There are no products in your shopping cart.
| 0 Items | Total: $0.00 |
How Sacagawea Would Have Carried Her Baby
I found this neat little anthropological/historical tidbit at the US Mint:
According to Irving Anderson of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, the Lewis and Clark journals are very vague in documenting how Sacagawea attended to Jean Baptiste. In a June 29, 1805, entry, Lewis refers to "the bier in which the woman carries her child." No physical description of the "bier" is provided, but there is a reference elsewhere to mosquito netting as a "bier."
Further, Sacagawea lived among the Hidatsa beginning around the age of 11, and although it is not conclusive that Sacagawea adopted Hidatsa customs, she could reasonably have learned to carry Jean Baptiste slung from her shoulder, as was the Hidatsa custom.
[Source: The United States Mint]
Many cultures around the world have been using baby slings of one type or another for thousands of years. When I was an anthropology student at the University of Utah I studied quite a bit about maternal health and economy. Most of our subject material was of African tribal mothers who are twice as productive when harvesting mongongo nuts then mothers who held the baby on the hip with one arm.
Post new comment