Al Cluck loves the story of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. They are his heroes and like they did, he loves hunting and fishing, hiking and exploring.
He loves the story so much that he conducts an eight-day Lewis and Clark tour as part of his tour guide business in Montana. He owns over 90 books about the expeditious pair who led the Corps of Discovery westward.
He even flew out to Virginia to spend a few hours on top of a freezing mountain, where snow covered the ground like a thin cotton sheet and the trees braced their branches against an ice blue sky.
Here, last Saturday, Cluck was one of 3,000 people gathered on Monticello's West Lawn for the commencement of the national Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commemoration.
Cluck ambled along the sidelines of the many rows of seats, snapping photos with a disposable camera and occasionally placing a tape recorder by a huge speaker to document the various speeches. With his bushy tan beard and green hat, he looked every bit the mountain man he says he is.
"I come to listen to these guys who are my teachers about Lewis and Clark and this topic of discovery," Cluck said with an emotional reverence. He got 13 books autographed in the days leading up to the commencement, securing the John Hancocks of Lewis and Clark scholars Dayton R. Duncan, Gary E. Moulton and James P. Ronda.
"They're the people guiding us along the journey," Cluck said. "I'm just a guy from Montana who runs tours and tells people the story."
When Cluck tells stories of the historic trek, he often does it in character. As George Drouillard, a hunter and interpreter on the expedition, Cluck dons leather pants, a leather shirt and a fur hat. He plays Thomas Jefferson in a top hat and black tuxedo. He complements the outfits of these men, and others, with pouches, trinkets, beads and pipes -- he said he could talk for an hour just about the pipe.
The people who Cluck portrays are the ones history has remembered in the interceding 200 years. But as Ronda, a historian and professor at the University of Tulsa, pointed out in the commencement address, there's another side of the story that needs to be told.
Cluck said, on that cold day, that he had also journeyed to the commemoration "to hear the native side of the story because it's a different kind of story and one that needs to be heard."
Amy Mossett has been working on a different kind of story for the past 15 years. A member of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes in North Dakota, Mossett has been collecting the oral and written histories of Sacagawea (pronounced with a hard 'g,' not a soft 'j'), who was also a member of the Hidatsa tribe.
But that wasn't what Mossett learned growing up in school, which was run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. There, in Twin Buttes, N.D., her teachers taught a version of the story in which Sacagawea was a Shashonee Indian who had been kidnapped and enslaved by the Hidatsa.
Mossett, her black hair pulled back in a low pony tail, looking petite in a pair of blue jeans, did not mince words as she prepared to check out of the Holiday Inn yesterday morning.
"I knew that her story was not being presented from a Hidatsa perspective," Mossett said. "We didn't have slaves. Thomas Jefferson had slaves."
She was appointed to the board of directors for the Lewis and Clark bicentennial in 2000 and was part of a concerted effort to ensure that Indian involvement in the commemoration was "appropriate, significant and meaningful," and that initiatives were developed for "lasting legacies."
"What I mean by 'lasting legacy,'" she says, "is not a powwow."
As the bicentennial commemoration continues with events across the country over the next three years, Mossett wants to see "permanent infrastructure" to address such issues as protection of the environment and of sacred sites along the trail.
Mossett says her "key legacy project" will be recording the Mandan language, of which there are only a handful of speakers left. "That is frightening," she said.
Edwin Benson, 71, is the only conversational Mandan speaker on the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota and the only person who is teaching it.
After attending the commencement at Monticello on Saturday, Benson then went to the Newcomb Hall Ballroom, where he sat in front of an informational display about the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikira Nations. For several days he had answered questions for interested passers-by. Often, he said, he was asked if it's cold in North Dakota.
The black cap Benson wore was embroidered with a gray coyote, the symbol of his clan. In Mandan, coyote is "shehek."
"I'm the only one in this whole globe," he said, cupping his hands into a circle, "who can speak Mandan."
Benson was raised speaking Mandan by his grandfather on the Fort Berthold reservation. When he started school at age 6 he was forbidden to speak the language. It was also at school that he became a Christian.
"That's where I learned the name Jesus," he said. "That's when I knew the name God."
Now, the man who was forced to learn English introduces Mandan words to kids at Twin Buttes Elementary School. He teaches them names for the four seasons, different types of food and the names for "smaller animals and larger animals," he said in a soft, low voice.
Benson also is recording Mandan stories on film at Minot State University. He then records translations of the stories and they are put into a computer. "If someone wants to hear them and learn it, that's where they'll be," he said.
Benson, who dropped out of school at 13 and worked as a ranch hand for several years, said he thinks the government needs to pay more attention toIndians' education. He says that too many young people are dropping out of school and he doesn't know why "too many people's not doing much about it."
Mossett says that in addition to the issues directly connected to the Lewis and Clark expedition, tribes who do not have federal recognition will use the bicentennial "as a venue to get recognized." Such tribes include those of Virginia's Monacan nation, whose land Monticello perches on, but whose eight tribes aren't recognized by the federal government.
As far as the bicentennial shedding light on the American Indian side of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Benson said he thinks the commemoration opened a lot of eyes.
"This year put a lot of truth in explaining how it really worked," he said. "Maybe not all yet, but I think we will get a lot of it as time goes on."
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