Once again, Indians of Northern Plains prepare a welcome

TWIN BUTTES, N.D. -- Soft, lyrical syllables come in rapids and eddies, like a stream that rushes and bends.

Edwin Benson, 72, sits in his ranch kitchen and speaks the rippling words, telling the story of a crafty coyote who pretends to help a buffalo calf return to its herd. The coyote is persuasive, the buffalo calf naive. There is foreboding in Benson's tone, but humor, too.

He tells the story in the language that two centuries ago welcomed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Mandan Indian villages by the Missouri River in western North Dakota, not far from his home.

Benson learned the language from his grandfather and speaks it fluently. He is one of just four, maybe five people remaining who can.

For 20 minutes a day, he teaches schoolchildren on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, sharing ancient words for house and garden, for hawk and cottonwood, for the colors of horses and buffalo. He teaches the kids to count to 10.

"For me, it's easy," he said. "It was my first language. But it's hard to explain to children why you say a thing one way to a lady, another way to a man. It isn't enough time.

"A lot of time, I feel lonely. I speak the language of my people, but I have no one to talk to."

As the nation celebrates the bicentennial of Thomas Jefferson's 1803 Louisiana Purchase and prepares to mark the 200th anniversary of Lewis & Clark's journey through that vast territory, the Northern Plains tribes credited with saving the expedition are determined not to be a historical footnote.

"We have a story to share, and we want to be the ones telling it," said Karen Paetz, a member of the Three Affiliated Tribes -- Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara -- at Fort Berthold.

"Our ancestors had no idea of what might come in the wake of those visitors," she said. "We're going to be more prepared this time."

That includes major new public works projects -- roads, bridges, housing, a marina, water and sewer systems -- to make the sprawling but sparsely populated reservation capable of receiving larger numbers of tourists without endangering important cultural sites.

It also includes putting more Indians at state and national historic sites to interpret what people find there. Paetz helped to establish a college-degree program in tribal tourism at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, with courses on Indian history, culture, spirituality and customs.

"Non-native people [have been] telling what happened," she said. "That needs to be corrected. We don't want tourists wandering aimlessly across sacred sites, indigenous grasses and other places that are important to us -- and without understanding any of it."

Valerian Three Irons is a descendant of Sheheke, White Coyote, the Mandan chief who welcomed Lewis and Clark and assured their survival through the winter of 1804-5 by offering peace, advice and food.

"There are some of the opinion that no, we're not going to celebrate such a thing as the expedition," Three Irons said. "It was in the end devastating to our people, our culture. The other view is that if we don't tell our story, we're letting someone else tell it. We're allowing them to define us as a people and a culture, and nobody has that right. That's been done for too long.

"If the visitors can see us as a people today, if there can be some greater understanding of who we were and who we are, maybe we have a hope of righting some of the wrongs."

By 1804, when Lewis and Clark first approached the earth-lodge villages on their way west, the Mandan were a people in serious decline. Once a thriving nation of 15,000 who lived in permanent settlements, raised crops and anchored a trade area that extended far beyond the Missouri River Valley, they had been decimated by smallpox and forced to rely on the neighboring Hidatsa Indians for security against the Sioux.

The French explorer La Verendrye had visited the Mandan in 1723 and told of a prosperous people familiar with French and Spanish trade goods. Their terraced villages were defended by dry moats and escarpments.

But not against disease. On Oct. 19, 1804, the Corps of Discovery passed by On-a-slant village, south of present-day Mandan, N.D., deserted since a 1781 smallpox epidemic.

At On-a-slant today, guide Dakota Goodhouse, 28, said he "felt drawn to these villages." Maybe, he says, smiling, it's because he's a Dakota. He talks to visitors from that perspective.

"To a Sioux person, this was like European living," he said, standing inside one of the recreated earth lodges. "The beds are off the ground. The walls are like a house, not a teepee."

"Yes, but we stole them," Goodhouse said, smiling again. "We stole so many horses!"

Calvin Grinnell, cultural preservationist at the Three Affiliated Tribes Museum at Four Bears, is helping to develop a tribal plan for protecting medicinal plants, artifacts and burial sites. He'd like to retrieve hundreds of items from museums elsewhere -- including Mandan-Hidatsa items sent to Jefferson by Lewis and Clark.

