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Reviews
| Lewis & Clark and the Indian Country: The Native American Perspective, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie and Jay T. Nelson. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007. 366 pages. $24.95, paper.
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| The Lewis & Clark bicentennial generated a variety of commemorative and celebratory activities, from books, to festivals, to videos and exhibits. Lewis & Clark and the Indian Country is the result of one such event: an exhibition that opened at the Newberry Library in Chicago in October 2004. While much of the Lewis & Clark literature has focused on the individuals involved and the expedition as an event, this volume takes another approach. By placing Lewis & Clark's foray into Indian country in the larger context of language loss, culture change, economic dislocation, and the disruption of social traditions that resulted, this book presents the expedition not only from the Native perspective but, more importantly, as part of a historical process still ongoing. Lewis & Clark and the Indian Country thus broadens the scope of the study of this expedition to include its long-term impact from the American Indian perspective. Doing so, it also calls attention to the significance of history as a meaningful tool in understanding contemporary America. |
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Hoxie opens the volume with his essay, "What Can We Learn from a Bicentennial?" He offers a useful overview of public commemorations—what he calls the "bicentennial phenomenon"—as media events and public spectacles whose purpose is not to educate, but to congratulate. They generally steer away from controversy while focusing on trivial issues that lend the festivities an aura of historical authenticity. It is this trend that the present volume counters. Instead, it leads the reader into territory most often left out of commemorations: the territory of complexity and controversy. Only with this venturing, Hoxie concludes, can a serious student of history reflect on the deeper meanings of the famed expedition and its significance for the past and the future. |
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The book duplicates the organization of the exhibition while also providing background information and deeper analysis than is possible in a museum exhibit. Each section begins with a brief introduction enabling readers to understand the issue in the context of the larger goal of the project: rethinking and reimagining the history of the Lewis & Clark expedition. Part I, "The Indian Country," presents an overview of the distinctiveness of the region when Lewis & Clark ventured there. This section includes descriptions by anthropologists, retelling of Indian traditions, as well as contemporary perspectives on the meaning of community. What emerges is a picture of complex societies, bound to each other by trade, diplomacy, travel, and competition. |
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Part II, "Crossing the Indian Country," offers a cross-cultural portrait of the expedition itself. The section opens with an overview of the Americans' limited knowledge of the region as Lewis & Clark set out on their journey, followed by vignettes of encounter between the travelers and their hosts. As the story unfolds, it becomes evident that the Indian hosts played a central role in the eventual success of the expedition, that they were not just the footnote and curiosity they often become in the retelling of the Lewis & Clark expedition. |
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"A New Nation Comes to the Indian Country," Part III of the volume, reflects on the agents of change that followed Lewis & Clark into the West: trappers, settlers, miners, ranchers, and missionaries and teachers. Each wave of people further cemented the American control of the region, altering and undermining the traditions of the Native peoples. Part IV, "The Indian Country Today," introduces individuals and communities that are working to rebuild and maintain these traditions in the contemporary setting, emphasizing the continued presence of Indians as peoples in the West and offering a hopeful message for the future. What stands out in this section is the tremendous pride of Native peoples as members of both their tribes and the larger American community. |
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The historian James P. Ronda concludes the volume with his essay, "Lewis and Clark Reconsidered: Some Sober Second Thoughts," addressing the value of the Lewis & Clark expedition as an American story. Ronda thus reiterates the most important message of this volume: the significance of understanding our common past as an American story that continues to influence our lives today. The Lewis & Clark expedition was only a blip in this story that involves tens of thousands of years, but it helps illuminate the complexity of this place we call the United States. As this volume demonstrates, Native Americans are an indispensable element of the story of us, a lesson well worth emphasizing to the student of American history. |
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| California State Polytechnic University, Pomona |
Päivi Hoikkala |
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