Tribal Culture Clash

By Margot Roosevelt/New Town

Prairie grass ripples along the shores of North Dakota's Lake Sakakawea, and a fat rainbow shimmers overhead. Here, if Amy Mossett has her way, an $11 million interactive museum will soon welcome visitors to the Lewis and Clark trail. Mossett, tourism director for the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes, is building replica earth lodges and planning sleep-in-a-teepee packages with ethno-botany hikes, buffalo-hide painting and lectures on tribal trade networks--insect repellent included. Her message: "Come and meet the descendants of the people who provided shelter to Lewis and Clark."

If the Mandan are as friendly today as they were 200 years ago, their neighbors the Sioux, who were ornery in their encounters with Lewis and Clark, remain almost as testy. A South Dakota "scenic byway" designation drew initial opposition on the Standing Rock reservation. Traditionalists fear that tourists will loot sacred grave sites. And while the tribe is seeking grants for roadside panels and interpretive centers, the message will be mixed. "Our people have for too long put on beads and feathers and danced for the white man," says Ronald McNeil, a great-great-great grandson of Chief Sitting Bull and president of the local community college. "Yes, we'll show how our ancestors lived when Lewis and Clark came up the trail. But then we must say what happened to them since. I'm tired of playing Indian and not getting to be an Indian."

With conflicting emotions running deep among the tribes, Lewis and Clark boosters hope to bridge the divide by touting the expedition as "a journey of mutual discovery." Their fear: that Indian protests will mar the festivities, as happened during the 1992 Columbus voyage anniversary. "We're not going to repeat the Columbus debacle," says Michelle Bussard, executive director of the National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. The nonprofit group has assembled a 30-member Circle of Tribal Advisers to promote Indian participation, and the National Park Service has chosen a Mandan-Hidatsa, Gerard Baker, to be superintendent of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. His traveling exhibit, "Corps of Discovery II," will be "a tent of many voices," he says, focusing on native cultures and their "hope for the future."

It's all very inclusive, but these are not Disney Indians. "We're not celebrating Lewis and Clark," says Tex Hall, president of the American Congress of Indians, who is scheduled to speak at the January launch of the commemoration at Monticello, outside Charlottesville, Va. "Still, people are making money on this, so don't leave out the Indians. It's an opportunity for us to tell our story." And to revive cultures that are slipping away. In Oregon, the Umatilla tribe, whose members told Clark they thought the explorers were "supernatural and came down from the clouds," wants funds for a language-immersion program, as only a handful of tribe members still speak their native language fluently. And the tribe hopes to publish an atlas of its Columbia River homeland with more than 1,000 native place names, long extinct.

For more than a century, the history of Lewis and Clark's encounters with the 58 tribes along the trail has been defined by the white men's journals. The Mandan, who fed them, danced with them and offered them sexual favors over the bitterly cold winter of 1804-05, were described as good neighbors. The Lemhi Shoshone, Lewis wrote, were "not only cheerful but even gay, fond of gaudy dress...generous with the little they possess, extreemly honest..." He admired the Chinook for their canoes, "remarkably neat, light and well adapted for riding high waves" but disparaged their "well-known treachery."

Today Indians are looking to their own oral histories, as well as reading between the lines of the journals, to re-interpret what happened. Says Ben Sherman, president of the Western American Indian Chamber in Denver: "The upcoming events portray Clark as the benevolent protector of Indians--that's propagandist baloney." The tragic aftermath: as Governor of the Missouri Territory and Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Clark presided over President Thomas Jefferson's land-grab policy, which some historians characterize as a direct cause of "cultural genocide" and "ethnic cleansing."

In his journal, Lewis called the Blackfeet "a vicious lawless and reather an abandoned set of wretches." But today's Blackfeet want no one to forget that two of their warriors were killed in a skirmish sparked by Lewis' talk of selling arms to rival tribes. "We knew, 'There goes the neighborhood,'" says tribe member James Craven, a professor at Clark University in Vancouver, Wash. Diplomatic blunders also fueled a confrontation with the Teton Sioux, gatekeepers of the Missouri, whom Clark later called "the vilest miscreants of the savage race." LaDonna Bravebull, a Standing Rock tour guide, touts her ancestors' viewpoint as, "We're not taking your trinkets and your great white father. I don't think so!"

