Page 32 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

One harsh winter day, the kind of weather when "the weak [buffalo] calves fall to attendant

wolves," she begins a horrifying story of a woman, burdened with buffalo hides on her back, falling

prey to the cold and then being devoured by wolves. "No one speaks about the woman / dying in

the frail rising of a killing day," she writes. Lewis and Clark are out hunting. Again, it isn't clear

whether the thought of wolves has jogged her memory of this story of a woman's sad fate, whether

she is witnessing it, or if she has seen a ghost. Sacajewea tell us that, though the woman is dead,

she sees her still: "Her rigid spine /sparkles in the steam of river light. /Her eyes glitter at the

swooping birds." Her death is embedded in the land she passed from. But, there is something

more. Just as Lewis and Clark can't hear the cries of the animals, or see the dead lying around

them, they are also incapable of seeing the suffering wrought upon Indian women, a blindness

they share, she implies, with Indian men. "The white men don't see the wives who are hidden / in

the lodges at the edges of lost," she writes. This is hardly a romanticized depiction of pre-contact

life. Women are sent by their men to trade buffalo meat "for one small favor from the white men."

Women who are poor, unbeautiful, "unfortunate," hump-backed and broken, those with small pox,

or dying children, are outside everyone's range of vision, she complains. "They are not the

beautiful women / men fight over." She says, "We have passed the graves of a thousand women

in a single day."

John Berger, in "Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead," claims that the dead and the alive exist

as a whole together: "The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead. In this core are

the dimensions of time and space. What surrounds the core is timelessness." He continues: "Between

the core and its surroundings there are exchanges, which are not usually clear. All religions have been

concerned with making them clearer."10 When there is any kind of transmission, from core to periphery

or periphery to core, something is invariably lost in the translation. One senses this as mystery and feels

it in all that Sacajewea doesn't explain. We sense it also in the technique Earling uses of redaction.