Who Needs Lewis and Clark

Who can forget those junior high history text's wonderful stories of the adventures of Lewis and Clark exploring the American frontier. Well, lots of American Indians wish they could forget. If history is indeed the story of the "winners" then American history is one of the best examples. America had to go out and conquer the savage Indians who threatened the poor settlers who after all only wanted to take away their land. Or America had to go out and save the brave men and women of Texas who only wanted to steal Mexico. Or...or...a thousand ors...

Anyway, for those of you who don't live out here in the "heart of America", especially somewhere along the Missouri River, we've been having this on going and seemingly endless reenactment celebration of Lewis and Clark going on. You know these reenacters float up and everyone greets them and learns of "our" history by seeing it.

As the Oread Daily has been reporting old L and C are not being received so well in Indian Country.

The latest "greeting" came from members of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes at the border of the Fort Belknap Reservation. As reported by the Great Falls Tribune (Great Falls, Montana) the Gros Ventre and Assinboine say, "...say they have little gratitude for the government-commissioned explorers who purported to 'discover"' their ancestors and the land they inhabited for generations."

"Nobody discovered us," said Raymond Chandler, vice president of the Fort Belknap Indian Community Council. "Our people were always here. This is our homeland."

Last Thursday en lieu of a swell hello, members of the tribes played host to the "Corps of Recovery," a counter celebration meant to underscore the survival of their own people, culture and spiritual beliefs in the modern world." The day of games, feasting and prayer replaced a four-day National Park Service-sanctioned event called the Corps of Discovery II that was scheduled for this week on the reservation.

"Everything that has been done to the Native Americans started with Lewis and Clark coming through here under the European-type doctrine of discovery," said John Allen, spiritual leader for the Fort Belknap band of Assiniboine Indians and coordinator of Thursday's events."We're in essence saying we still have our culture, we still have our spiritual ways, even after 200 years of repression by the United States government," Allen said.

Gena Weasel, a Fort Belknap Assiniboine, said the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial is a reminder to her of the ills that have befallen Indian Country in the past two centuries. "It's like the Fourth of July," Weasel said. "I tell my kids, this is not really a celebration. It's a white man's celebration."

Indeed, just what did L and C bring to the Indians.

Well, for the Assinboine and Gros Venture who were surviving quite well at the time the results of the visit were the forced destruction of major parts of their culture, the forced relocation to a reservation in Montana, disease, starvation and, "a generation of Indian children ...(shipped) to off-reservation boarding schools where they were forbidden from speaking their native tongue."

"Lewis and Clark brought a lot of hardships," said George Horse Capture Jr., a Gros Ventre spiritual leader. "I don't want to be harsh, but that is what was brought here."

That is what they brought everywhere.


For further information, check out http://www.indianz.com/myredir.asp?url=http://www.stoplewisandclark.org/