Page 29 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

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

the winter before braving the tall mountains to the west. It is here that Sacajewea's journal begins:

Building Mandan Camp

There is no fever

like the fever of white men building

the sound of trees falling

hissing

the branches of bones snapping/cracking/dying.

Building

they are building their houses.

One day their buildings will devour the sky.

Point of view is possibly more clear-cut in a journal or diary than any other form of writing. One

records in a journal what one sees, but also what one chooses to exclude. What one sees and

excludes is most often determined by one's culture. Sacajewea immediately establishes the

difference: they are white men, unlike her. They build their homes, unlike her people, who are

nomadic. What they see and hear, she also notices, is different. It is apparent to her in their capacity

for violence and in their complete disregard for the pain and destruction they are causing the plants

and animals to suffer. She hears the remaining trees, "gathered shoulder to shoulder / shuddering

loss," but the men do not.

On a day named "Two Suns Dull the Thick Clouds," one can sense Sacajewea watching in the old way,

one keenly observant of the weather, faint changes in the light, and the movement of animals, signs on

which her people, living intimately in nature, were dependent:

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