PITTSBURGH Indians don't honor the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark trip

The tribes viewed Lewis and Clark as the end to their way of life.
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- As superintendent of the National Park Service's Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, Gerard Baker doesn't view this year's bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition as a celebration.
That's because Baker is an American Indian.
"The first thing I had to establish is this is not a celebration," Baker said of the expedition which Meriwether Lewis launched in a 55-foot keel boat in Pittsburgh in 1803.
Lewis joined William Clark in Louisville, Ky., and the pair ventured on across the continent and onto what would one day be known as Washington state.
"This is a bicentennial commemoration. The tribes viewed Lewis and Clark as the opening of the West and, thus, an end to our way of life," Baker said.
Baker, 49, grew up on the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota, which is populated by the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes. Baker is a full-blooded American Indian: his father was Mandan and Hidatsa, his mother a Mandan.
Baker's forefathers befriended the American explorers, whose trip is commemorated in the traveling exhibit, "Corps of Discovery II: 200 Years to the Future" which is on display in Point State Park through Sept. 7.
A re-enactment of Lewis' launching of the keel boat along the Monongahela River is to be held today as part of the commemoration.
"We have less than 10 speakers of the Mandan language" still alive, said Baker, who speaks Hidatsa. The last full-blooded Mandan Indian died in the 1970s, Baker said, so he is intent on passing on what he knows of that culture.
Oral history
"I grew up in an environment of oral history," Baker said. But the Lewis and Clark stories he heard didn't focus on the whites. "They were about [Clark's slave] York -- the first black man we ever saw -- and Sacagawea," a Shoshone interpreter who helped the men on their way to the Pacific Ocean.
The exhibit will next stop in Ashland, Ky., beginning Sept. 13, and will make nine other stops this year in Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri before a winter hiatus. The exhibit will again hit the Lewis and Clark trail in March and continue on through 2006, 200 years after the expedition ended.
Although the object of the expedition was to find a waterway connecting the Northwest to the Missouri River -- no such river exists -- it did help strengthen eventual claims the nation would make on still unsettled lands as the United States expanded west.
Lewis and Clark also provided the first descriptions of plants and animals, including the grizzly bear, prairie dog and mountain goat, that were unfamiliar to the white explorers.