“WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother
to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: what did I
know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment.
What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be
pieces. Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your
daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her
shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s
language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands I watch
her be in multiple musics.” —from WHEREAS
WHEREAS
confronts the coercive language of the United States government in
its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and
tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity
back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics,
prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and
disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative
text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her
predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “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.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new
voice in contemporary literature.