Lewis and Clark Bicentennial gives flesh perspective on history.

My journey to the NCEW convention in Portland followed a good part of Lewis and Clark's path through Oregon, priming me for Friday's breakout session.

The explorers took more than two weeks to paddle down the Columbia from their campsite near the mouth of the Snake River to what's now the city of Portland. I covered the same distance in under four hours, making the Benson Hotel by lunch time.

With the official Lewis and Clark trail logo appearing almost as frequently as mileposts along the highway, I couldn't help thinking that more had been lost in two hundred years than just the perspective that comes with a more leisurely pace.

The highways that flank the river, cut like scars through even the most spectacular vistas in the Columbia Gorge. The sight of a lone bird is a stark reminder that along this route, members of the Corps of Discovery saw flocks of mallards so thick they darkened the sky like a storm. A pair of Indians working a drift net from a fiberglass skiff near White Salmon brings to mind the precarious fishing scaffolds at Cecilo Falls, long ago flooded by the slack water behind The Dalles Dam.

So, at the start of the session with panelists David Sarasohn, associate editor at The Oregonian, and Bobbie Conner, vice president of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial board of directors, I already had a half-written editorial in mind on the loss of our natural heritage.

Lament is an acceptable topic for editorial comment, but not a great one. It tweaks emotions without offering readers any alternatives or opportunities for action.

Fortunately, the panel discussion, moderated by Charles Rowe, associate editor of The Post and Courier in South Carolina, did what the best editorials often do--provide new ways of looking at a familiar topic.

Conner, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, challenged journalists to look beyond "the protest story" in trying to understand the Native American view of Lewis and Clark's legacy.

It's good advice for editorial writers, not only because it challenges us to break away from the pack, but because it shifts focus to the tribes that have elected to participate in the bicentennial, which is far more fertile ground.

The bicentennial is a chance for Native Americans to talk about history from the perspective of the people who were already here when Europeans arrived. "We are not just a backdrop to the story of westward expansion" Conner admonished.

It was clear by the end of her talk that the old images--savages, noble or otherwise, or hapless victims of oppression--are ways that the dominant culture has viewed Indians.

The way tribes view themselves--as nations existing in the past, alive today, and enduring into the future--is the more compelling story.

That's because, Sarasohn said, the Lewis and Clark bicentennial isn't about some dusty history, but a story about what happens next.

The focus might be how the environment is faring two hundred years after Lewis and Clark opened a path to the West, or the changing economy of the region, or the native people who are still here.

Whatever the emphasis, it's still a story about what happens next, Sarasohn said.

The desire to know the answer, of course, has always been the reason readers follow one word to the next.

Chris Sivula is editorial-page editor of the Tri-City Herald in Tri-Cities, Washington. E-mail csivula@ tri-city.com