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West of the Mississippi, celebrations of the epic 1804-1806 Lewis and Clark Expedition are thick on the ground these days. The bicentennial is much less of a big deal on the East Coast. In New England, a single, small exhibition at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (through 2005) carries the flag. In symbolic weight alone, though, the Peabody's contribution may well top the rest.

Thanks to several fortuitous twists of fate, "From Nation to Nation: Examining Lewis and Clark's Indian Expedition" contains some of the most important relics of the two-year journey, examples of what the Peabody describes as "among the oldest and most meaningful examples of Native American cultural arts in any museum collection."

The fascinating displays also allude to, but don't fully explore, another fascinating story: the peculiar post-expedition tale of the Native American artifacts they contain. This second epic spans the entire span of American museology and its ambiguous relationship to Native American cultures.

A little history: early in his presidency, an expansionist-minded Thomas Jefferson had arranged for his private secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to make a scientific survey across the west to Oregon, partly to nail down American claims there. By the time it set out in 1804, though, the very nature of the United States had changed dramatically.

In 1803, Jefferson and Emperor Napoleon I signed the stupendous land deal known as the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson had in his new domain not just vast, unexplored territories, rich resources, and natural wonders but whole nations of Native Americans, each with languages, cultures, and politics of its own

With these changes in mind, the Lewis and Clark Expedition carried diplomatic gifts from the American President for the tribal leaders they met, everything from wampum made by East-Coast tribes to large silver medals struck with Jefferson's likeness and symbols of peace and friendship. They received many gifts in return.

On their return, Lewis and Clark gave many of these Indian objects to President Jefferson, who proudly displayed them in his home at Monticello. After Jefferson died, in 1826, deeply in debt, Monticello and all its contents were sold at auction. The Lewis and Clark material vanished from history.

Fortunately for posterity, Lewis, Clark, and Jefferson had also given some 70 Indian objects to Charles Wilson Peale for his Philadelphia museum. Established in 1786 and originally housed in Independence Hall, Peale's Museum was the nation's first serious museum of cultural and natural history. A celebrated artist widely admired for his portraits of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and other Founding Fathers, Peale exhibited the Lewis and Clark artifacts along with his own paintings, curious inventions, intriguing objects, ingenious gadgets, stuffed animals, minerals, and the museum's centerpiece: the first complete American mastodon skeleton ever discovered.

When the museum closed around 1850, the rising entertainment entrepreneur P. T. Barnum and his sometime business partner, friend, and confidant, Moses Kimball, proprietor of the Boston Museum, acquired its collections. Adept hands at sensation and showmanship, Barnum and Kimball raised the museum business to phenomenal new levels of profitability.

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Barnum was already growing rich off the success of his American Museum in New York, where he mixed inanimate curios with living curiosities like Chang and Eng, the original "Siamese twins." The Lewis and Clark artifacts joined the celebrated Feejee Mermaid, "positively asserted by its owner to have been taken alive in the Fe[e]jee Islands," and hundreds of other Kimball-Barnum curiosities in Kimball's Massachusetts establishment.

After a long run, the Boston Museum burned in 1899. Kimball's family donated some 1,400 remaining exhibits, including the humbug mermaid and Peale's Lewis and Clark material, to Harvard's Peabody, where they have stayed ever since. In this haphazard way, the artifacts in "From Nation to Nation" survived, more by accident of fate than by any conscious design.

After decades serving as "curiosities," Indian objects like the Lewis and Clark artifacts had become, by the late Victorian era, objects of academic study. In fact, the Peabody was established, in part, to preserve for future study the creations of Native American peoples, who, its founders presumed, were headed for early extinction.

"From Nation to Nation" focuses on the beginning of the story, on the intertwining cultures as Lewis and Clark encountered them. The exhibits include such traditional Indian diplomatic gifts as a pictographic buffalo robe and ceremonial pipes as well as traditional rain gear from the damp Pacific Northwest. But the show also displays objects in which European influences had already begun to blend with Native American designs.

Among these cross-cultural objects Lewis are an elegant side-fold dress, possibly Sioux, which includes English brass buttons and Italian glass beads in its decoration, and a striped "top hat," woven on the Pacific coast "in the fashion which was common in the U. States two years ago."

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The show's elegant, Federal-style installation alludes to yet another transformation of its contents. As recently as the 1950s, Northwest coast tribal masks, Hopi figurines, and other rare Indian works in the Peabody collections were considered no more valuable than the pickled sea cucumbers, fossil trilobites, pinned butterflies, and other "specimens" housed elsewhere in the same building.

Then the artifacts became art. Auction values of Native American objects soared from a few dollars to six figures and beyond. Art museums began to exhibit Native American works along with old master paintings. Nineteenth-century anthropological museums like the Peabody spruced up their dusty displays to reflect the change in cultural valuation.

Meanwhile, rising minority consciousness led the surviving Native American tribes to reclaim their heritage. But what was left to recover?

"Nation to Nation's" concluding section displays works by three contemporary Native American artists: Butch Thunder Hawk, Jo Esther Parshall, and Pat Courtney Gold. These objects are even more culturally ambiguous than those created by their ancestors; they are revivals and adaptations, rather than continuations, of tribal styles that have largely died out. At the same time, even in this historical display, these "Indian" works are more closely connected to the modern, non-Indian world of art galleries and museums than they are to ancient tribal functions and traditions.

Do these concluding objects represent the continuity of Native American culture? Or do they signify its final fusion with a European-based society? Are Thunder Hawk, Parshall, and Gold American artists working at extending a tribal heritage or are they part of a tribal heritage looking to be finally accepted as fully American? Has American history irreversibly changed the meaning of even such early historical objects as those in "From Nation to Nation?"

As it was before Lewis and Clark's journey, the lines between nations remain largely unmapped.

"From Nation to Nation: Examining Lewis and Clark's Indian Collection" is on display through December 31, 2005 at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Click here for more resources on the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

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