In November of 2019, I was contacted by Sandy Hausman of National Public Radio affiliate WVTF to react to a then-brewing controversy in Charlottesville, Virginia over the depiction of Sacagawea–the Native American woman who guided the Lewis and Clark expedition across much of the Rocky Mountain West–in a 1919 sculpture commemorating the local leaders of the Corps of Discovery situated conspicuously in the middle of a downtown street. According to Hausman, “City leaders in Charlottesville, Va., will remove a statue of Lewis and Clark because their guide, Sacagawea, is portrayed as weak. They will replace it with one that highlights her importance.” My brief contribution to the “In Virginia, Sacagawea Gets Her Own Statue,” begins around 2:00. While a post-doc at UVa, I directed the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial project from 2002-04. During that time I taught my first digital history courses to undergraduate in the Media Studies program. One of the early student projects from the fall 2002 semester, “Lewis and Clark: Nostalgia and the Frontier,” included an examination of Charles Keck’s sculpture commissioned by Paul Goodloe McIntire. The students, Stephen Coleman, Lisa Jensen, and Katherine Schumann, created a small thematic research collection that they divided into four sections: Description, Construction, Dedication, and Reaction. It is from this collection that the passage I read in the NPR story by Keck on the composition of his sculpture comes from.
NPR: In Virginia, Sacagawea Gets Her Own Statue
Leave a reply