BILLINGS, Mont. — In Joe McGeshick's classes, explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark aren't presented as the larger-than-life heroes some of his students at Fort Peck Community College read about in high school. Neither is the Indian guide Sacagawea.
McGeshick is among the tribal college educators bringing the expedition story to students in a different way — blending art, oral traditions and native culture with mainstream history and even myth to give them a fuller picture.
"It's time to look at a multifaceted view of all the people on the expedition, their strengths and weaknesses," McGeshick said from the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeast Montana. "There's a tremendous role that tribal colleges can play now and I don't think you can downplay it."
Tribal colleges traditionally have infused a tribal perspective into their teachings. And with the bicentennial of the famed expedition just months away, some educators — particularly those along the trail blazed by Lewis and Clark — see a prime opportunity both to better engage their students and to reach out to a curious and captive public.
The topic isn't a new one for tribal colleges. It's been explored to varying degrees in a range of classes, from American history and American Indian studies to art and literature, even as many tribes consider the expedition a minor detail in their own histories.
While much of white America celebrates the expedition, many Indians view it as the beginning of the end of their way of life.
Marvin Weatherwax said a class devoted to Lewis and Clark is being considered for Blackfeet Community College at Browning, where he teaches Blackfeet studies.
"Tribal colleges really don't shy away from it," he said. "A lot of people don't necessarily like it but want the right story told."
Educators like Karen Paetz don't rely only on textbooks, drawing instead from more unconventional sources, such as the land and people, to teach lessons.
Field trips to historic forts along the Missouri River and discussions with elders, the "doctorates of the culture," are part of regular studies in Paetz's tribal tourism program at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, N.D. Graduates of the program may be among those working for tour companies, tribal groups or the National Park Service next year as visitors begin arriving in the state for the bicentennial.
Studies, she said, also include tribes and myths and legends. One concept the tribal tourism program, which goes beyond Lewis and Clark, is based on is the "need to articulate our own history, for ourselves," said Paetz, tribal tourism program director and instructor. But it's also important to be aware of the "non-native" perspective, she said.
"There are many controversies in history, and history is only interpreted with one's background knowledge," Paetz said. "With every passing generation, we're one more generation removed from the pristine oral history of our tribes."
Though Lewis and Clark set off on their cross-country journey almost 200 years ago, disagreements still arise today about details of some of their encounters, personal histories — particularly of Sacagawea — and the effect of the expedition.
The explorers spent a winter in present-day central North Dakota with Mandan and Hidatsa Indians. Hidatsa oral history says Sacagawea, an interpreter and guide on the journey, was a member of that tribe, a claim disputed by many. Many historians say she was Shoshone.
Marilyn Hudson, administrator of the Three Affiliated Tribes Museum at New Town, N.D., said she's given presentations at Fort Berthold Community College. She said tribal oral history has "little about Lewis and Clark being anything more than wayfarers traveling through."
Oral history for the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara does not ascribe heroine status to Sacagawea, she said.
"You think her role was certainly glamorous," Hudson said, "but she's a product of Americans seeking to create legends and heroines and definitely a product of the imagination and fiction and a lot of stories." "I think her role was very harsh as a woman or girl growing up in this area. I think for a lot of tribes in the area, life here was difficult," she said. "Just think of what North Dakota winters are like."
McGeshick, who devotes time to Sacagawea in a class on myths and legends, said art played a part in establishing the larger-than-life roles that Lewis, Clark and Sacagawea now hold in the minds of many.
"You see a lot of Sacagawea pointing the way for Lewis and Clark. That in itself is misleading," he said.
But McGeshick, like other educators, provides students with a broad range of information and perspectives in hopes of expanding their view of the expedition and their understanding of tribal history and other issues.
Chuck Braithwaite, who spoke at a recent conference in Cody, Wyo., about Indian perspectives on Lewis and Clark and is researching how tribal colleges approach the subject, agrees providing different points of view on the expedition is a positive thing.
"These stories have to be in the educational system," said Braithwaite, editor of the Great Plains Quarterly at the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
"Nobody's saying that one perspective is the truth with a capital T," he said. "But I think the more perspectives we get as with anything, the more we understand the real significance in our lives."