Woman has served the traveling European male from the start of his overseas adventures, if not as the prize in herself, then as a guide to the booty. What’s known as “exploration” had begun, for Greeks and Vikings alike, with raids for exotic women and must-have loot. At storytime later around the fire, rape and pillage took on a rosy glow: The Hesperides were said to have shown Hercules to their father’s Golden Apples in the West; Medea supposedly helped Jason abscond with her father’s gold, then went with him. And what was a good story when Mediterranean meant “middle of the world” had lost none of its appeal 2,000 years later, when our European hero jumped the Atlantic. Already, in Mexico, Malinche had replicated Medea’s career, from the betrayal of her people for Hernan Cortés to her final personal isolation. For all its claim to originality of vision, the U.S., too, had taken the traditional route, with Pocahontas serving as an Anglo Medea for the Separatists’ on their arrival in Massachusetts.
As the Anglo settlers spread westward from the Appalachian Mountains, the old plotline went with them, dusted off around the campfire in renditions of “Oh Shenandoah.” Here, in the role of Jason’s Midas and Hercules’ Atlas, the king on the far shore is the rebelling patriots’ sole Iroquois friend, the Oneida leader Oskanondonha, who fed George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge and was then dispossessed. As Shenandoah (his anglicized name) in the song, he loses his daughter to a generic white trader—the singer, whose progress carried her from the Missouri River frontier to the ocean trade, with verses added, until a ditty about dispossession became a muddled anthem of separation and yearning, mostly about the dispossessor.
As that, continuing an American parallel with white South Africa, “Oh Shenandoah” is much like the Afrikaner anthem “Sarie Marais,” which expresses the longing of a Boer soldier for his girlfriend “down there in the corn by the green thorn tree” in the Afrikaner’s Ohio over the Vaal River. Enlarging and complicating this connection, the tune and lyrics of “Sarie Marais” are thought to have been adapted from a ditty sung during the U.S. Civil War by Union soldiers, “Ellie Rhee (Carry Me Back to Tennessee),” about the sorrows of a runaway black slave. (“Oh why did I from day to day / Keep wishing to be free; / And from my massa run away, / And leave my Ellie Rhee.”) First a song of separation, then of identity, today it is both for the tens of thousands of white South Africans who fled black majority rule to Britain or more successful settler enterprises such as Australia, Canada and the U.S. (Behind them, Sarie’s beloved “old Transvaal” has been carved up into three provinces with native African names.)
Recently, a native woman from the same “Indian maiden” typecast as Pocahontas has been given the lead position in a renewed impulse by image-makers to present the European invasion of North America as a response to invitation. The U.S. Treasury Department—the nation’s licensed icon-maker—in 2000 issued a one-dollar coin commemorating Sacagawea (Sacajawea), a Shoshoni teenager whom Lewis and Clark recruited in 1805 to help them reach the West Coast. It failed, like the earlier Susan B. Anthony dollar.
Yet as a symbol, Sacagawea has continued to flourish, with more images to her erected in the U.S., it is thought, than to any other women except the Virgin Mary. Other image-makers—schools, writers, women’s advocates, merchandisers—have recognized in this symbol a useful add-on to the national story, a mind-melt of Pocahontas at the outset of it with Sweet Betsy from Pike on its final leg. (The Mint: “With her infant son bound to her back, she single-handedly rescued Captain Clark's journals from the Missouri whitewater . . .”).
What this symbolic Sacagawea does is to provide a Native American component for the Lewis-and-Clark space shoot, which has become in the current telling a fully multiracial project on the modern model—a sort of ark of U.S. society, one that includes also a non-speaker of English (her “husband,” the French guide Toussaint Charbonneau) and the token black—Clark’s slave York—who, it is now being emphasized, was treated as an equal on the trip and really had a great time.
But back up and Sacagawea becomes indistinguishable from other swarthy faces in the Anglo picture album. Like the natives ahead of the train in “American Progress,” a popular late-1800s painting, she points the Anglo juggernaut westward, finding fresh horses (locomotion) for Lewis and Clark so their probe does not stall in the Rockies. From farther away, like Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” and the symbolic native on Massachusetts’ original flag, she seems to say, “Come over and help us.” From still farther back—and south—she has a career track so much like the Mexican Malinche’s that it could have been borrowed, but the similarities are factual:
Malinche gave Cortés entrée to Aztec gold through her inside knowledge of Aztec culture and her ability to translate from the Aztec language into a Maya dialect understood by a Spaniard who had been taken captive. Likewise, Sacagawea gave two U.S. military men, who are presented today as a scientic team, access to North America’s “natural resources” through her sanctioning presence and her ability to translate from Shoshoni into Hidatsa for Charbonneau, who translated into French for another Frenchman, who told it in English to the hapless Lewis and Clark, who were mono-lingual like most Anglo-Americans today.
