Layli Long Soldier
American poet Layli Long Soldier’s work has been celebrated for its experimentation with poetic forms and for its powerful representation of Native experiences and identity. She is best known for her award-winning debut poetry collection, Whereas (2017). In part a response to the U.S. government’s official apology to Native Americans in 2009, Long Soldier’s book addresses past and present injustices against Native people in the United States, including issues of colonization and genocide. Other themes frequently explored in her work are language and motherhood.
Early life
Long Soldier’s mother, Loevia Hockley, was from Idaho. Her father, Daniel Long Soldier, was from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. An enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux (Oceti Sakowin) Tribe, Layli Long Soldier grew up in the Southwest. In 2018 she told Poets & Writers magazine, “I don’t have a single hometown. But I have lived in Santa Fe [New Mexico] the longest and feel most at home [there].” She began writing poetry when she was 7 years old. However, Long Soldier’s mother was a pianist, and Long Soldier learned to play the piano and violin as a child and later the electric guitar and bass. She aspired to be a singer and performed in a band called Hunska when she was in her 20s.
Education, influences, and first book
In 2009 Long Soldier earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. As she told Krista Tippett, host of the podcast On Being, in 2017 she had initially planned on studying music, but because the school did not have a music program and because she “really wanted to go to school” at IAIA, she selected its writing program as “the next best thing.” Discovering her voice as a writer was “not easy,” she explained to Tippett: “A lot of, I would say, the first three, three and a half years, I wrote some really, really, really bad, bad, bad poems, like really dry. It took me a long time.” Additionally, Long Soldier studied in the summer writing program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.
Among her influences, Long Soldier has credited the poet Orlando White (with whom she has a daughter) for her development as a writer, telling Poets & Writers that White introduced her to the work of Canadian poet bpNichol and American poet Aram Saroyan. She also has named Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and Native American writer and activist Zitkala-Sa as influences, explaining that they “speak to me as women artists of mixed heritage who elevated Indigenous art, philosophies, and histories within contemporary considerations of art.” Other sources of inspiration include the work of American avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein and the short stories of Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. In 2013 Long Soldier told Women’s Quarterly Conversation, “When I first read Akutagawa’s work, I felt like he was my brother. I heard him. His poems said to me, The world is not always round, sometimes it’s the steely razor of a prose block.”
In 2010 Long Soldier published the chapbook Chromosomory. She earned a master’s in fine arts from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 2014.
Whereas
Long Soldier began working on the poems that would become her first full-length poetry collection, Whereas, not long after the birth of her daughter in 2006. The book is divided into two parts: “These Being the Concerns” and “Whereas.” The first part features many poems about writing, the language of poetry and of Indigenous peoples, and motherhood, and it ends with “38,” a remarkable protest poem about the 38 Dakota men who were executed in 1862 under the orders of Pres. Abraham Lincoln for their roles in the Sioux Uprising. Using precise, documentary-like language (“You may like to know, I do not consider this a ‘creative piece.’ / I do not regard this as a poem of great imagination or a work of fiction”), Long Soldier lists the facts that are left out of the accepted narratives of U.S. history, such as that the hanging was the largest mass execution in U.S. history and that it took place the day after Christmas (December 26, 1862): “This was the same week that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.”
Later in the poem she recounts the story of a white government trader named Andrew Myrick, who had refused to provide store credit to Dakota people and had reportedly once said, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”
When settlers and traders were killed during the Sioux Uprising, one of the first to be executed by the Dakota was Andrew Myrick.
When Myrick’s body was found,
his mouth was stuffed with grass.
I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem.
“I am a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship, I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.”— Layli Long Soldier, Whereas (2017)
The second half of Whereas was instigated by Long Soldier’s belated discovery that the U.S. government had issued a congressional resolution of apology to Native Americans, signed by Pres. Barack Obama in December 2009. As she told Tippett in 2017, “It was sometime in the spring, I think, of 2010 I heard about it.…And I was personally really surprised that I hadn’t heard about it before. Part of the reason I hadn’t is because it was so quiet, and there really was not a lot of risk taken in how it was delivered.” Indeed, as she notes in the introduction to her series of “Whereas Statements,” at the time of the resolution’s signing there were no tribal leaders present to witness it. Further, it was not read aloud until five months after the signing, when U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback read the apology to five tribal leaders. Yet, as Long Soldier reminds readers, there are more than 560 federally recognized tribes in the United States.
Long Soldier’s “Whereas Statements” is a response to this apology—its “delivery, as well as the language, crafting, and arrangement of the written document.” Using both traditional and experimental forms, such as visual poems in the shape of a hammer or narratives with long blocks of prose, she explores the subjects of grief, identity, history, and language (both Indigenous languages and the language of policies and treaties), and she confronts the U.S. government’s inadequate responses to historical and continuing injustices against Native Americans: “Whereas I could’ve but didn’t broach the subject of ‘genocide’ the absence of this term from the Apology and its rephrasing as ‘conflict’ for example.”
Whereas received widespread praise. In her review for The New York Times, poet Natalie Diaz wrote, “Though the Congressional resolution of apology to Native Americans is void of any gestures signaling sincere repair, ‘Whereas’ ensures that this grief, this absence, will be given presence, be given a body to wonder.” The book was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.
Honors and other career highlights
Among the other honors Long Soldier has received are the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s National Artist Fellowship (2015), a Lannan literary fellowship (2015), and a Whiting Award for poetry (2016). Her participatory installation Whereas We Respond was featured on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 2012. In addition, Long Soldier has taught at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona, and served as a mentor in the IAIA’s graduate-level creative writing program.