Despite the challenges, Grinnell said he looks forward to seeing new visitors. "Some people will be disappointed," he said. "They want to leave us in 1804. But I enjoy taking people around and showing them -- despite all the setbacks, despite the low self-esteem that sometimes affects us -- how far we've come."

On Oct. 24, 1804, five days after passing deserted On-a-slant, Clark reported seeing a village of about 40 earth lodges "situated on an eminence of about 50 feet above the water in a handsome plain."

Indians beckoned to the Americans from shore. The captains were invited into lodges; they welcomed Mandan onto their boats.

Sgt. John Ordway recorded in his journal that the Americans "found the nation very friendly."

For five months, the Indians and their guests talked, shared meals and took each other's measure. The visitors encouraged the Mandan and Hidatsa to remain at peace and to extend that peace to the Arikara, and they advised them to look to the United States -- not British Canada -- for guidance, protection and commerce.

Taken together, the Knife River villages -- two Mandan, three Hidatsa -- had a population four times greater than St. Louis. But they were vulnerable to raids, especially by the nomadic Sioux, and they saw an advantage in having the well-armed expedition make its winter camp nearby.

White Coyote, whom Lewis and Clark called Big White, offered corn and other supplies to sustain the expedition through the winter until they resumed their journey to the west. "If we eat, you shall eat," he said. With regard to the Arikara, he told them, "We will make a good peace."

Fort Mandan was raised on the east side of the Missouri and soon became a favored hangout, a window into American life where Indians traded corn to have their axes sharpened and kettles repaired. They inspected thermometers, writing paper and spyglasses, and they watched the making of candles and shot. They joined in hunts and games.

One early visitor would prove to be especially significant. On Nov. 11, 1804, a young Shoshone woman named Sakakawea entered Fort Mandan. In the spring, after giving birth to a son, she would guide the expedition west.

A statue of Sakakawea, with her son strapped to her back, stands today outside the North Dakota Capitol in Bismarck. In October, a replica will go into the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C., where each state is allowed two statues of people of significance. Sakakawea of North Dakota will join Henry Clay of Kentucky, Sam Houston of Texas and Robert E. Lee of Virginia.

At Fort Mandan, "Explorers and Indians got to know each other in ways that had little to do with federal policy or grand councils," James Ronda wrote in "Lewis & Clark Among the Indians," published in 1943 and reissued for the bicentennial. They found "common ground where people from different cultures could talk, joke, haggle and compete in the shared struggle for life on the northern plains."

On New Year's Day 1805, 16 men of the expedition accepted the Mandans' invitation to celebrate in the village. "The party left the fort carrying a fiddle, a tambourine and a sounding horn," Ronda wrote. "The Mandan onlookers were especially charmed by the ability of Francois Rivet to dance upside down on his head. All joined in a circle around Rivet, dancing and singing. After some time all the revelers were invited into the lodges for food and gifts of buffalo robes."

The fort didn't survive the corps. Clark reported that it had burned by the time he returned in 1806. A replica stands 10 miles upriver from the original site, now under water.

In 1998, the North Dakota Lewis & Clark Bicentennial Advisory Committee met with members of the Three Affiliated Tribes and asked, "What do you want us to tell the world about your culture?"

"Right from the start, we conceived of the bicentennial as a Mandan cultural festival, not a celebration of the details of how the corps came in here," said Tracy Potter, a committee member. "No one is celebrating or honoring or applauding Lewis and Clark. It's all about the chance to tell the story of the Native peoples."

Potter, director of the foundation that oversees Fort Abraham Lincoln and the On-a-slant site, also is author of a new biography of Sheheke.

"The Mandan nation continues to exist in the minds and hearts of . . . maybe a few hundred people," he said. "After the 1837 smallpox epidemic, fewer than 200 Mandan survived. They moved in with the Hidatsa. In a sense, that was the end of their independent nationhood, but they are Mandan still because they say they are [and] they preserve the culture.

