Page 23 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015
P. 23
Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION
from Ghost Dance: The Poetics of Loss
(DebraEarling)*
Melissa Kwasny
"And so it was all over," the great visionary Black Elk says in his account of the Wounded Knee
Massacre of 1890. "I did not know then how much was ended."1 Wounded Knee, where the United
States Seventh Cavalry killed 150 noncombatant Sioux men, women and children, was, of course, not
the only massacre in the four hundred year history of the white-Indian wars. It was only one of the last
in the legacy of violent conquest and attempted genocide, both physical and cultural, that haunts any
real understanding of what it means to be an American. As historian Patricia Nelson Limerick writes, in
an essay entitled "Haunted America," it is the foundation that "our presence on this continent rests
on."2
Every inch of earth, after forty thousand years of occupation, is probably a site haunted by human
violence. "Maybe there are no fields other than battlefields," writes Wislawa Szymborska in her poem
"Reality Demands," "those still remembered, / and those long forgotten, / birch woods and cedar
woods, / snow and sands, iridescent swamps, / and ravines of dark defeat."3 In a profound book, Sweet
Medicine: Sites of Indian Massacres, Battlefields, and Treaties, one which could serve as a metaphor
for Americans' perhaps willfull blindness to this haunting, contemporary photographer Drex Brooks
presents black and white photographs of abandoned fields, ditches, and shopping malls where major
events in the years of the conflicts occurred. Some sites have been paved over for mini malls; the burnt
out stump of the famous council tree at Horse Creek in Nebraska lies at the roadless edge of a
cornfield; a worn footpath winds through debris next to a highway. A bus driver smokes a cigarette in
the parking lot at Sand Creek. The effect is devastating. The lack of monuments, plaques, or any sign
of public recognition in some of these places bears witness to a total disregard for what happened, as
Page 21 of 218
