This is from a road trip a couple years ago that took me through Boise, Idaho—part of a nonfiction work-in-progress tentatively titled Unstuck.
At Cecil D. Andrus Park near the State Capitol Building, I hang with Lewis and Clark, a monument called The Hospitality of the Nez Perce they share with Chief Joseph, who, as chief of the Nez Perce tribe (located in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington) always sought peace even while the Europeans “settling” his territory broke promises and violated treaties, perpetually chipping away at Joseph’s ancestral homelands and relocating his tribe to uninhabitable reservations hundreds of miles away.
This statue depicts the Nez Perce chief pointing Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in the direction of the Northwest Passage toward the Pacific Ocean, unwitting to the horrors that Lewis & Clark’s mapping expedition would one day mean for all Native Americans.
A reminder that No good deed goes unpunished.