Page 24 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

well as to the people involved.

Rebecca Solnit, in her book Storming the Gates of Paradise, writes, "Such erasure is the

foundation of the amnesiac landscape that is the United States. Because the United States is in

many ways a country without a past, it seems, at first imagining, to be a country without ruins. But

it is rich in ruins, though not always as imagined, for it is without a past only in the sense that it

does not own its past, or own up to it. It does not remember officially and in its media and

mainstream, though many subsets of Americans remember passionately.”4 One of the paradoxes

of living in the West is that the palimpsest is more visible. Many white people grew up on farms

bought when Indian country was carved into allotments, an ingenious method of forcing poverty-

stricken Indians to sell their lands. Many people live in reservation border towns, and there is

much inter-marriage. But more importantly, I think, is that one actually knows people who have

been directly involved, whose grandparents or great grandparents survived or didn't survive Sand

Creek, whose ancestors starved waiting for food at Fort Robinson, whose mother or father was

kidnapped while camping and sent far from his family to boarding schools. To lose one's

language, loved ones, culture, land, and religion is, according to Richard E. Littlebear, to

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"dislodge[d] us from the 'very ground of coherence." He says, "It forced us out of our minds."

Those who have so recently lost languages, landscapes, ancestors, even the remains of their

ancestors, often in the most horrendous ways possible, have, in effect, lost a world. Those who have

survived with great strength and intelligence to inhabit a nation given over to values and rapaciousness

contrary to their closest spiritual beliefs—these are people who have something to say to all of us. How

to write the enormity of such loss? And just importantly, how to move forward afterwards? We are now

confronting an equally drastic apocalypse: the disappearance of coasts and icecaps, the extinction of

other species at a rate of at least 10,000 a year, the warming of the planet, the frequency of destructive

storms. War, and its atrocities, seems to be the matter of the day. Scientists speak now of a sixth