Longtime Tribecan and filmmaker Lynn Rogoff, whose company, Amerikids Productions, is based on Leonard, has released “Bird Woman Sacajawea,” a feature-length animated movie that combines artificial intelligence and human creativity to tell the story of the legendary Shoshone guide who led the Lewis & Clark Expedition.

In the film, Sacajawea, the legendary Shoshone guide, discovers her supernatural shapeshifting abilities as both a woman and an eagle, and follows her journey leading the Lewis & Clark Expedition, where she faces starvation, blizzards and violence from competing tribes. The film uses advanced AI techniques for text-to-image generation for the landscapes and character designs as well as facial animation tools for lifelike expressions and lip-syncing. A real-life writer crafted the script and dialogue. The actors include Sera-Lys McArthur, a member of the Nakota/Assiniboine Nation, and Daniel Two Feathers, an actor, Lakota language consultant and translator. Watch it here.

Lynn has been working for years on film and TV projects that focus on teenagers in American history who did heroic deeds. She’s written specials on Civil Lovington, who during the American Revolution helped her father’s troops foil the British as they came from Long Island to capture West Point; she deeveloped a game for McGraw Hill about teenage Pony Express riders who thwarted schemes in the Civil War.

“Teenagers during the last 200 years were considered adults — you were pregnant and married by the time you are 16,” Lynn said. “It’s only in the 21st Century that we starting to think of them as kids.”

Sacajawea was 16 when she led the Lewis & Clark Expedition in 1804, and Lynn went to North Dakota between 2003 and 2006 to research her story during the bicentennial celebration, meeting with tribal elders to develop a grant proposal for National Endowment for the Humanities to do a documentary, but she didn’t get the money. (Ken Burns would eventually get the grant to do one on Lewis & Clark.)

“At that point, I just put it away — I realized female Native Americans historical protagonists were not sellable at that time,” Lynn said. “Nobody was interested.”

But years later, during the Me Too movement, she decided to pull it out again, and during covid created a nine-episode audio drama with actors. But she had a feature film screen play written as well, and couldn’t walk away from the subject without creating something visual. So she started investigating AI tools that could mesh with what she already had.

“Everything was already edited for audio — actors, composers, musicians — so we thought we would produce animation to go with the audio,” she said. They used still images and made them into video, and took tips from the gaming world, where characters speak directly to the audience. The first episode won 10 film festivals and was picked up by Questar.

Lynn is now raising money to do the next episode.

(And for those who don’t know the story — I didn’t! — Lewis & Clark met Sacajawea in what is now North Dakota — it was Mandan Tribe territory on the Missouri River; she had been captured by the Shoshoni Tribe in the Rocky Mountains and brought east, essentially enslaved. Then she was sold to a French Canadian trapper, and that’s how she ended up in North Dakota, pregnant. Lewis & Clark wanted to traverse the Rocky Mountains, and she was one of the few that knew the way, since she had done it in the opposite direction. And she knew the language. The Mandan elders suggested that she join them. She ended up giving birth and taking the newborn with her on the expedition.

When they get to the Rocky Mountains, she finds her tribe. Her brother has become the tribal chief there — and they were starving. So after much negotiation that Sacagawea brokered, the tribe gave the expedition horses in exchange for the guns they needed to fight the other tribes to get buffalo meat so they could survive.

They winter in the Pacific and have to go back over the Rockies — at that time she has to decide whether she stays with the tribe or stay with the expedition. She relinquishes her child to Clark, who has become attached, and she goes on her own to St. Louis.)

There are no pictures of Sacajawea — though there are more statues of her across America than any other woman, from North Dakota to the Pacific. The Suffragettes chose her as a symbol to prove women could lead; she replaced Susan B. Anthony on dollar coins in 2000, shown with her baby. And of course she appears in the “Night at the Museum” movies.

“She is iconic but her story has never been told,” Lynn said. “That was always so interesting to me.” Plus, Lynn has found it hard to walk away. “You spend a long time with a character and a long time in history and you get very involved. You get immersed.”