David Ellingson reads aloud from Lewis and Clark's journals to his high school class in Woodburn, Ore.: "We have found the most friendly and decent savages we have met in this neighborhood."
He pauses, looks at his students and notes that Lewis and Clark "used 'savage' a lot."
This sparks a brief but lively discussion punctuated by student Tim Dickerson observing, "I think 'savage' became a stereotype."
Lewis and Clark's journals come alive at this school. The explorers' account of encounters with Clatsop Indians, for example, occurred just a few hours' drive from the classroom.
Ellingson created an interdisciplinary class called "The History and Science of Lewis and Clark" six years ago, drawing on the passion he developed for the expedition in college. His students use a condensed version of the journals to explore everything from the landscape Lewis and Clark crossed to the Native American burial customs they encountered.
And before class is dismissed on this spring day, Ellingson poses a pointed question about the national focus on the 200th anniversary of the journey: "Is the bicentennial a celebration for Native Americans?"
These sorts of questions are being posed in an increasing number of classrooms as teachers push their lesson plans beyond popular stories of this landmark historical journey. That's what professors Bethany Andreasen and Joseph Jastzrembski had in mind when they created a summer teachers' institute at Minot State University in North Dakota about the Lewis and Clark expedition. One week of the institute is devoted to considering the expedition from the Native American perspective.
"We thought it was important that our students interact with actual descendants of the Indians who dealt with the expedition and hear their voices," Jastzrembski says. "We should be reminded how this expedition heralds very drastic changes in the status of (native) people, both as individuals and tribal units."
The greatest challenge is reminding people that Lewis and Clark must be viewed in several different cultural contexts, Jastzrembski says. Another significant challenge is reminding people that Native Americans are not museum pieces or artifacts, but living, breathing people who are "still here and still part of the American story."
All of this requires getting people past the surface story. "If you look at elementary school textbooks, the history of the 19th century was hero worship," Andreasen says. "There's a mythology that's developed around it."
North Dakota is a logical place for the Lewis and Clark symposium. The expedition spent more time here than any other state. Teachers attending the Minot State symposium create lesson plans and curricula to take back to their classrooms that are then made available on the Internet. (See Resources.)
Kate Lewis, who teaches English in Lexington, N.C., partnered with Pittsburg, Pa., social studies teacher Hal DeLuca to explore ways of addressing the question of, "What is 'savage' and what is 'civilized'?"
"What we are doing here is values education," explains DeLuca, who teaches at an Episcopalian middle school. "We try to incorporate what it means to respect diversity."
Boston-area high school history teachers Eva Urban and Stephen Spear divide their students into groups of four and have each look at the journey from the perspective of a Native American, an anthropologist, a naturalist and a geographer. Students are expected to research each perspective and draw conclusions about the legitimacy of Lewis' and Clark's interpretations.
"In this way they can see the journey outside of just the political confines most textbooks paint it in," Urban says.
All of this offers an entry point to larger historical questions of Western history.
"To teach the story of Lewis and Clark in a classroom gives you the opportunity to move beyond the expedition and talk about how different interactions between different people has profound social, cultural, economic and historical consequences," Jastrzembski says. "It also allows us to shake the romantic notions out of the heads of our students – romantic notions that tend to place Native Americans in a 'Dances with Wolves' context."
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