Anna Lee Waldo's Play 'Sacajawea'

Anna Lee Waldo, in the play Sacajawea: The Indian Princess (1978), confirms that many men who have written about Sacagawea "have obviously fallen in love with her. Almost every woman who has written about her has become Sacajawea in her inner reverie" (xii). Norman K. Deniz in Sacagawea's Nickname, or The Sacagawea's Problem (2006), traces the representation of Sacagawea through ages in a very dramatic interesting and simple way in a form of an essay which is a co-performance text, a four-act play. He suggests that "Sacagawea was represented as savage, a slave, a squaw, an Indian woman, a boat launcher, a guide, and birdwoman" (15). In the second published version of the journals (an analysis of various editions of the journals of Lewis

and Clark edition by Elliot Coues, 1893), she is a savage, a guide and a heroine (15).
Anna Wolfrom's three-act play, Sacajawea: The Indian Princess (1914) celebrates conquest and submission.

It represents Sacagawea, as Deniz suggests, in the form of "the fully assimilated American woman" (Sacagawea's Nickname 14). She is instrumentalized as a proponent of the assimilation of Native Americans. Sacajawea in the first act of the play rushes in the arms of her husband the white French trader, Charboneau, asserting that she is not frightened of the white newcomers addressing her husband: "You come into the land of the sun and buy me from the Chief who steal me from my people, The Shoshones./ Me no more slave but a wife of fur trader"(Sacajawea 1. 4). The newcomers proved to be Meriwether Lewis and William Clark who came to lead an expedition (1804-1806). Their mission was to find a hypothesized water-route linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Anna Wolform's Sacajawea praises Charbonneau and all White men from the very beginning of the first scene. George Wemyss, in The Invisible Empire white Discourse, Tolerance and Belonging(2009), suggests that "dominant discourse constructs 'white' as a category which people from various 'non-white' backgrounds may . . . aspire to in order to become part of the white elite. When challenged, the discourse shifts to include different categories of people as 'white' in different contexts" (13). She is not afraid of the whites because her husband Charbonneau is the white man who bought her from the chief who

steals her from her people, the Shoshones. She concludes "me no more slave but wife of big trader" (Sacajawea 1.1. 4). She rushes to the chief informing him that she has seen canoes which have white people:"brothers of Charbonneau take all your daughters as wives" (Sacajawea 1.4). She boasts having a White husband and a papoose telling her old friend who could escape and return home:" but you do not have a white husband. /see I have a white husband and little papoose who will not fight but be a captain of peace like his white brothers" (Sacajawea 2.3.21).
Wolform's Sacagawea resonates Barker's Pocahontas whose representations operate to produce, as Bhabha suggests, "the fixed images of the colonial subjects" ("The Other Question"18). On seeing the English arrive on the shores of her home country, Pocahontas exclaims, in The Indian Princess "Oh, 't was a rare sight to behold the chiefs as they leap'd on shore. . . like beings from a higher world, sent here to amaze us with their glory"(12).
Donna Kessler, in The Making of Sacagawea: A Euro- American Legend (1996) traces the shift in the representations of Sacagawea from savage into Indian Princess: " in turn of the century's novels (dye, 1902), popular history (Hosmer, 1903), drama( Wolform 1918) and suffragist literature, Sacagawea is transformed from savage into a princess, a guide, a heroine, to a model of modern feminism 's independent American woman" (67). Wolform in her play Sacajawea: The Indian Princess, represents Sacajawea as a daughter of the Chief of the Shoshone and literally as an "Indian princess"( 1.1.8). However, Sacagawea's representation as assimilated Indian Princess dominates the play.