Page 27 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

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

form and a forum for Earling to attempt the rescue and recovery of this missing person
and missing

point of view, as well as to powerfully investigate the nature of loss itself.

A journal is a record of a journey, whether temporal or geographic. It typically consists of daily

observations, usually of weather, transactions, and major events, sometimes listing items one has

seen or bought or eaten. Unlike the famous and public journals of Lewis and Clark's, few women have

been assigned them. As wife, mother, and Indian, Sacajewea had no voice in the journey, or the

journals. Her point of view was something no one would expect existed, as the point of view of the fox

or the deer would not exist, nor was it something anyone in the party would seem curious about. Yet,

like most captive outsiders, one can imagine her observing carefully, stealthily. To imagine that the

speechless finally have a voice, albeit a secret one, has always both frightened and intrigued us. It is

our intrigue with hermetic histories, suicide notes, and the psychics who claim they can talk to animals,

and with anything that has been irrevocably lost. Her journals, like the diaries kept by many pioneer

women—who recorded births and deaths, the lack of food and the crazy-making prairie winds—might

serve as a shadow enterprise to official histories, counterpart to the famous journals of Lewis and

Clark, their viewpoint conditioned by their western education, their way of seeing Indian and white

alike, their convenient assumption that they are civilized and the people they meet are savages. Who

else but Sacajewea could tell us?

Earling maintains the conventions of the journal: each day is named, events are recorded, the voice is

first-person but not necessarily personal. The speaker is observant, alone, watching others. She notes

the weather. But there are crucial differences in Sacajewea's version, ones that serve to distinguish and

highlight the vast gulf between world views, and, knowing as we do how the story turns out, illustrate the

profound nature of what has been lost.

Day of the Aching Moon in the Year of Their Lord

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