The language of Resolution 57 and of the Council's mission statement reflect the historical reassessment of the Lewis and Clark Expedition that has been ongoing during recent decades to take into account the Native American role. Despite the growing recognition of the role Native Americans played in Lewis and Clark's achievement of American national goals and in the Expedition members' safe return from their journey, some feel that the tribes and native nations whom the exploring party met should be watchful of the way the bicentennial is packaged for public consumption. To us, they mean something completely different.
Native opinion is by no means unified on the issue.
As the bicentennial of the Expedition approaches, the debate over, and exposition of, Native American concerns will likely heat up. Just as native information brokers were necessary to the success of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, so too are they necessary today to make native perspectives on the bicentennial and other issues of local, state, and national concern known to the larger society. Meriwether Lewis died only a few years after the Expedition, but Clark lived to see drastic changes in the relationships between the native nations and the American nation. It was in part a response to such pressures that the Cherokee Nation sent one of its young men to the North in 1826 to raise money for a printing press. Boudinot's speech suggests that he was perhaps too modest about the capabilities of Indian writers.