There is a sculpture of Sacagawea, Lewis, and Clark on a bluff above the Missouri River in Great Falls, Montana. As they point west, one gazing through a telescope, they seem to dream beyond the setting sun.
They believe they’ll find a mirror of the eastern lands with which they’re familiar, proposes Tod Bolsinger in Canoeing the Mountains (InterVarsity Press, 2015). Drawing analogies pertinent to Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory as his subtitle summarizes (the type of territory I pondered in my “Hope as Church Unravels” series and a 2017 Eastern Mennonite Seminary Commencement address on “Weaving the New”), Bolsinger portrays them as expecting modest mountains. From gentle crests they’ll glide down a western-style Mississippi to the Pacific. This will delight Thomas Jefferson, who wants them to explore the Missouri River in search of a direct waterway “across this continent for the purposes of commerce.”
Instead of gliding, their expedition crashed into the staggering realities of Rocky Mountains. As Bolsinger puts it, they would have to
go off the map and into uncharted territory. They would have to change plans, give up expectations, even reframe their entire mission. . . . There were no experts, no maps, no “best practices” and no sure guides. . . .
Nevertheless, despite no direct waterway, reach the Pacific they ultimately did. The country burst across now-mapped wilderness.
Except people with their own maps already lived there. When the expedition arrived in 1805 in what is now Missoula, Montana, hospitable Salish Native Americans cared for the weary explorers. For decades after the Salish sought constructive relationships with the hordes to follow.
In Missoula, the Salish had a campground. That’s where the University of Montana now sits. Behind Grizzly Stadium rises a mountain marked with a huge initial M. Beside it flows the Clark Fork River, with downtown Missoula on the other side.
Though rebuilt since the first 1870s version, a few blocks downstream Higgins Bridge still connects the sides. On the university side is a plaque that tells of 1891. Amid promises broken then, before, and later, the U.S. government said it was time: The Salish must move to the Flathead Reservation.
Today you can stand on the bank and watch cars whiz past where an age-10 Mary Ann Pierre Topseh Coombs and her Salish people, wearing their best ceremonial clothes, left home across Higgins Bridge while the white folk watched. There, “Women’s History Matters” reports, “Mary Ann recalled that ‘everyone was in tears, even the men,’ and said the procession was like ‘a funeral march.’”
I learned about Mary Ann while my wife Joan, who consults with behavioral healthcare providers, was connecting with Salish and other Native American healthcare leaders in the Flathead Reservation. They wrestle with how to offer care—a 2018 version of the hospitality their people once provided Lewis and Clark—amid effects of yesterday’s traumas and today’s realities. They navigate the tragedies and triumphs detailed in a moving New York Times Magazine story on the Arlee Warriors and how “on Montana’s Flathead Indian Reservation, basketball is about much more than winning.”
As by the Clark Fork I imagined Mary Ann’s crossing, I felt haunted by the Lewis and Clark saga. Their courage is evident. So is the fact that in charting their world on top of Native American charts they imposed tragedy in which most of us participate, myself included as I love the land, likely first loved by Unami Native Americans, on which my home is built.
Does the shredding of familiar maps invite us to move beyond them, as Bolsinger urges, but to shift sources of inspiration? Bolsinger hints at this when he highlights contributions to the Lewis and Clark expedition of Sacagawea, a Soshone Native American who joined the expedition with her French Canadian husband. Yet this remains a footnote to the larger affirmations of Lewis-and-Clark mapmaking.
What if when we encountered Lewis-and-Clark-like leadership we imagined the alternate maps—maybe like last-shall-be-first maps Jesus describes—lurking in such paths not taken as collaborating with instead of exploiting the hospitality of Mary Ann’s people?
As loneliness surges with the breakdown of both conservatism and liberalism in Western cultures, what if the inheritors of that forced march across the Higgins Bridge are blazing their own trail through not only their historical traumas but also the unraveling of the culture that took over their people? Is that what we see when suicide clusters force its young to “learn to ‘survive their past and their present’”? When the Arlee Warriors release a video on Facebook dedicating their basketball tournament to all who have lost a loved one to suicide?
When the Warriors win and, amid celebrations, Bear, a Salish grandfather who had long ago been beaten for speaking his native language goes on?
“We’re not supposed to be here,” he said, his face turning momentarily dark, his immense hands clenching. Then his hands released, and a great smile worked its way across his face. “We’re still here,” he said.
He walked inside, where mothers danced around the laughing boys, shoving them playfully down to the court. The world is never so hopeful as when the old honor the young.
—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published the first version of this post.