Page 33 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

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

Lines within brackets are those that are crossed out:

A child stands so close [to fire] his hair [singes] smokes.

If we suspend our disbelief that the journal was found, that it is being translated by someone who

speaks and reads Shoshone, the redactions convey the inability of the translator to bridge the gaps in

language, in time, and in the cultural and world views between contemporary American culture and

that of nineteenth-century American Indians. There might be no words in English for certain objects or

experiences. In some places the words are crossed out until the right one appears, as if the initial

translation weren't successful. In some, the redaction functions as a correction, as in this devastating

explanation of the rape of Indian women: "The white men [mistake] believe / they are desirable."

There are also a few explanatory addendums, placed, as an editor might place them, in brackets, such

as when, after Sacajewea's lovely description, "I must gather / myself / as many," used in preparation for

the coming bad weather, she gives us an image of what that might look like: "[Particles, cottonwood

down in cinder light.]" There is a double sense that these could also be Sacajewea's corrections, given

that she is a translator in her own right, a medium through which the past and future seem to move

fluidly. In either case, the technique works to give us the sense of words and images coming from across

great distances to emerge stuttering, straining for the light, the way we might try to recall the figures in a

dream.

Throughout the journal, Sacajewea sees behind, but she also sees ahead. She sees

Meriwether's suicide, which occurred in 1809, long after the expedition ended. "Meriwether will

lift a musket to his head and feel the spruce-feathered crack of his skull, his cold brain./ Dusk

will haunt the rusty sky. He'll live for days in his last hours. He'll see the dead he has killed." She

has foreseen the building of houses everywhere, the disappearance of the buffalo and the

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