FEBRUARY 6
2023•Native American $1 Coin
2020•American Samoa 5-oz Silver Coin Released
The Native American $1 Coin Honors Maria Tallchief and American Indians in Ballet
On February 6, 2023, the United States Mint opened sales of the year’s Native American $1 Coin, honoring Maria Tallchief and the remarkable Native American ballerinas known as the “Five Moons.” Its reverse placed Tallchief in a commanding balletic pose, surrounded by a lunar motif and four dancers representing both her celebrated contemporaries and the generations of Native dancers who followed.
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For more than two centuries, American coins overwhelmingly portrayed presidents, statesmen, national symbols and allegorical figures.
The 2023 Native American $1 Coin told a very different story.
Its subject was dance.
More specifically, it honored Native American women who helped transform American ballet.
When the United States Mint began selling rolls, bags and boxes of the new dollar on February 6, 2023, the coin brought together two women separated by generations but united on a single piece of American money.
On the obverse was Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman whose portrait has anchored the dollar design since 2000.
On the reverse was Maria Tallchief, the Osage ballerina widely recognized as America’s first major prima ballerina.
Behind her were four more dancers—a visual tribute to the Native American women whose international achievements became part of twentieth-century ballet history.
Maria Tallchief
Maria Tallchief was born Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief in Fairfax, Oklahoma, in 1925.
She was a citizen of the Osage Nation and grew up during an era when Native Americans faced widespread discrimination and pressure to assimilate into dominant American culture.
Tallchief nevertheless rose to the highest levels of an art form whose prestigious institutions had long been centered in Europe.
Her career helped establish the idea that world-class ballet could have a distinctly American identity.
The Smithsonian notes that Tallchief is often credited with helping popularize ballet in the United States. Her 1949 performance in the title role of The Firebird became one of the defining moments of her career and helped bring international attention to the company led by choreographer George Balanchine.
Tallchief and Balanchine were married for several years, but their artistic partnership had an impact far beyond their personal relationship.
Balanchine created major roles for her, and Tallchief’s speed, athleticism, precision and dramatic presence helped give those works life.
She became a central figure in the rise of the New York City Ballet.
America’s First Major Prima Ballerina
The United States Mint describes Tallchief as America’s first major prima ballerina and the first Native American to achieve that rank.
That description captures why she became the central figure on the 2023 dollar.
Tallchief was not simply a successful dancer who happened to be Native American.
Her achievement challenged assumptions about who could occupy the highest levels of classical ballet.
She performed with major companies in the United States and abroad, became internationally famous and created roles that remain closely associated with the development of American ballet.
Among her most enduring contributions was her performance as the Sugar Plum Fairy in Balanchine’s production of The Nutcracker. That production helped turn the ballet into the American holiday tradition familiar to audiences today.
Her career therefore belongs simultaneously to Native American history, women’s history and the history of American performing arts.
Tallchief was not alone.
Four other Native American ballerinas from Oklahoma achieved international recognition during the twentieth century: Marjorie Tallchief, Yvonne Chouteau, Rosella Hightower and Moscelyne Larkin.
Together with Maria Tallchief, they became celebrated as the Five Moons.
The name reflects both their shared Oklahoma roots and the extraordinary concentration of Native women from the region who reached elite levels of professional ballet.
Marjorie Tallchief, Maria’s younger sister, became an internationally acclaimed dancer in her own right.
Yvonne Chouteau, a member of the Shawnee Tribe, performed professionally at a young age and later helped build Oklahoma’s ballet institutions.
Rosella Hightower, of Choctaw heritage, developed an international career and became especially influential in European ballet.
Moscelyne Larkin, of Eastern Shawnee and Peoria ancestry, also performed internationally before returning to Oklahoma and contributing to ballet education there.
Their careers made the “Five Moons” an important cultural story rather than merely a convenient nickname.
Five Dancers, Five Moons
The United States Mint translated that story into a compact coin design.
Maria Tallchief dominates the reverse in a balletic pose.
A lunar motif provides the visual reference to the Five Moons.
Four additional dancers appear in the background.
The Mint deliberately gave those figures a broader meaning. They symbolize Tallchief’s Native American ballerina contemporaries while also representing generations of dancers inspired by them.
The reverse inscriptions read:
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
MARIA TALLCHIEF
$1
AMERICAN INDIANS IN BALLET
The wording is significant.
The coin names Tallchief individually but frames her accomplishment within a larger Native American contribution to ballet.
The reverse was designed by Benjamin Sowards of the United States Mint’s Artistic Infusion Program and sculpted by Mint Medallic Artist Phebe Hemphill.
Designing a dancer for a coin presents a special artistic problem.
Ballet is movement. A coin is static.
The artist therefore has to select a pose capable of suggesting motion, balance and physical control within a shallow relief surface only slightly larger than an inch across.
The Tallchief design uses the dancer’s body as its central visual structure. Her pose creates a sense of upward movement while the surrounding figures and lunar elements establish the larger theme.
The result differs sharply from a conventional portrait coin.
Tallchief is not shown merely as a head-and-shoulders historical figure.
She is shown practicing the art that made her historically important.
Sacagawea Remains on the Obverse
The obverse continued the familiar portrait of Sacagawea carrying her infant son, Jean Baptiste.
Sculptor Glenna Goodacre created the design originally used for the Sacagawea dollar introduced in 2000.
On the 2023 coin, the obverse inscriptions are LIBERTY and IN GOD WE TRUST.
The date, mint mark and E PLURIBUS UNUM appear incused on the edge rather than on either principal face.
This arrangement allows the reverse to devote more space to the changing annual Native American theme.
With Sacagawea on one side and Tallchief on the other, the 2023 dollar became a particularly striking pairing of Native American women from very different periods of United States history.
