Page 75 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

unjustly killed need most, the company of loved ones. Camping on the bones is not proof of a greater

humanity, Bird Rose insists, but is an action that repairs what was violently torn asunder in the matrix

that is country, the place where one is born and dies in the company of others. She explains, “If people

decided to cease to tell the stories of what

happened, the implication could be that the

deaths and the pain no longer matter” (57).

Wrongful death doesn’t want to be

memorialized. It wants to be kept company

with.

To be called into relationship

In her most recent book Wild Dog Dreaming

(2011), Deborah Bird Rose writes about what it

takes to call us humans into relationship with

our Earth’s others. She says that we must

locate “an ethical call-­‐and-­‐response within the

living reality of life” (29, emphasis mine) rather
It’s hard to look at a photo like this without feeling rude

than in the abstract spaces of the mind, or of a and voyeuristic. In Wild Dog Dreaming, Bird Rose

heart that has been made abstract by describes how she comes to a tree along a road on which

narcissism.
dead Dingos – all poisoned – are hung like Christmas

ornaments. After the initial shock and horror – “God,

where are you here?” she hears herself cry out – she just
This has been my point so far: An emotional
looks, reaching beyond feelings of shame and guilt.
witnessing of the suffering of others can be as

Something transforms in her, beyond the horror and the
ineffective as thought no matter how intense or

anguish. She takes each animal in, an honoring. There is
sincere the felt emotion. Unless I am honestly
something respectful in looking this way. We don't know

present with what has transpired – roads that
how to do it. Certainly don't know how to sit with death

and especially not with gruesome death in quiet dignity.
cut through the tracks of others without respect

or consideration -­‐ I will not know how to

respond in kind, in a way that repairs what has been breached. Love, in Deborah Bird Rose’s account,

is what sparks in us the ability to respond in kind to the presence and needs of others. Love is what

awakens us to the life-­‐worthiness of others in death and in life and calls us into right relationship with

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