Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes

Part One Frenchmen, Bears, and Sandbars Vine Deloria, Jr. Vine Deloria, Jr., is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Fort Yates, North Dakota. He is perhaps the only American whose educational history ranges as far and wide as a New England prep school (Kent), the U.S. Marine Corps Telephone Repair School in San Diego, the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, and membership in the faculty of a prestigious state university. Deloria is currently retired professor of history and an adjunct professor of law, religious studies, and political science at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Best known to the general public as an author (his works include Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, 1969; Red Earth, White Lies, 1995; among many other books), he has been a college professor since the early 1970s and an activist in Indian affairs since the 1960s. From 1964 to 1967, for example, he was executive director of the National Congress of American Indians; in the mid-seventies he founded and chaired the Institute for the Development of Indian Law; in the nineties, after serving as vice chairman of the Board of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, he became chairman of its Repatriation Committee. Vine Deloria, Jr., has received honors early and often for his work as a writer and scholar, but unique among these was his nomination in 1974 as one of eleven "Theological Superstars of the Future." While his Sioux forebears chose confrontation in their encounter with Lewis and Clark, Deloria chooses a potent sense of historical irony. Frenchmen, Bears, and Sandbars Exaggeration of the importance of the expedition of Lewis and Clark is a typical American response to mythology. We prefer our fantasies in opposition to the facts of life. It was a routine venture now revered because we desperately need to have a heroic past, since that pleasure is denied to us in the present. The expedition was initiated following Jefferson's finesse of Congress and the Constitution in the purchase of a mere claim by France that it "owned" a substantial portion of the North American West because a Frenchman had first set foot on lands drained by the Mississippi. Not only did the expedition seek a practical water route to the West Coast with the eventual goal of opening the Pacific to American commerce, but Jefferson also needed to prove that the purchase of an unknown territory was not a white elephant. (He did, however, caution Lewis and Clark to be on the lookout for mammoths while en route.) Since traditionally historians have understood the journey as the first effort by civilized men to pierce the unknown West, we often tend to clothe the accounts of Lewis and Clark in more heroic terms than they seem to have deserved. Much good history falls by the wayside when we stress the heroics and neglect the context of their journey in our understanding. The expedition actually seems to have been a tedious march from one place to another made known to them by Indians and French traders, with an occasional incident to testify to the strangeness of the land and the unique challenges that the West presented. After reading through the journals edited by Elliott Coues, my impression of the memorable experiences of the expedition, the things that would have remained with its members years after their return, revolved around three major topics, although I must admit that a strong case might be made for several other themes. But the things that impressed me were the fact that Frenchmen had already explored much of this region so that it was reasonably well known to many people, that there seemed to be an oversupply of bears on the prairies and bottomlands, and that sandbars posed a continuing barrier to theJosephy, Alvin M. is the author of 'Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes ', published 2006 under ISBN 9781400042678 and ISBN 1400042674.