Page 31 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

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

seek to explain but which might also be described as a visionary one.

The "journal" does not cover the entire two years of the expedition. It begins with the

building of the camp at Mandan and ends with Sacajewea's vision of the buffalo gone: "Buffalo haunt the

sky." One speculates that pages or volumes might have been lost or damaged by weather like the

fragments of Sappho's. Or perhaps her work was interrupted or she wrote sporadically, not daily.

Perhaps she lost heart. Earling doesn't say. It is clear, though, that Sacajewea, and hence her people,

had a different sense of time. There are entries which speak vividly of events in the past: the rage of a

stampeding buffalo herd rampaging a village, for instance:

Sometimes the ground rolls and the great houses shake.

Tassels of corn rain pollen. For on the shelf of the earth the buffalo riot.

Skulls of their hooves

dent/mark/cut

the land.

Often, one doesn't know whether she is recounting an experience, recalling a memory, or repeating a

story she was told, or if, in passing through a place, she is seeing what occurred there in the past. "For

me, memory isn't situated in the past, but moves about freely," Harjo writes. "We can catch hold of it.

And some of it is born within us, probably located somewhere in that DNA spiral."9

Sacajewea knows that her stories are different. "This is the story Lewis and Clark won't be writing

down," she says. Lewis and Clark couldn't possibly tell her story of the buffalo trampling the village

because it contains all those things—the destruction of the village of the past, her exhilaration at the

hunts of her youth, the buffalos' future obliteration, even their haunting us now—as her experience of

time does.

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