Looking back, the Sioux had it right. Jefferson had told Lewis to inform "those through whose country you will pass" that "henceforth we become their fathers and friends, and that we shall endeavor that they shall have no cause to lament the change." But whites brought diseases that killed as many as 90% of some tribes' members. Most of the tribes Lewis and Clark encountered were forced off the rivers that sustained their commerce and culture and herded onto reservations with poor soil. Today a third of Native Americans live below the poverty line, and half are unemployed.

The challenge for tribes is to share this history without inducing compassion fatigue in the tourists they hope to attract. One thing that unites Lewis and Clark enthusiasts and naysayers is the burgeoning revival of Native American traditions. For visitors, tribal culture offers a glimpse of the American past. For Indians, it is key to their survival as distinct peoples. At the Boys and Girls Club on Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, the posters read TRADITION, NOT ADDICTION. At an Indian Health Service clinic in Mobridge, S.D., teenage methamphetamine users are introduced to the sweat lodge. The Cheyenne River Sioux run a herd of more than 2,000 buffalo and distribute meat to tribe members, while the Lower Brule Sioux are planning a buffalo museum.

At Standing Rock, the combative past survives in surnames. On radio station KLND--that's Lakota, Nakota, Dakota--the news is from Mike Kills Pretty Enemy, the music from Virgil Taken Alive. Last month tribe members gathered near the grave site of Sitting Bull, General George Custer's conqueror, to pray at the graves of long-ago chiefs--Thunderhawk, Rain-in-the-Face, Running Antelope. A package event for tourists? Hardly. The Indians got there on horseback and camped in the cold. In fact, they were not dressed for camcorders. They wore jeans, permanent press and wrap-around shades. When they set fire to a wad of sage, in a purification ritual, it was in a Folger's coffee can. And the graveside speeches touched on the plague of alcoholism and suicide among reservation youth. "We want our children to be proud that they are descendants of chiefs," says Sitting Bull kinsman McNeil. "So when they play cowboys and Indians, they'll all want to be Indians."

Indian pride and Indian politics could complicate the Lewis and Clark commemoration. In April when 130 tribal delegates gathered in Lewiston, Idaho, under the auspices of the Lewis and Clark council, the tone veered sharply off the official "reconciliation" trail. The group called on the Federal Government to extend legal recognition to the Chinook, Clatsop and Monacan tribes, noting "their pivotal role in the success of the expedition." Recognition brings federal aid as well as sovereignty--and the right to build casinos. Another resolution decried vandalism of sacred sites and plundering of Indian graves as "acts of terrorism," adding that the increase in Lewis and Clark visitors could result in "cultural resource desecration [of] catastrophic proportions."

In recent years, Standing Rock's former historic-preservation officer, Tim Mentz, reburied remains from 438 Indian graves that had been disturbed. As federal officials have tinkered with the water levels of the Missouri River, long-submerged Indian villages have resurfaced, luring robbers seeking to profit from a black market in bones and artifacts. "We are not archaeological specimens," says Mentz indignantly. Unfortunately his zeal went too far for some tribal officials. Mentz was fired last May. His offense: refusing to disinter hillside graves to make way for a road to the reservation casino.

Many of those graves are Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara, village tribes that lived along the Missouri in what is now Standing Rock, when the Sioux were nomadic warriors. But with smallpox decimating their ranks, the Indian farmers were herded north to Fort Berthold reservation. There they rebuilt their villages, only to be displaced again in 1953 when Garrison Dam flooded their rich bottomlands. If they see an opportunity in the Lewis and Clark commemoration, it is because culture and economics are intertwined. The image of Amy Mossett dressed up as Sacagawea graces North Dakota tourist posters, but she says she isn't "playing Indian." And her teepee sleepovers and earth-lodge exhibits are part of something more significant than attracting tourist dollars.

Like many Native Americans, Mossett is reviving traditional culture in her daily life. Three years ago she began cultivating a garden with a tribal elder to replicate the ancient crops that Lewis and Clark once enjoyed. "You can't buy Mandan blue flour corn in the grocery store," she says. She is taking a course in porcupine-quill embroidery. And her teenage daughters are studying the Hidatsa language in school. "Our tribes have survived catastrophic events in the past 200 years," she says. "But if we grieve forever, we will never move forward."