Question

Sacajawea told her life story to write james willard schultz who published it in 1918. Identify two factors that might affect the reliability of the published account.

Answer 1

James Willard Schultz's book "Bird Woman: Sacagawea's Own Story", first published in 1918, is an adventurous account on Sacagawea's life story, mainly her heroic role in the Lewis and Clark expedition. The novel is filled with great feats and amazing records of that moment in time, all based on a real-life story. However, there are a couple of factors that might naturally affect the book's reliability. The stories told by Schultz were passed down in the common Native American tradition of oral storytelling; in this case, Schultz learned them from Earth Woman who, as a child in the early 1800s, heard these stories being told by Sacagawea in her father's lodge. The passing of time and the oral telling and re-telling of the stories can naturally disrupt many of the details, altering the original historical facts. Another factor to be considered when speaking of the book's reliability is to evalute how much of the story got "lost in translation" - that is, how each storyteller's individual perspective changed the story, as well as how the translation of it from one language to another affected the original meaning.