The Native American $1 Coin Program grew out of Public Law 110-82, the Native American $1 Coin Act, signed in 2007.
The law directed the Treasury to continue the Sacagawea design on the obverse while introducing changing reverse designs celebrating important contributions made by Indian tribes and individual Native Americans to the development and history of the United States.
The annual reverse requirement transformed the dollar into a continuing historical series.
Rather than limiting Native American representation to a single person or event, the program could explore agriculture, diplomacy, military service, technology, civil rights, exploration, law, culture and other contributions across many years.
The 2023 theme expanded that historical range into the performing arts.
The golden-colored dollar began in 2000 as the Sacagawea dollar.
Its distinctive color came not from gold but from a manganese-brass alloy.
Beginning in 2009, the Native American $1 Coin Program retained Goodacre’s Sacagawea obverse while changing the reverse annually.
The 2023 coin follows that established format.
Its composition is 88.5 percent copper, 6 percent zinc, 3.5 percent manganese and 2 percent nickel. It weighs 8.10 grams and measures 26.49 millimeters in diameter.
Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco all produced versions of the 2023 Native American dollar for different Mint products and purposes.
February 6, 2023: The Coin Goes on Sale
The Mint had publicly announced the Tallchief reverse design on November 9, 2022.
The February 6 milestone was different.
At noon Eastern time that day, the United States Mint officially opened sales of rolls, bags and boxes containing the 2023 Native American $1 Coin.
Collectors could purchase 25-coin rolls from Philadelphia or Denver, 100-coin bags, and 250-coin boxes.
The Mint’s contemporary announcement emphasized that orders placed before the official February 6 on-sale time would not be accepted.
That gives the date unusually clear documentation.
February 6 is not an inferred release date or a later collector convention. It is the exact on-sale date announced by the United States Mint.
The Native American dollar occupies an unusual position in modern United States coinage.
It is legal tender.
Yet dollar coins have struggled to circulate widely in the United States.
Americans remain accustomed to the one-dollar Federal Reserve note, and efforts to make small dollar coins a routine part of everyday commerce have repeatedly encountered resistance.
As a result, many Native American dollars are encountered primarily through Mint products, banks, transit systems, vending applications or collectors rather than ordinary cash transactions.
This makes the series paradoxical.
Its coins are circulating legal tender, but their greatest public impact may come through their designs and the history they teach rather than through widespread day-to-day circulation.
The Tallchief dollar is important because it broadens what a Native American coin can commemorate.
Public history has often reduced Native American subjects to a limited set of themes: early encounters with European settlers, western expansion, warfare, treaties and traditional cultural imagery.
Those subjects are historically important, but they are not the whole story.
Native Americans have participated in every era and nearly every field of American life.
The Five Moons demonstrate that Native history also belongs in the story of twentieth-century modern art.
They were not historical figures standing outside mainstream American culture.
They helped create it.
Tallchief and American Ballet
The Smithsonian describes Tallchief’s performances in the late 1940s and 1950s as central to the popularization of ballet in the United States.
Her breakthrough in The Firebird in 1949 helped place Balanchine’s company on the international cultural map.
This matters because ballet had long been associated primarily with European traditions and institutions.
The emergence of a major American ballet culture required artists who could make the form feel artistically serious without merely imitating Europe.
Tallchief became one of those artists.
Her success therefore represents more than personal fame. It belongs to the larger development of an American performing-arts identity.
Maria Tallchief received an unusual double numismatic honor in 2023.
In addition to appearing on the Native American $1 Coin, she was also honored in the American Women Quarters Program.
The Smithsonian noted the distinction when the Tallchief quarter entered circulation later that year.
The two coins approach her legacy differently.
The quarter focuses on Tallchief as one of the women honored by the American Women Quarters Program.
The Native American dollar places her within the larger story of American Indians in ballet and explicitly connects her to the Five Moons.
Together, the two designs demonstrate how a single historical figure can belong to several overlapping narratives.
The Power of Representation on Money
Coins are among the most widely distributed forms of public art a government creates.
A museum exhibition may reach thousands of visitors. A coin design can be reproduced millions of times.
That gives the choice of subject unusual significance.
For generations, the people represented on American money came from a narrow historical group.
Programs such as the Native American $1 Coin series have expanded that visual record.
The 2023 dollar placed an Osage woman performing ballet at the center of a legal-tender United States coin.
It did so without separating her Native identity from her artistic achievement.
Both are essential to the design.
February 6, 2023 marks the public sales release of a coin whose subject would have been difficult to imagine on United States money generations earlier.
The reverse celebrates Native women not as anonymous symbols but as internationally accomplished artists.
Maria Tallchief stands at the center because of her extraordinary career.
The four dancers and lunar imagery broaden the tribute to Marjorie Tallchief, Yvonne Chouteau, Rosella Hightower, Moscelyne Larkin and the generations that followed.
The design therefore works at several levels at once.
It is a portrait of Tallchief.
It is a tribute to the Five Moons.
It is a recognition of Native American achievement in the performing arts.
And it is another chapter in the evolving story of who appears on American money.
A person looking quickly at the 2023 Native American dollar might see only a dancer.
Look closer.
The lunar imagery carries the memory of five extraordinary Native women from Oklahoma. The background figures connect Tallchief to her contemporaries and to later dancers. Sacagawea remains on the opposite face, extending a Native presence across both sides of the coin.
That makes the 2023 issue one of the most layered designs in the Native American dollar series.
On February 6, 2023, the United States Mint opened sales of the Native American $1 Coin honoring Maria Tallchief and American Indians in ballet—placing the achievements of the Five Moons into the continuing visual history of American money.
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