Moscow honors a great explorer

The family of Sacajawea and University of Idaho staff welcomed a statue of the famous guide to the tribal lounge in the Bruce M. Pitman Center on campus at a dedication Friday night.

The statue of Sacajawea and son Jean Baptiste, made by artist Glenna Goodacre, stands 7 feet tall and weighs 600 pounds. It is one of 12 that Goodacre made before her death in 2020. Sacajawea’s face on the statue is based on the U.S. dollar coin that Goodacre also designed.

The coin’s model, Randy’L Teton, is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribe in Fort Hall, Idaho. She sat for the coin in 1998 as a junior in college. The U.S. mint does allow depictions of living people on its coins, Teton said, so the statue and coin are her likeness in forehead, chin and cheekbones.

“As I look at this 7-foot statue, it’s fitting for (Sacajawea) to return back to these lands to be with all of you and all of you students,” Teton said. “It’s a quote I read, that I want you to think of as you look at this statue — ‘May all your explorations lead to great discoveries.’ Because that’s what she symbolizes.”

Teton said she first started learning about Sacajawea at 14 when she started working at the Shoshone-Bannock tribal museum for her mom and would often have visitors asking about the Shoshoni explorer. Teton said she would go on to ask many of the elders who came to the museum. She said she learned it was Sacajawea who would bring the white men to their land. Sacajawea, Teton would later learn, was just 11 years old when she was kidnapped from her homeland near present-day Salmon, Idaho.

“That saddened me because, being 14 and a Shoshoni girl, I didn’t understand why she was looked at in that light,” Teton said.

Two hundred and sixteen years after Sacajawea passed through, Teton and her three children would also traverse Lolo Pass on their way to Moscow to honor her and dedicate the statue.

The statue came to the University of Idaho as a donation from Rich and Sharon Allen. The Allens are both 1973 University of Idaho alumni.

“We saw her (the statue) and you may not know this, but she winked at me,” Rich Allen said. “And she said ‘take me home.’ ”

Rich Allen brought the idea of buying the statue and gifting it to UI to Sharon Allen, who took one look and agreed. They would go on to pitch the idea to College of Art and Architecture Dean Shauna Corry, who agreed the statue belonged on campus.

Corry said the statue will be temporarily held in the Tribal Lounge in the Bruce M. Pitman Center until a permanent location on campus can be found. Another edition of the statue is on display at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore.

Kali Nelson can be reached at knelson@dnews.com.