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For teachers and students

Program dates and exhibit events

 

Monday, November 5, 2007: James J. Holmberg will present "Big Medison: York's Life During and After the Lewis and Clark Expedition."

Description: James J. Holmberg writes and lectures on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with special focus on William Clark and York. In addition to numerous articles, Jim Holmberg wrote the epilogue for the revised edition (2000) of Robert Betts’s In Search of York: The Slave who went to the Pacific with Lewis and Clark and edited Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan Clark (2002). In the summer of 2006 By His Own Hand?: The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis, also by the University of Oklahoma Press, was published. This work examines the murder v. suicide arguments regarding Lewis’s tragic 1809 death. Holmberg has contributed the case for Lewis’s death being by suicide.

A native of Louisville, Holmberg received BA in history and MA in American history from the University of Louisville. He joined the staff of The Filson Historical Society in 1982, and presently serves as the curator of Special Collections. Holmberg has served, and serves on, national, state, and local boards of Lewis and Clark organizations, including as chair of the Kentucky Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commission.

Location and Time: Purdue University Libraries, Undergraduate Library, B-848, 3:00-4:00 p.m.

Monday, November 12, 2007 : Roger Strater presents "Finding Your Way in Indian Country"

Description: A discussion of the navigational, surveying and cartographic methods of Lewis and Clark on their Voyage of Discovery from 1803 to 1806 using replica instruments. Using these instruments to measure celestial angles and terrestrial distances, Captain William Clark was able to make a map of the western portion of the North American continent so accurate that it remained in use until the middle of the 19th century.

Location and Time: Purdue University Libraries, Undergraduate Library, B-848, 3:00-4:00 p.m.

Thursday, November 15, 2007: Dr. Selene G. Phillips presents "Visual Images of Sacagawea: The First American Female International Diplomat"

Description: Dr. Phillips has been portraying Sacagawea for six years and traveled for four years with the Great Plains Chautauqua Society. She is writing a book about how the woman who accompanied Lewis and Clark has been appropriated in American culture and how indigenous epistemology would provide a more complete picture of the Lewis and Clark voyage and Sacagawea. Her presentation will decode the hidden messages behind the visual imagery, and she will discuss the role of Sacagawea and children's books. 

Phillips is the president of the advisory board to the American Native Press Archives. She served on the Indiana Governor's Native American Council from 1997 to 2003. She received her Ph.D. from Purdue University in American Studies in 1993 and now teaches in the Communication Department at the University of Louisville.

Location and Time: Purdue University Libraries, Undergraduate Library, B-848, 3:30-4:40 p.m.

Saturday, November 17, 2007: Michael Dotson presents “On the Trail with Lewis & Clark: A Newfoundland's Grand Adventure as the Captain's Dog”

Description: 863 days, 7,689 miles, and 1 dog. In 1804, the Newfoundland dog Seaman traveled with the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In 2005, Michael Dotson and his own Newfoundland, named Seaman, reenacted the original expedition. Dotson will tell stories of Seaman’s adventures on the journey to the Pacific.

Following the presentation, the South Central Newfoundland Club will give a working dog demonstration on the library lawn.

A Western historian and reenactor, Michael Dotson has been a student of Lewis & Clark for thirty years, a contributing historian for The Journals of Lewis & Clark published by the University of Nebraska Press, and is a member of the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation.

Location and Time: Tippecanoe County Public Library, 2:00 p.m.

 

Tuesday, November 27, 2007: Dawn Riggs presents “Clearing a Path: The Diplomacy of Lewis and Clark in the Great Plains”

Description: Lewis and Clark, leaders of Jefferson¹s Corp of Discovery, were charged with many tasks as they entered into the strange and unfamiliar Great Plains. Those tasks were to map and make an accounting of the lands, resources and peoples now claimed by the new United States. But looking east from Indian country, Lewis and Clark were not a wholly unfamiliar sight. European explorers, traders and soldiers were frequent and familiar characters to those indigenous people who called the Great Plains their home.

But there was something different about these new intruders that was both intriguing and threatening to the historic residents of the Great Plains. This talk will explore some of the diplomatic strategies both sides employed and some of the ways indigenous Americans understood those encounters.

Dawn Riggs moved to Lafayette in August 2007. She has lived in southern California for over twenty years and taught Native America history and Early American history at the University of California and the California State system for the last ten years. Originally from Appalachian Pennsylvania, her research examines the history of the Delaware peoples, and her current research involves the diaspora of eastern Native Americans through Ohio and Indiana.

Location and Time: Tippecanoe County Public Library, 7:00 p.m.