Page 25 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

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

extinction. Our world is going to change, is changing, might disappear, and we might disappear with it,

as we seem unable to stop the relentless and destructive direction we are heading.

American Indian writing, particularly poetry, seems increasingly crucial to me, as an expression of

our deeply troubled history, and as one which has much to say about grief and cultural survival.

And there is something else. In the photographs in Sweet Medicine of the massacre site though

they may be obscured, there is, in each of them, an uncanny sense of human presence. As if

they were ghosted: as if something remained to stare back at us. The ability to see past what

most of us are taught to see is one definition of the visionary. The visionary poems in the most

recent book of American Indian author Debra Magpie Earling, a member of the Confederated

Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation, provides answers to the

questions I have proposed: how to meet the challenge of writing the enormity of loss, whether

cultural, environmental, or personal, and how writing can provide us with visionary paths to go forward.

Proposed as a counter response to Montana's bicentennial celebration of the Lewis and Clark

expedition of 1804-1806, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is a collaboration between fine printmaker

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Peter Rudledge Koch and Salish poet and novelist Debra Earling.Originally published in a limited

edition, bound with buffalo hide and trimmed with trade beads, the "photo adaptations" and Earling's

book- length poem are a revelatory—one is tempted to say clairvoyant—channeling of the voice not

only of a woman but a people, not only a people but a distant, almost inaccessible vision. The

expedition, charged by President Thomas Jefferson with finding a water route from the Mississippi

west to the Pacific Ocean, notably "for purposes of commerce," is one of the most romanticized

myths of the American West and its "discovery." The flood of white settlers, railroad men, buffalo

hunters, fur traders, and the military campaigns it ushered in accelerated the end of a way of life for

millions of indigenous people. In fact, as Cheyenne visual artist Bentley Spang notes, Native

Americans are still struggling with their "Recovery from Discovery."

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