"Now there has been a revival of pride in who they are, and part of that is due to the bicentennial. The Mandan are responding to it in the same way they responded to the expedition itself: 'This could be a good thing for us, a commercial possibility.' After all, they see themselves as the stars of the Lewis & Clark story."

The Fort Berthold Reservation covers nearly 1 million acres straddling the Missouri River and Lake Sakakawea, formed when Garrison Dam was built 50 years ago.

To many eyes, it is a bleak and forbidding landscape, empty as a Badlands creek in August. But to others, there is stark, calming beauty in the rugged buttes and winding coulees with their antelope and hawks, scents of sage and sweet clover, endless vistas and almost mystical silence.

Artists George Catlin and Karl Bodmer came in the 1830s to sketch and paint. At Missouri River Lodge, a 2,000-acre cattle ranch and bed-and-breakfast south of the reservation and near the Knife River villages, Orville Oster takes visitors to a summit to look down at the river and surrounding plain with its buttes, scoria pits, cottonwoods and gulleys.

Catlin described it, too: "rugged and various coloured bluffs . . . grouped in all the wildest fancies and rudeness of Nature's accidental varieties."

At the western end of the reservation are the Killdeer Mountains and the North Dakota Badlands: "Hell with the fires out," as a 19th-century U.S. Army general described it, but a deeply spiritual place to the Northern Plains Indians -- and to many visitors.

At the reservation's eastern border, where range gives way to farmland, lies the village of White Shield and, nearby, a veterans' cemetery: scores of white markers bearing the names of Owl, Smoke, Young Elk, Left Hand and other frontier Indian scouts; Glen Yellow Bird, a Marine veteran of Vietnam; Leon Fox, a Navy veteran of World War II, and Carroll Howling Wolf, an Army veteran of the Korean War.

One marker stands for Bloody Knife, George Custer's favorite scout, killed at the Little Big Horn in 1876.

The cemetery is not nearly so old. It was moved from Nishu, a village lost to the lake.

The tribes had lost much of their remaining lands following the 1910 Homestead Act. Then the reservoir, long championed by farming and flood-control interests, gradually but insistently took 155,000 acres of their best agricultural land.

A photograph from 1948 shows the U.S. Interior secretary signing contracts for the land. Men stand by, watching without expression, except for one who holds a hand to his eyes and weeps: tribal Chairman George Gillette. "Right now the future does not look too good to us," he said.

The pain hasn't subsided. "The dam and subsequent lake flooded our homelands and disrupted and demoralized a culture that had been in existence for hundreds of years," Chairman Tex Hall said on June 11, explaining why the tribe wouldn't otherwise mark the dam's 50th anniversary.

The rising water tore clans and communities apart, severed road connections and changed lifestyles, Hall said. In compensation, the tribes were promised electricity, water, agricultural assistance, roads, a hospital and a school.

They're still waiting on those promises, said Marcus Wells Jr., a tribal council member. "It was like putting us on a desert and telling us to go ahead and live the lives we used to live," he said.

Federal legislation in 2000 again promised water throughout the reservation, Wells said. But the tribal council, tired of waiting, started the huge project with loans.

"I've been hauling water for 37 years," he said. "My father and grandfather had to haul water. . . . I've lost five elders who were so happy that it was on the way. They died waiting."

The tribes also are participating in a $55 million project to replace the dangerously narrow, nearly mile-long 1930s bridge over the Missouri linking Four Bears, home to tribal headquarters and a casino, with New Town. Created by residents of towns lost to the reservoir, New Town is the reservation's largest community, with a mixed native and non-native population of 1,387.

A huge new powwow center is planned, plus an RV park expansion, a hospital and clinic and other projects to capitalize on or sustain tourism.

"I don't think we'll ever see a tremendous increase," said Marilyn Hudson, director of the summers-only tribal museum, which had 2,500 visitors two years ago and expects 5,000 this year. "We're out of the way. But people who make it here will find hope. They'll find very average people, white and Indian, living together and making progress.

At his home at Twin Buttes, miles from the unseen river-become-lake, Edwin Benson remembers when the surveyors came and said he'd have to move from Red Butte, his birthplace by the river.

