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prairie. "They can only take so much," she writes in a revolving and revelatory sequence of

syntax. "Only they can take so much. / They can only take so much." The lines move through

connotations of hope that the whites will not take everything, to the realization that they are

intent on just that, to a sense that there is still something left that they will never be able to take,

or a last meaning, that of a possible curse, as in they won't be able to take what will happen to

them.

If we have vanquished the lost and the dead from our perimeters of the self, we ignore them at our peril.

The world, as Sacajewea writes in her journal, is dangerous with spirits of the past. Their voices are still

here, as are their images, if one could see them. In 1855, the Duwamish chief, Chief Seattle, famous to

white people for a benign speech about caring for the earth, also gave a speech that said, "And when the

last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the

white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children

think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the

pathless woods, they will not be alone. . . At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent

and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love

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this beautiful land."`This is the prophesy Sacajewea leaves us with. "Someone is moving. / Beyond the

clearing," she writes. It is a gift that Earling gives us, that she has seen them, too.

Footnotes

*Adapted from “Ghost Dance: The Poetics of Loss,” first published in The American Poetry Review, March/April 2015

1 Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, p. 276.

2 Limerick,PatriciaNelson."HauntedAmerica,"inSweetMedicine:SitesofIndianMassacres,

Battlefields, and Treaties. Drex Brooks. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995 [no page].
3 Szymborska, Wislawa. View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems. New York: Mariner Books, 1995, p.184.
4 Solnit, Rebecca. Berkeley: University of California
Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics.
Press, 2007, p. 355.
5 We, the Northern Cheyenne People: Our Land, Our History, Our Culture. Lame Deer: Chief Dull Knife College,

2008. p. 41.
6 Earling, Debra. the Lost Journals of Sacajewea. Photo-interventions by Peter Rutledge Koch. Berkeley: Editions

Koch, 2009.
7 Harjo, Joy and Tanaya Winder. Soul Talk, Song Language: Conversations with Joy Harjo. Middletown, CT:

Wesleyan University Press, 2011, p. 13.
8 Tall Bull, Linwood. Indian Education for All Conference. Montana Office of Public Instruction. Helena, Montana,