Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
*
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 Statements"
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.