His grandmother had died just before he was born. His mother died when he was 2, and his father was often absent, leaving Edwin and an older brother and sister with their grandfather.

"My grandfather was my mother and father and grandpa, all in one human being," he said. "But he died when I was about 7."

Edwin stayed at the home place by the river with an older brother and sister, looked after by neighbors. The brother left to fight in World War II.

"At the time, I didn't realize -- I couldn't figure out what was wrong. But now I know it was loneliness," he said.

He worked occasionally for area farmers and ranchers and kept a garden. He attended a Bureau of Indian Affairs school and learned English.

"But at home we didn't use English," he said. "It was out of place to hear English in our Indian home. Some neighbors spoke Mandan still."

"There were a lot of non-Indians wandering around the area with packs on, on the hilltops and down in the coulees," Benson said. "They told us how far up the water was going to be. That was hard for us to believe. 'The water from the river will be to here? These great big cottonwood trees are going to be under water?' But it happened. And it's still there.

"It was a sad feeling in the people to leave that river bottom. We had to move up onto the hills, to land that wasn't even tillable. But they said they'd pay for taking the land."

He doesn't remember how much was paid. "Maybe some of us got $500," he said. "That was for good bottom land. Still, it was a lot of money then, and grown adult people felt like kids, jumping around."

Many of the people who sold their land left the reservation. Today, of about 11,000 enrolled members, about 7,500 live off the reservation.

"We would have kept more of our culture if they had stayed," Benson said. "Our language would be more alive. In those days before, we had our culture close to us because we had our relatives close."

Mandan and Hidatsa and Arikara have much intermarried, and today most members of the Three Affiliated Tribes claim blood from all three. The last full-blooded Mandan died in the 1970s, a woman named Mattie Grinnell.

"She made 104 years," said Benson. "She had a real sharp mind and never lost it. When she saw me, she talked in Mandan. She knew who I was and knew I could talk Mandan, and that pleased her.

"But I've always gotten along with non-Indians, too," he said. "When I'm gone for a few days or a week, when I get back to Halliday [a mostly white town of 225 south of the reservation], I'm home. 'Where you been?' they ask. We don't see the color."

Benson traveled earlier this year to Monticello, Jefferson's home in Virginia, to represent the Mandan people at opening ceremonies for the national Lewis & Clark bicentennial.

"It'll be good if it brings new streams of visitors," he said. "A lot of people will see our land, our country. They'll go home and say, 'In North Dakota, there's this type of country, and nobody could imagine.'

For an excellent, firsthand account of the Mandans and other tribes, read George Catlin's Letters and Notes on the North American Indians. Catlin greatly admired the Indians and lamented their slow decline as the result of encroaching white civilization, but he was no PC sentimentalist (as if such a thing could have existed in the nineteenth century) and wasn't afraid to call a spade a spade. His book is entertaining and highly instructive. Anyone who reads it will emerge from the experience with a far better regard for the North American Indians than he could obtain by listening to our modern activists.

During my national tour of '95, I had the opportunity to drive through South Dakota and visited the "monument" at Wounded Knee.

The amazing thing about Wounded Knee is that it was bad enough the first time there was a "battle" there. Not much has changed since. Fortunately for the indigenous grasses, there ain't that many tourists who show up there.

"Sacred sites", my a**! If she is talking about such 'sites' on land which it titled to the indians, either as a tribe or as individuals, then they can do as they see fit. But to allow any recognition of such 'sites' on government lands is clearly and unambiguously a violation of the Constitution.

Indian activist claims that Natural Bridge is such a 'site' and must be treated as a religious 'site' is socialist rot of the worst kind. To allow such restrictions as the National Park Service is now doing is to allow government to preferentially recognize one religion over another, and on government land at that.

What if someone wanted to sacrifice a virgin to Baal on,, or under the arch? Certaimly worship of Baal is no different than some Indian belief? Or is it?

What about those wishing to celebrate the vernal equinox with the original fertility rites? How nice, religious celebrants and NAMBLA, coming together!

Moral: Keep government within Constitutional bounds or it will become the "fearful master" of which George Washington wrote.

Come to think of it, can government allow any teaching about any religion on government lands?

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