Profile of Sacagawea with her infant son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau being carried on her back.

Sacagawea (1788-1812) was a Lemhi Shoshone woman who helped the Lewis and Clark Expedition achieve each of its chartered mission objectives exploring the Louisiana Purchase. With the expedition, between 1804 and 1806, she traveled thousands of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean, established cultural contacts with Native American populations, and researched natural history.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery Expedition, was the first American expedition to cross what is now the western portion of the United States, departing in May 1804, from near St. Louis making their way westward through the continental divide to the Pacific coast.

Engraver: Glenna Goodacre (GG)

Depicts a portrait of Elizabeth Peratrovich. The foreground features a symbol of the Tlingit Raven moiety, of which she was a member. The Tlingit are indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. The Tlingit kinship system, like most Northwest Coast societies, is based on a matrilineal structure, and describes a family roughly according to Morgan's Crow system of kinship. The society is wholly divided into two distinct moieties, termed Raven (Yéil) and Eagle/Wolf (Ch'aak'/Ghooch).

Elizabeth Jean Peratrovich (1911–1958), Tlingit nation, was an important civil rights activist; she worked on behalf of equality for Alaska Natives. In the 1940s, she was credited with advocacy that gained the passage of the territory's Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945, the first anti-discrimination law in the United States. In March 2019, her obituary was added to the New York Times as part of their "Overlooked No More" series.

In 1941, while living in Juneau, the Peratroviches found more discrimination, having difficulty finding housing and seeing signs banning Native entry to public facilities. They petitioned the territorial governor, Ernest Gruening, to ban the "No Natives Allowed" signs then common at public accommodations in that city and elsewhere. The Anti-Discrimination Act was defeated by the territorial legislature in 1943. As leaders of the Alaska Native Brotherhood and the Alaska Native Sisterhood, the Peratroviches lobbied the territory's legislators and represented their organizations in their testimony. Elizabeth Peratrovich was the last to testify before the territorial Senate voted on the bill in 1945, and her impassioned testimony was considered decisive.

Engraver: Phebe Hemphill (PH)

Inscribed along the edge of the coin is the year of minting or issuance of the coin, the mint mark, and also the legend "E Pluribus Unum" (Latin for "Out of many, one")