Content area
Full Text
OMAHA -- The first day Gerard Baker put on a park ranger uniform, he personalized it by stripping the ranger hat band and replacing the uniform belt buckle with an Indian-beaded one.
After pulling his hair back into a short ponytail, the 6-foot-6 - - with his boots on -- Mandan/Hidatsa went to meet his new boss.
"I thought his head was going to spin around," Baker recalled. "That was my introduction to the Park Service."
That was more than two decades ago.
Baker has risen through the ranks of the National Park Service, where his first seasonal job included cleaning toilets, fixing barbed-wire fences, mowing lawns and riding horses through the back country of North Dakota's Badlands. These days, he can be found in long, gray-streaked braids, wearing a tie, pressed shirt and sports jacket as he sits in a Park Service Midwest regional office in Omaha.
Although he said he favors the ranger uniform, Baker, 46, isn't complaining about his new job as Park Service superintendent of Corps of Discovery II, a project that puts him at the government's helm of the biggest commemorations in U.S. history -- the 2003-2006 Lewis and Clark bicentennial.
"The National Park Service just made a marvelous decision in hiring Gerard," said David Borlaug, president of the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council. "He has a great capacity for bridging cultures, and he really has a knack for getting Native Americans and white interests to the table and talking."
Said Dayton Duncan, an author who co-produced a Lewis and Clark television documentary with historian Ken Burns: "He's about as perfect a choice for that job that could have been found. I can't think of anyone who would be better suited."
As Corps II superintendent, Baker's overall mission is to create a multi-media education center on wheels that will follow the trail of the original 1803-1806 Corps of Discovery. His job entails bringing the stories of 58 tribes, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the American public and the world. The exhibit will be taken to 200 cities and small towns across America for three years.
The exhibit will recount Lewis and Clark's Homeric 8,000-mile, 800-day journey that took them the entire length of the Missouri River to...