Layli Long Soldier’s We, from Graywolf Press, is another devastatingly good addition to her broad repertoire of art and writing. The 195-page collection includes poems, essays, images, constellations, and art installations brought to the page. Long Soldier weaves concerns of history and how Indigenous communities survive the trauma of boarding schools, genocide, and betrayal. She braids the personal and communal in order to create wide echoes that develop a pattern across the reading experience, which builds clear thematic texture that is rare to see in poetry. We is a standout amongst this year’s releases. It will break your heart. It will teach you. You will be changed.
Long Soldier begins from the personal, with long, sprawling sentences that mimic spoken language. The use of I, from start to finish, helps the reader feel a part of the experience. By continually engaging with her ancestors–instead of a static, backwards-facing archive– the poet is contributing to a living, breathing tradition for the generations that will follow. A collective memory, of sorts. With a humming energy, she evaluates and re-evaluates, considers and reconsiders, across forms and modes, the way healing must rise from the long aftermath of atrocities. Long Soldier finds hope through language, in her family, in the ancestors she continually returns to through her making–her writing and art, a hybridity necessitated by received forms’ inadequacy to contain what must be expressed. We ought to be taught in every classroom, because it contains a history that belongs to all of us. It is one we must grapple with and understand if we ever hope to create a more unified and equitable nation.
In the section, NOW, YOU WILL LISTEN, the book comes to life in a way that frames the rest of the collection. What begins as rumination on her daughter’s history midterm–“…searching for the words to address the distasteful American lens of calling other cultures’ foods “bizarre”–quickly digs into an attention to how Indigenous history has been minimized by language in the classroom (25). Community is what allows her to help her daughter and her daughter’s classmates reclaim a sense of dignity. After drawing attention to the offensive nature of the assignment, Long Soldier’s daughter focuses on Diné blue corn mush and Hopi Piki bread for her project. The poet points out that these two foods are made of the same ingredients, but result in “different forms” (25). The concerns of Long Soldier’s essay shift to the systemic erasure of a people via state-funded boarding schools, leaders forced to sign treaties written in unfamiliar languages, and, through it all, the necessity for song: a way of honoring the dead. By the end of the essay, Long Soldier and her daughter turn to making as a way to move hurt out of the body, ultimately creating the dress that adorns the book’s cover. This is culture in action; the hands of everyone who came before moving through the hands of this mother and daughter.
As the book continues, we see how naming trauma can subdue its power. Long Soldier brings to the fore 215 bodies of First Nations children found buried on the site of a boarding school in Canada. Bear with me. The Public Service Alliance of Canada estimates around 10,000 children in unmarked graves in Canada alone. So how many more in the US? We must acknowledge the systemic erasure–this genocide carried out by US and Canadian citizens alike. She goes on to note the ways this sort of historical trauma collects in the body and points readers towards elders, like Faith Spotted Eagle, who explain that:
It’s important that when we talk about this, it is not to impart a sense of guilt.
It’s to impart a sense of freedom from denial.
When you look at that trauma response, the Native people’s objective is to heal.
The non-Native people’s objective is to come out of denial. (30)
Long Soldier’s engagement with her daughter and other Native youth at the start of the book harmonizes with the stories passed down by ancestors and elders. In other words, the broader why of the book is that all of us, Native and non-Native alike, need to find common ground so that the cultures oppressed by American imperialism can continue to heal. Long Soldier is part of a wider legacy of artists and advocates doing crucial work to educate, to ensure that knowledge of what was is not forever lost. To that end, Long Soldier draws extensively from writer-activist Zitkála-Šá in various sections of the book, drawing from her legacy in order to show the way things remain largely unchanged.
But things are beginning to change in small, mighty ways. Today, across the Navajo Nation, a number of schools operate fully in Diné, a way to ensure the language and culture are not lost. Long Soldier repeatedly points toward resources–historic documents and accounts–so that healing can continue, and so that we can cast off any remaining denial in favor of a better, more unified future.
The way the poems in the middle sections (especially Obligations, A Line Through Grief, Mosquitos, and Constellations) use found material (recorded conversations, answers from the public to questions about grief, Zitkála-Šá’s short story “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman”, and the names of tribal leaders who signed treaties with Xs) radically alters what poetry makes possible. The visual forms serve as both poem and art installation–much like the Diné blue corn mush and Hopi Piki bread mentioned earlier–allowing thematic concerns to be considered from various angles and read multiple times. The texture that these sections bring to the book is a large part of what makes it a standout amongst this year’s releases. The hybridity is exhilarating. That Long Soldier’s making refuses much of what the contemporary poetry industry considers standard gives allowance to young writers to cast off prescriptive creation in favor of transformative creation.
I found the final section of the collection, (K)nots and Footnotes, to be the most striking of all. The piece, half of which is footnotes in red ink, deals with a story Long Soldier’s father told her of a man he knew named Wasú Mazá (Iron Hail), who was a teenager during the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1874. The piece follows her exploration through Wasú Mazá’s history, as it concerns the wider theft and swindling of land from the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ peoples. This essay synthesizes the book’s central concerns, engaging in tradition and collective memory. The (k)not in this section frays and unweaves. When we learn about Iron Hail watching his entire family massacred on December 29th, 1890, Long Soldier writes, “I cannot imagine surviving that kind of personal loss, as Iron Hail did in the following days, months, years. But I don’t have to imagine what surviving that kind of loss is like for our community here and now” (158). She goes on to detail how one of the fundamental differences between the treaties tribal leaders in North America were forced to sign and those the Māori signed with Great Britain is the fact that the Māori were provided translations into their own language before signing:
One could argue that most Native languages in the US, until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were oral languages with no formal orthographies or dictionaries. It could be reasoned, then, this is why written and signed translations of our treaties do (k)not exist… Though it may seem obvious, it’s helpful to pause and thoughtfully ask, what do X’s mean when they are used as signatures? (164).
Ultimately, it is this making, via language in Long Soldier’s case, that allows her to wrestle with the injustices of history and to leave a map for those who follow. “There are questions that cannot be answered within one lifetime… the answer is (k)not spoken. It is lived, fought for, and demonstrated through action,” Long Soldier writes (168). The impacts of atrocities like genocide are epigenetically hardcoded into survivors’ DNA, passed down from generation to generation. However, it is this making that allows subsequent generations to put down the burdens of the past and heal. This too is part of the living tradition Long Soldier is modeling.
In We, readers are reminded again and again that “The past has not passed, it’s fundamentally present” and that we––Natives and non-Natives alike––hold a collective responsibility to create a future where healing is possible, where denial is footnoted into irrelevance, where the future honors a past that could’ve been (31). This book gives me hope in my own making, in my own craft. It is a rare thing to walk away from a book feeling changed. Layli Long Soldier “continually return[s] to the foundation of language; the multiplicity in definitions–denotation, connotation, etymology, interpretation, and translation; how a word can turn an ordinary line into an extraordinary marvel” (162). And so, we too must have the courage to interrogate the horrors of the past, no matter how small or difficult. We must make a better world for all of us. Buy a copy of We wherever you can. You won’t regret it.
