Smithsonian Re-Surveys Lewis and Clark's Route — This Time, Tribal Colleges Run the Cameras

A 220-year-old biodiversity survey gets repeated with trail cameras across 15 states. The structural shift: Indigenous institutions control data collection on their own land, converting oral ecological knowledge into published datasets.

In 1804, Lewis and Clark catalogued western wildlife for Jefferson's political and scientific agenda. The Indigenous nations who had managed those ecosystems for millennia received no credit, and the expedition itself became the opening act of forced removal. Two centuries later, the Smithsonian is retracing that route with motion-triggered trail cameras — and this time, tribal colleges are running the operation on their own land.

The re-survey, funded through the Smithsonian's Our Shared Future semiquincentennial initiative, launched in early 2025 by digitizing and geolocating hundreds of wildlife observations from the original Lewis and Clark journals. By spring 2026, more than 50 research partners across 15 states activated camera arrays along the historic route. Seven tribal colleges signed on, with students serving as paid interns — the only re-survey volunteers to receive stipends, funded by the Smithsonian's Women's Committee. At Standing Rock Sioux reservation, environmental science students at Sitting Bull College installed 16 cameras across the 2.3 million-acre territory. The project was not without friction. Elders voiced concern that outsiders would use the data to locate hunting grounds, and residents recalled past experiences where scientists collected data without including tribal members on resulting studies. "Sometimes, in the past, when we've shared this information, we didn't really have full control over it afterwards," says intern Tamiera Garter. But the students came to see data sovereignty as integral to land sovereignty: "At the end of the day, it will protect our sovereignty," Garter says. The re-survey extends Snapshot USA, a nationwide mammal-monitoring project launched in 2019 that has logged more than 1 million mammal records across all 50 states using camera traps. Lead ecologist Bill McShea modeled it partly on eBird, which has gathered more than 200 billion bird observations since 2002 with over 100 million users. Snapshot USA's persistent gap: the Great Plains, where sparse population means sparse data. The Lewis and Clark re-survey fills exactly that hole, and tribal lands sit squarely in it. The ecological findings already matter. Students at Standing Rock found stark differences between the Grand River and Cannonball River watersheds — two systems on the same reservation. They captured images of typically elusive bobcat and mule deer. Across all partners, the re-survey has produced more than 5.5 million images covering a confirmed 67 species, with AI-assisted identification validated by volunteer scientists. The deeper structural point is about who holds the data. Indigenous tribes manage more land than the National Park Service, and previous studies have shown higher biodiversity on Indigenous-managed acres compared with other entities. "If we look at where the bison are right now, where the good carnivore populations are right now, they're on Indian reservations," McShea says. Yet this stewardship record is oral, not published — invisible to the policy and funding systems that allocate conservation resources. The cameras convert that invisible knowledge into citable datasets controlled by the communities that generated them. This is a small project in dollar terms, but the model — paid Indigenous participation, tribal data ownership, institutional credit for existing stewardship — is the kind of structure that compounds. If it becomes the template for federal conservation partnerships rather than an exception, the leverage is enormous. If it remains a one-off semiquincentennial gesture, the extraction pattern of 1804 reasserts itself in politer form.