The real story of Sacagawea

Here & Now Anytime

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4.1 • 953 Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2025

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

The story of Sacagawea that most of us know is incomplete and not entirely correct. The Hidatsa tribe and other tribes have a long oral history that tells a different story of her life, including that her name was not pronounced the way many of us were taught, she lived 50 years longer than the history books say and she had more children than the traditional written history tells. We speak with Christopher Cox, who wrote the article "What if Everything We Know About Sacagawea Is Wrong?" in the New York Times Magazine.

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0:00.0	Support for here and now anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design.
0:09.2	MathWorks accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science.
0:13.8	Learn more at MathWorks.com.
0:17.6	WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
0:22.2	Well, it changes the meaning of her life.
0:25.3	Almost everything for her is sort of up for debate once you start considering alternate forms of evidence.
0:32.0	Oral histories from Native American tribes paint a different portrait of the woman we've known as
0:38.3	Sakajua, including that we've been pronouncing her name wrong.
0:43.9	It's Monday, October 13th, and this is here and now anytime.
0:47.4	From NPR and WBUR, I'm Chris Bentley.
1:06.6	It's Indigenous People's Day, and today on the show, we're digging into one of the foundational stories of American history and finding out that we don't really know the whole thing.
1:17.7	It's about the Native American teenager who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their 1805 expedition from Missouri to the Oregon coast.
1:21.0	You probably learned her name as Sakajua.
1:22.2	I know I did.
1:26.0	As we'll hear, that's just one of many things we learned.
1:30.4	That's not entirely accurate. Today, her face is on the dollar coin, and there are statues of her all over the country. But there is a lot missing from the story
1:37.6	that we've been told, and the Hadatsa tribe has been leading an effort to correct the historical record.
1:44.9	Christopher Cox offers a more complete portrait of her in a story for the New York Times
1:49.8	magazine, and the first thing he did when Scott Tong spoke with them was correct the pronunciation
1:55.5	of her name.
1:58.2	The way that these tribes pronounce her name is Sikagawea, which of course is not the way that most of us learned it growing up.
2:05.8	Thank you. Yeah. Okay.
	...

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