Customer Reviews

The Journey of Sacagawea

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This documentary uses paintings, statues, and modern reenactments to describe Sacagawea and her importance to Lewis and Clark's expedition. In the same way that an African-American man (Morgan Freeman) narrated a documentary on the anti-Communist attack against Black artists, a woman (Susan Sarandon) narrated a work on women's pursuit of the right to vote, and a gay man (Harvey Fierstein) narrated a work on Harvey Milk, Rita Coolidge, a partially Native American woman narrates this documentary on Sacagawea. The work interviews scholars, tribal members, and even one ancestor of Sacagawea. The work is diverse showing women and men, Natives and Caucasians. However, the Lewis and Clark expedition was triracial, not biracial. Clark's slave named York was important too, but his name, shamefully, never comes up in this work.

One interviewee said Sacagawea was an equal to her French husband Charbonneau, then another interviewee refers to the man as Sacagawea's "owner." The expedition is portrayed as the accomplishment of equals, yet Lewis and Clark call Sacagawea "the Indian woman" and almost never call her by name.

This work has much music in its background. Some of it sounded like the work of the group Enigma.

The work says that more places and monuments are named after Sacagawea than any other American woman. I love it when I get the golden dollars with her supposed image on it. This work does a great job in explaining her importance to the expedition and to American history.