Page 19 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

The next morning my mother phoned to ask me if I had heard the news. Apparently the

Smithsonian had announced the return of a sacred fox to its rightful place and people.

The sacred fox had been removed from its traditional homeland by Lewis & Clark over

two hundred years ago. I cannot remember the tribe but when I hung up the phone I

picked up the notepad and was stunned by what I had written. An odd coincidence? I am

not sure. But the story of Sacagawea is so powerful, it haunts me.

I see Sacagawea as a very young woman, so young we would consider her a child in

this day and age. There is dispute about who she was, her name, her origin, but the fact

that she was a traditional native woman has never been disputed. She knew the sacred

ways, the old ways and when I think of her, I also think of all the native women who have

disappeared in recent years. Sacagawea is powerful because she refuses to disappear.

Her knowledge of the old ways is a lifeline to memory, a light that continues to shine.

She continues to be reinvented, revised, re-envisioned.

After reading the journals I was struck by the references to the ferocity of the time.

Women were strapped with a hundred pounds of buffalo to carry to the corp in deepest

snow. Women had to attend to the small pox sick, the dead and dying. In writing The

Lost Journals of Sacajewea I tried to capture, perhaps illuminate, native women’s

longstanding struggle and desire for freedom.

Because her name is also in dispute I wrote her name phonetically--the way I remember

it pronounced as a child hoping perhaps people would once again feel comfortable

talking about her. The revisionist thinking in the pronunciation of her name--even if

correct--is another lens that removes us from her story. When people become

uncomfortable attempting to pronounce her name, they become silent, and little by little

the story becomes lost to us. Remember how often you used to hear of her. Now I have

people correcting my pronunciation and insisting on a glottal stop—but how can that

be—when the Lemhi Shoshone still call her Sacagawea? I fear it is another way to make

native women disappear.

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