Whereas Quotes

“How do I language a collision arrived at through separation?”
― Layli Long Soldier, Whereas

“My eyes left me, my soldiers, my two scouts to the unseen. And because language is the immaterial I never could speak about the missing so perhaps I cried for the invisible, what I could not see, doubly. What is it to wish for the absence of nothing?”
― Layli Long Soldier, Whereas

“The Dakota 38 refers to thirty-eight Dakota men who were executed by hanging, under orders from President Abraham Lincoln. To date, this is the largest “legal” mass execution in US history. The hanging took place on December 26, 1862—the day after Christmas. This was the same week that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
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These amended and broken treaties are often referred to as the Minnesota Treaties. The word Minnesota comes from mni, which means water; and sota, which means turbid. Synonyms for turbid include muddy, unclear, cloudy, confused, and smoky. Everything is in the language we use.
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Without money, store credit, or rights to hunt beyond their ten-mile tract of land, Dakota people began to starve. The Dakota people were starving. The Dakota people starved. In the preceding sentence, the word “starved” does not need italics for emphasis.
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Dakota warriors organized, struck out, and killed settlers and traders. This revolt is called the Sioux Uprising. Eventually, the US Cavalry came to Mnisota to confront the Uprising. More than one thousand Dakota people were sent to prison. As already mentioned,“Real” poems do not “really” require words.
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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

“There was no text. “Real” poems do not “really” require words. I”
― Layli Long Soldier, Whereas

“WHEREAS I sipped winter water cold-steeped in pine needles, I could taste it for days afterward, I taste it now. When I woke alone gray curtains burned in sunrise and down my throat to the pit, a tincture of those green needles changed me. When should I recount detail, when’s it too much?”
― Layli Long Soldier, Whereas

“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 Dine, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands I watch her be in multiple musics.

At a ceremony to honor the Diné Nation’s first poet laureate, a speaker explains that each People has been given their own language to reach with. I understand reaching as active, a motion.

It’s here we roll along the pavement into hills of conversation we share a ride we share a country but live in alternate nations and here I must tell them what they don’t know or, should I?

Well you know Native people as in tribes as in people living over there are people with their own nations each with its own government and flag they rise to their own national songs and sing in their own languages, even. And by there I mean here all around us I remind them.”
― Layli Long Soldier, Whereas

“grass chorus
moves
shhhhh
through half-propped
windows I swallow
grass scent
the solstice makes a mind wide
makes it oceanic blue a field
in crests swirling gyres
the moving surface
fastened in June light here
I’m certain
that certain kinds of talk only = pain
excusing myself I paddle deep
in high grass waves I’m safer
outdoors than in /
in those heady grasses the mouth loosens confesses:
I don’t trust nobody but the land I said”
― Layli Long Soldier, Whereas

“But I failed
to begin there,
with this expanse.
Much as I failed to start
with the great point in question.
There in muscle in high
inner flight always
in the plunge we fear
for the falling,
we buckle to wonder:
What man is expendable?”
― Layli Long Soldier, Whereas