Native views on explorers focus of talk

LEWIS AND CLARK

Want to go?

Who: Dark Rain Thom and James Alexander Thom

What: "Sign-Talker: Between Two Worlds"

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Program Lounge, University Center

By Sam Blackwell ~ Southeast Missourian

"Sign-Talker: Between Two Worlds" is James Alexander Thom's fictional account of the Lewis and Clark expedition as George Drouillard, a Shawnee hunter and interpreter, might have seen it. Drouillard was related to Cape Girardeau founder Don Louis Lorimier and is believed to have lived in Cape Girardeau at one time.

Thom's previous book about the expedition, "From Sea to Shining Sea" published in 1986, was told from William Clark's point of view. But in 1990, Thom married a Shawnee woman named Dark Rain who knew that many American Indian tribes have their own stories to tell about the expedition.

"It was almost like Drouillard himself was urging me to tell it from the point of view of native people who not only helped it go through but made it possible," he says. "Drouillard was one of the Indians who helped the most."

Thom and Dark Rain Thom will discuss "Sign-Talker," Drouillard and Native American views of the upcoming bicentennial commemoration of the Corps of Discovery expedition in a program to be presented Tuesday at Southeast Missouri State University.

The program is the foundation of a Missouri Humanities Council series titled "Where Diverse Communities Intersect: Lewis and Clark Interact with America." That series is being presented in a test this month and next at the Kirkwood Public Library in the St. Louis area. If successful, the council plans to seek the funding to conduct the programs throughout Missouri, Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska.

The Center for Regional History at Southeast, one of the sponsors of Tuesday's talk, already is planning to acquire the rest of the series, which includes programs on canoe-making, on the gifts the expedition gave to American Indians along the way, and on the relatively unexplored idea that they benefited as well from the relationship with Europeans and Americans.

Multilingual hunter

Thom, who lives near Bloomington, Ind., says Drouillard was a skilled hunter who spoke seven Algonquin languages in addition to English German, French and Spanish. He also was adept at sign language. "He was crucial from one end of the journey to the other."

Drouillard's exact relationship to Lorimier is uncertain, Thom says. Some sources say his mother was the sister of Lorimier's wife, Charlotte. "But in a tribe, women could be cousins and they would refer to each other as sisters," Thom said.

Dark Rain Thom is on the planning council for the national Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commission. She and the council chairman, a member of the Northwest-based Nez Perce tribe, have insisted that the stories of the tribes along the trail should be told during the commemoration.

Each tribe has its own tradition about encountering the expedition, she says. The Nez Perce tell of meeting strange creatures who were furry, pale and had blue eyes. "They thought they might be strange walking fish," she says. "They wondered if they should kill them and eat them."

But an old woman who had been captured by whites as a young girl told the tribe these were human beings who had been kind to her.

"They couldn't have succeeded without the generosity of the Indian tribes along the way," Dark Rain Thom says.

Tribal input

The "Diverse Communities Intersect" series was organized with the help of tribal advisors, says Michael Bouman, executive director of the Missouri Humanities Council. "We wanted to make sure Native American studies were central to everything we do. It's an important educational need to understand Native Americans not as them but as the larger us."

Nearly 200 years ago in exploring the West, Lewis and Clark came upon long-established tribal villages with their own civilizations, art forms and agricultural systems.

Through the series, Bouman said, "we are forming an understanding of a place filled with culture, not just a place waiting for white guys to come through."

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182