Lewis and Clark Exploration a Story Told in Many Competing Voices

The upcoming 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition, a survey ordered by President Thomas Jefferson to stake a U.S. claim to the West, is not exactly cause for celebration in Indian Country.

Mainstream America has long viewed the 1804-06 trek led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as a heroic effort that opened up the nation’s western frontier. A beginning.

But for the people who were already here, who helped the sometimes helpless surveyors get through, it was the beginning of the end.

The goal of those planning commemoration of Lewis and Clark’s Voyage of Discovery--at the tribal, federal and local level--is to make sure the whole story is told.

“We are not going to condone or create another Columbus Day debacle,” said Michelle Bussard in Portland, Ore., executive director of the National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, referring to heated protest spurred by the 500th anniversary of the best-known European visit to this side of the Atlantic.

“Columbus didn’t discover America--Native Americans had lived here for eons,” she said.

Lewis and Clark reached the mouth of the Columbia River in the fall of 1805, confirming overland access to the Pacific.

They traveled by river and, for a time, on horses provided by the Shoshone, Sacagawea’s people. The Nez Perce Tribe revived the near-starving party after a rough passage through the Bitterroot Mountains. The Chinook--now battling for federal recognition-- helped them through the dreary winter of 1805-06.

“The expedition needs to be thought of as a joint venture with Indian people, which it was for vast stretches of the trail and certainly in our neck of woods out here on the Snake and Columbia rivers,” said David Nicandri of the Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma.

The Pacific Coast tribes that greeted Jefferson’s survey party were already trading with French, Spanish, English and American ships that expanded the market for furs--and that brought death in the form of smallpox, dysentery, tuberculosis and other unfamiliar diseases.

By the 1840s, as the white influx increased, disease-related losses in high-traffic areas were around 70% and some tribes had been wiped out.

“Lewis and Clark within that context don’t come across as quite so grand and glorious a story,” Nicandri said.

The tribes that survived found their world overwhelmed by white settlers, new priorities and change that continues to this day.

The effect of dams, cities, freeways and an ever-faster dominant culture are evident along the tamed Columbia River, where Chinook village fires used to light the night.

Lack of federal recognition has not prevented federal bicentennial organizers from seeking out the Chinook. They are among about 50 “trail tribes” being invited to participate.

Plans so far include a project at four riverside sites by Maya Lin, creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Nicandri is overseeing a historic exhibit that will spend three years traveling the 7,000-mile round-trip trail. Vancouver Mayor Royce Pollard hopes the exhibit will start and finish here--the first spot west of the Rockies that Lewis and Clark considered a suitable site for a city. He also hopes to make his community a center for American Indian congresses.

Other commemoration plans are in the works.

The word “commemorate” is used advisedly. Tribal leaders made clear early on they want no part of any “celebration,” Pollard said.

Some of the tribes’ stories are not easy to tell--or to hear.

“It’s the only war we’ve ever had where we treated the other side as badly,” Pollard said.

But he recalls telling area tribal leaders: “If you all don’t get involved, we’re going to tell the story again, and it ain’t the story you want to hear.”

“ ‘Use us,’ is what I said,” recalls the former commander of the Army’s historic Vancouver Barracks, which conducted 19th century military assaults on area tribes.

“I had a warped sense of all this for a long, long time before I came here,” Pollard said.

But as mayor, he led his community’s 1997 reconciliation with the Nez Perce, helping to heal a 120-year breach dating to the 1877 imprisonment of noncombatants by frustrated Army officials who couldn’t catch Chief Joseph.

“There’s a lot of tension associated with this,” Nicandri conceded. “You can’t go to a Lewis and Clark meeting without there being moments of . . . constructive engagement.”

Sometimes it’s not so constructive.

Pollard invited Clark College economics professor Jim Craven, a member of Canada’s Blackfoot Nation--related to the Blackfeet of Montana--to join a Vancouver-Clark County planning committee. But Craven said the story he wanted to tell--of atrocities and genocide, continuing even now in higher infant mortality rates, shorter life spans and other hard-edged statistics--was not welcome.

Some committee members said the problem was his delivery.

“I agree with every one of his statements--I just think he goes about it wrong,” said committee member Martin Plamondon, a cartographer who just published the first in a three-volume set of maps based on the Lewis and Clark journals.

“I don’t know a nice way to talk about genocide,” Craven replied.

Lori Jimerson, a local resident of Iroquois descent who is working on the bicentennial effort at Clark College, feels there are obstacles--guilt, denial, anger--on both sides.

“You can’t tell the story of the village sites out there and not tell the story of why they’re not there anymore,” she said.

But reconciliation has to start somewhere.

“My attitude is, ‘Let’s get in there and maybe they’ll see the light,’ ” said Chief Cliff Snider, Chinook representative on the Vancouver-Clark County panel and on a national council of bicentennial advisors.

Tribes have their own reasons for participating, Snider said--the Chinook, for example, hope to advance their fight for federal recognition.

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Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council:

https://www.lewisandclark200.org

Public Broadcasting System Lewis and Clark page:

https://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark