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Reviews
LEWIS AND CLARK THROUGH INDIAN EYES
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edited by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.
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| Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2006. Illustrations, photographs, maps, notes. 214 pages. $25.00 cloth.
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| No non-Native looms larger in the historiography of indigenous people in the West than Alvin Josephy, who is now deceased. In an introductory note to Lewis and Clark through Indian Eyes, Josephy asserts that the idea for this book took root when he was researching his path-breaking volume on the Nez Perce Indians over forty years ago. Certainly no one can disagree now, let alone a generation ago, that there is a crying need to hear "the voice of the Indians themselves" in Western history, and no one could more credibly assemble a team of Indian observers to help answer that question than Josephy (p. ix). |
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Accordingly, this is by any measure an accomplished anthology. Nevertheless, Josephy perpetuates the modern myth that tribal perspectives were, or were likely to be, absent from the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial observance. A number of tribal dignitaries have taken issue with that supposition in post-Bicentennial assessments of the commemoration, including Gerard Baker, a Mandan-Hidatsa official with the National Park Service who for most of the commemoration was superintendent of the National Lewis and Clark Historic Trail. |
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Given their nature as a literary form, anthologies inevitably enlist the interest of readers to varying extents, and several of the essays collected here are more valuable than others. The volume appropriately commences with the now also deceased Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), the foremost Native scholar and activist of his generation. Deloria addresses a question frequently invoked in assessments of the history of the West since Lewis and Clark, which is essentially: Given the tide of Euro-American immigration into the region, how might the history have turned out differently? He interposes that a salutary "alternative history" may have taken the form of the French-Indian model, which unlike the American one, did not aim to "duplicate the Old World" in the new (p.12). |
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Assuredly the most enterprising essay, both figuratively and literally, is Bill Yellowtail's "Meriwether and Billy and the Indian Business." Yellowtail (Crow) makes the case that the "Indian side" of the Lewis and Clark story is the "entrepreneurial spirit" that Natives brought to the encounter (p. 73). Essentially taking the stance of a tribal libertarian, Yellowtail asserts that modern Indians, "having succeeded for certain in implanting 'Tribal Sovereignty' in the national language," now need to precipitate an "evolution to the next paradigm, which might be entitled 'Indian Sovereignty'" (p. 74). By this he means to call forth the flowering of Native individual accomplishment in such fields as petroleum engineering and other business enterprises, which provides an outlet for individual Indians in addition to opportunities within their governments. Doing so would tap into the "enormous intelligence, resourcefulness and creativity" otherwise ensconced in what he terms the "tribal official/tribal attorney reservoir" of talent (p. 80). |
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The essay by Roberta Conner (Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation), titled "Our People Have Always Been Here," is the centerpiece of the compendium and is simply replete with insights. On its merits alone, her essay is worth buying the book. Methodologically, Conner develops the Native perspective on several episodes that occurred during the Expedition's passage through the Columbia Plateau as preliminarily defined by excerpts from the explorers' journals, some of which are rather famous inscriptions. In analyzing, for example, William Clark's startling comment of October 19, 1805, that he could have "tomahawked every Indian here," the central phrase in the episode with the "fritened Indians" near present-day Plymouth, Washington, Conner has it right when she asserts that the sentiment Clark is expressing is not the aggressiveness it appears to be at face value. Rather, she states, "[f]or a moment Clark feels no vulnerability, and he is aware of that" (p. 990). There is a difference between overt hostility and the absence of fear. |
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The fulcrum for Conner's extended analysis of the significance of Lewis and Clark in Indian country is a series of meaningful and at first glance seemingly rhetorical questions found on page 107, which she then answers with considerable insight in the ensuing pages. Space here does not allow for a full explication of her arguments, but the range of her remarks addresses such topics as Lewis and Clark Law School professor Robert Miller's "Doctrine of Discovery." By way of summary, Conner avers that aspects of the Expedition can and should be conditionally applauded. The men of Lewis and Clark were "courageous, observant, astute, conscientious, and diligent about their duties." Nevertheless, she adds trenchantly, "they were ignorant of the inherent knowledge and values in the ancient cultures they encountered [which] does not separate them from many people today" (p. 112). |
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Essays by Gerard Baker, Roberta and Richard Basch, Debra Magpie Earling, N. Scott Momaday, Allen V. Pinkham Sr., and Mark Trahant round out this memorable and lasting legacy of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. |
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| David L. Nicandri
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| Washington State Historical Society |
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