As the nearly four-year commemoration of the Lewis and Clark bicentennial reached its recent conclusion, much was made of the disappointment the national observance proved to be for tourism officials and others interested in capitalizing on its commercial possibilities. As a Wall Street Journal headline described it in the commemoration’s final months, “Lewis and Clark are met with a yawn after 200 years.”

Yet on a different plane, the bicentennial observance has produced not yawns but intellectual excitement and important new conceptions of the legacy of the Corps of Discovery. The commemoration has not only brought into public consciousness a fuller understanding of the historical context of the Lewis and Clark expedition, but it has also demonstrated how far we have come in the past 200 years in appreciating the complexities inherent in the collision between human cultures that was put in motion by the great explorers.

Similar to many other academic and cultural institutions around the country, we at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, used the occasion as an opportunity to learn and teach. We undertook a series of educational symposia dedicated to understanding the expedition’s enduring impact in the context of the American Enlightenment and, in the process, opened new dialogue and stirred broader understanding between Anglo Americans and indigenous people.

For many of us here, the most salient “discovery” was the way conventional history has failed to appreciate the size and sophistication of native civilizations before the arrival of Europeans.

As Charles C. Mann writes in his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, published last year, it is time to overturn the widely held notion that the Americas before Columbus were a vast underused and under-populated wilderness.

New advances in archaeology, anthropology, and other fields teach us that the Indian nations before 1492 had better technology and were far more populous than previously believed. The Indians had developed farming technologies that in some cases were more advanced than those used in Europe at the time. They had large cities and complex, rich cultures. The population density along the Missouri River rivaled that of the Rhine. We tend to exaggerate the level of European civilization 500 years ago, thinking of it as an early version of the culture we experience today. We would do well to remember that the Europeans five centuries ago still had bears and wolves living in the next woods and struggled prodigiously to protect themselves from the cold. To be alone, without fire, and far from home at sundown was a life-threatening situation for a pre-modern European. The citizens of London or Novgorod in 1500 had far more in common with their contemporaries in North America than they would have had with those of us living today in Europe or the United States.

As we better understand now, the indigenous populations whom Lewis and Clark encountered at the outset of the nineteenth century were far past their peaks, decimated long before by European diseases that spread across America in perhaps the most devastating epidemic in human history. Perhaps it wasn’t superior technology or civilization, so much as their different immune systems that dictated that the Europeans would prevail when the two worlds collided.

As the Lewis and Clark observance made abundantly clear on our campus, it is well past time to dismiss the fiction that any cross-cultural “encounter” or “melding” took place between European and native Americans after the Corp of Discovery opened the way to the West. What followed was a jarring clash of civilizations that had a one-sided outcome, with profoundly negative consequences for the Indians that are still experienced today.

Most meaningful to me personally, and to many who went through this enriching experience with me, is a new appreciation for different and distinctly native American ways of seeing and knowing the world. I think about it often now on my evening walks, the reality that there is more to learn, and more to behold, than what is observed through a microscope, understood through scientific measurement, or deduced through empirical reasoning.

To be sure, the European traditions and methods of scientific inquiry and investigation—those inherited from the Enlightenment—have been billiantly successful. They have provided us with the tools to unveil the mysteries of the cosmos and to peer back across the light years to become spectators at the origin of time itself. They have provided us with the technology to drill down to the level of the most fundamental subatomic particles and to examine and manipulate the building blocks of matter in ways that, absent that technology, are literally beyond comprehension. They have drawn us to explore the oceans’ depths and to map the far side of the moon. They have allowed us to develop the tools for analyzing the human mind, for delving into the complexities of human motivation at the molecular level. They have enabled us to curb plague and overcome famine, and they show promise for allowing us one day to cure every disease imaginable through the manipulation of genetic material. The scientific method and its legacy are among the most formidable and enduring achievements of the human mind.

Yet for all it has done to improve the human condition, the scientific way of knowing leaves us short, particularly as we struggle with questions involving ethics, aesthetics, spirituality, and value in human existence. Indigenous ways of knowing can help us complete the picture.

Relying on intuition, Indians learn about someone by looking him or her in the eye. They turn to cherished myth to evoke larger truths about human existence—truths that science, by its very definition, cannot approach. They help us answer not just how the world works, but why.

This indigenous way of knowing has much to offer the country’s education system. It reinforces the value of the humanities, which explore through art and literature. It reminds us that some students learn more from an inspiring, truth-evoking story than they ever would in a laboratory or immersion in a mathematical problem—as crucial as those pursuits are for education. Our commemoration of the Lewis and Clark expedition has helped us remember that empirical reasoning is necessary yet insufficient for complete understanding of the world.

The bicentennial observance on this campus has stirred tensions at times and perhaps dimmed the luster of the great explorers in some participants’ eyes. But, more important, it has deepened our understanding of American history and our recognition that the pioneering spirit personified by Lewis and Clark had dire consequences for the people, environment, economy, and cultural heritage of the American West.

Whatever its lack of commercial benefits, the Lewis and Clark commemoration has reinvigorated the national dialogue about the many origins and multiple legacies of the American experience, and it has showed us new ways of continuing the inquiry. For our new insights and pedagogical models, we owe a great debt to the observance of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, and to the native people whose accomplishments and wisdom are now more clearly revealed.