Page 30 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

In the waking hour when all animals turn the color of dust,

the hour of first feeding

a faint glimmer of light at the edge of [branding,] [blunt,] blue snow calls.

My blood returns stinging.

One imagines her alone, in her world, not the world of the whites, no one there but herself and her

baby, who has woken her to feed, just as the animals have awoken to feed outside. It is no longer six

a.m. but the "waking hour," pre-dawn, when animals are colorless. For Lewis and Clark, this hour

changes throughout the year, but she is precise in her language. This hour does not change.

Sacajewea ushers us into a different world, one that is timeless. Cheyenne historian Linwood Tall Bull

writes that Indians are experts at body language because of their many centuries of watching animals.8

Sacajewea hears the prairie dog trapped, crying in its specimen cage. She feels the other animals

hiding in their response to hearing it. At dawn, in winter, her sense of her own blood "returns stinging."

She uses her own body's response, in turn, to make her decisions:

I must gather

myself as many

[Particles, cottonwood down in cinder light].

My spirit shivers over the river.

Her extreme attention provokes a response, which results in her own set of instructions. Carried

further, it becomes an uncanny act of prophesy: "We will leave this place soon," she concludes. It is

a resonant world Sacajewea lives in, one in which all beings she encounters speak and listen to each

other, a way of being that ecological studies with their emphasis on the importance of biodiversity