Conclusion: The Afterlives of the Black Hawk War

We remember most vividly the things we have forgotten. We no longer know their names, but they never leave us, these tireless ghosts, these palinopsia, these echoes. They float across the surface of our eyes. They busy themselves in dreams. The image of the Black Hawk War presses itself against the eye and leaves a stain, a shimmering along surfaces, light refracted in the deeps. We tell the story of the Black Hawk War so we might forget the way it bends the light, the penumbra of light and dark, a space of uncertainty, the place where the world and