The consequences have been significant.

The popular historical memory of the American West is saturated with the stories of Euro-American explorers, mountain men, traders, and military figures.

The stories of the Indigenous women who were essential to those enterprises — as interpreters, as cultural mediators, as mothers raising the next generation of mixed-heritage communities, as survivors of conditions that broke many of the men around them — are systematically underrepresented.

Marie Dorion is one example of this systematic underrepresentation.