At least, that is her achievement if, as the Sacagawea myth insists, U.S. progress really hung on getting those Shoshoni horses. Actually, says debunking educator Wanda Pillow, the real Sacagawea was much less valuable to the expedition than her myth would suggest—mentioned fewer than 70 times in two years of journals, usually in connection with housekeeping chores in her real capacity as Charbonneau’s slave, graced with the odd gallant compliment for the expedition’s only female member and only mother, 15 years old. Less valuable to Lewis and Clark, certainly, than Malinche to Cortés, she remained unimportant to their story until about 1900.
Then, just in time for Lewis and Clark’s centennial celebration, she was discovered. Clark’s real kindness of adopting Sacagawea’s two half-breed children on her death in 1812, plus the myth-making opportunity she presented, enabled her to be popularized as a native maid who, like Pocahontas, had wisely welcomed the Anglo nation builders in. (There were even rumors, 100 years late, of a romance with Clark.) This white man’s Sacagawea provided a grace note at the completion of the “Manifest Destiny” Thomas Jefferson had envisioned in sending his Corps of Discovery off.
Taking nothing from Sacagawea and her sisters, that destiny today appears still unsatisfied. The white man’s restless journeying continues, timeless because it is myth-driven. The “final frontier” of his history-making trek is still the original one: “space” itself, now defined as the sky. The word trek, borrowed by television producers from Afrikaans, originally implied escape as much as adventure, starting out suffused with the white Afrikaners’ tribal sense of apart-ness and their history of jumping boundaries set by others. Sarie Marais’ grandparents would have reached the Transvaal during the Afrikaners’ “Great Trek” to outdistance the empire-building British—very like the “Pilgrims” in flight to America and the U.S.’ on-moving “pioneers.”
This kind of “trek,” seen from one angle, puts the settler groups on both continents in a refugee class with the natives who, in turn, were obliged to flee from them. But the modern myth of “space exploration,” as scripted by the U.S. nation, follows the more heroic classic European model, in a direct line from the Argonauts and Hercules through the myth of Lewis and Clark into the present. The “Apollo Program” that opened the modern phase took its name from a Greek sun god at the dawn of European travel, when Spain, jumping-off place for Colón, was the western horizon (“Hesperia”). The Corps of Discovery morphed into an Astronaut Corps, the continuing mission: to “conquer” space for the U.S. specifically, although the moon landing was presented as a step for “mankind.” Just as if the actual history of it had not begun strictly as a white man’s enterprise, “space exploration” is presented today—and understood in pop culture—as a broadly human, even humanizing, effort.
The original Star Trek television series carefully included an African-American (woman), an Asian-American, a Russian and a half-“Vulcan” character who arguably, as the only crew member with genes native to “space,” is the expedition’s “Indian.” Placed second in command, the noble Spock provides diplomatic and psychological entrée to a strange new world (like the historians’ New World) where everybody, like the Scots-Irish captain, is an alien equally, though some are more alien than others. In a nod, doubtless unconscious, to Puritan Massachusett and its settler view of natives as devils, Spock’s pointed ears and eyebrows were airbrushed out in early promotions out of fear these vaguely Satan-like features would alienate potential viewers. Subsequent Star Trek incarnations have granted something like humanity to a range of reptilian and insect-like beings who give evidence of having something like “civilization.” (Watch out, aliens!)
And where the TV series has gone, goes the nation. The official myth-making effort today reflects current social mapping. Crew assignments for the “space program” give due deference to “minorities” who are more numerous and therefore more challenging currently than the defeated natives (whose position in the U.S. remains up in the air). If NASA is to be believed, after planting the U.S. flag on the moon in 1969, its greatest coup has been to break social barriers by launching the first woman and the first black, the advancement of science being secondary. From the NASA website (2003):
“In the early 1980s as the Space Shuttle began operations, NASA was able to break a number of scientific and technical barriers. The greatest barriers broken were the gender and racial barriers of its Astronaut Corps. The flights of the first American woman, Sally Ride, and the first African American, Guion Bluford, into space were an inspiration to millions.”Natives having lost lead position, only in 2002 was native America also brought aboard this glory train. A fractionally-Chickasaw Oklahoman named John Herrington became the most widely traveled of a fractionalized race when he “walked in space” (afterward returning to a public relations tour). Appropriately, he was a specialist in takeoff and landing.
{Adapted from Looking for the Bahana, © 2008}
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