South American Explorer

The rejected US dollar coin, featuring the famous Shoshone Indian Sacagawea, has found new life in Ecuador, writes Jeremy B. Jones.

Ecuador’s Dollar Coin

Sacagawea set out for the middle of the earth less than a decade ago, on the heels of a failed resurrection. The US government had hoped dearly for her resurrection, her reinvention. Beginning in 1998, it spent US$67.1 million to promote her as an emblem of American life.[i] Sacagawea was supposed to be a symbol of liberty, and they coined her as such. Indigenous liberty.

‘Liberty’, some quiet voices noted, was surely not a word for Sacagawea’s life. Taken as a child to marry a rough trader and forced to lead gruff, white men through the wilderness, then to die at the age of 25.

Despite this arguably sad tale, she was poured and pressed and unveiled in the year 2000, with Liberty printed above her head.

Sacagawea

Despite the money, posters and surveys from Washington, once Sacagawea was coined and passed around, it became clear that no one really wanted her. Many people simply didn’t know who the woman on the coin was meant to be. Plus, she was a confusing size, barely bigger than a quarter, sliding easily into a coke machine but vending no coke. And 65% of Americans preferred the Statue of Liberty to her Shoshone face, and simply didn’t get or want it. [ii] The dollar coin is built to fail, and fail she did.

But while Sacagawea was being indifferently passed around – a slight, forced smile on her face and a baby, wrapped and asleep, on her back – a president in Ecuador was shaking hands and scribbling his garbled signature on stacks of papers. With the flick of a wrist, he welcomed in George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and, eventually, Sacagawea, as he laid to rest Simon Bolivar, Juan Montalvo, and Rumiñahui.

This president, Jamil Mahuad, didn’t win much local support for his decision. Ecuadorians actually forced him to resign not long afterwards. Why would they want these foreign men invading their country, filling their banks and pockets? They asked.  And why would he boot his countrymen – the ‘founders’ and the Inca warrior who fought against them – for these American men in green? 

Mahuad left his office, eventually flying north to the United States and a job at Harvard.

Sacagawea sat in stacks in banks and the Mint. She waited and waited, and when it became clear that she had no place along the historical narrative of American currency, Washington bought her a one-way ticket to the newly dollarized Ecuador.  Her plane may have passed Jamil Mahuad’s somewhere over Texas as she neared Ecuador and he relocated to the United States.

In 2002, Sacagawea landed and set out into a new world – a country smaller than Nevada[1]; a country of Darwin’s islands, Andean mountains and Amazonian jungles; a country where at least 30% of the population is indigenous; a country where the highest mountain in the continent stands; a country where Sacagawea has now made a strange but comfortable home.    

Randy’L He-dow Teton

I met Sacagawea on my honeymoon. I stood in a Panama hat store in a touristy piece of Quito and after buying my wife a skirt, the short bald storeowner set Sacagawea firmly in my hand without a tinge of mystery.

I studied her. Her faced looked up at me and I didn’t recognize it at first. It wasn’t her face. It was a proxy: a young Shoshone woman studying art history named Randy’L He-Dow Teton. Because no one knew what Sacagawea actually looked like, Randy’L sat for hours and Sacagawea was formed.

I stuck Sacagawea in my pocket, and took her deeper into the Andes the next morning.

Leaving Quito, we passed by Mt.Cotopaxi – snow-capped and looming. A large eruption from the nearly 5900-meter beast would not only send rock and lava into the lowlands and toward Quito’s suburbs, but the ice and snow loosed from the rumbling would send its glacier balefully into the civilized world – a frightening mix of fire and ice.

Vilcabamba

We stopped briefly in Baños, a township in a we’re-shoestringers-who-like-thrill-and-culture-but-of-course-we’d-prefer-a-latte-at-the-Swede-owned-joint-rather-than-a-café-con-leche-at-the-local-spot-down-the-street kind of way. We left just before its volcano - Mt. Tungurahua – erupted, dumping tons of ash on farmland and rural villages.

We caught a train in Riobamba and sat on the top of cars as we passed patchwork mountains and crept down the steep switchbacks called, El Nariz Del Diablo –the Devil’s Nose. We willingly fell victim to the laziness and comforts of Vilcabamba. We trekked up and down the Andes until we spent all of our money, and with every step, Sacagawea surprised me. Everywhere we went, everyone knew her.

She was everywhere, pocketed in markets and passed on buses, paid in stores and put away for later.

Woman with fish in Otavalo

Many people believed she was one of them. Sacagawea was indígena, an Ecuadorian Indian, they said. They were proud of her, believed she represented them. Her popularity had grown so quickly in the five years she’d lived in Ecuador, that she was the muse of Colombian counterfeiters. In 2002 and 2003, the US Secret Service raided a number of warehouses in Colombia that housed large-scale operations focused entirely on shaping and forming fake Sacagaweas.

Of course, the coin as currency may function more seamlessly in Ecuador. Dollar coins work easily in many of the informal sectors, and people are more comfortable with them. Still, as we rounded deeper into the mountains, and indigenous women climbed on buses with babies and animals and boxes bound to their backs, I couldn’t help but wonder about Sacagawea’s face, looking worn and hard with a baby wrapped to her, and think that maybe she is Ecuadorian in some way. Maybe she has more to say here, or can at least find a place to stand, to exist.

I carried Sacagawea back with us to the US, after the rest of our money ran out. Once we had walked into the multi-level, cement-laden parking structure outside of the Atlanta airport to climb into our car and head home, I rolled down the window to the pay attendant. I handed the man Sacagawea. He held her in his hand for a moment, tilted his head to the side while he studied her face. Flipped her over, looked for any sign that she belonged. Finally, he took her in, opened our gate, and likely sent her back towards the outgoing flights. 

Jeremy B. Jones
teaches writing at Charleston Southern University. He received his MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa, and he has traveled through much of Latin America.  His published work, and excerpts from his current book project, can be found at www.thejeremybjones.com