Xu Li Interviews Layli Long Soldier

Layli Long Soldier is the author of Whereas. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

From Associate Editor Xu Li: In the following interview, Layli Long Soldier discusses her work in Whereas as well as her community-based writing work in relation to supporting families of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Peoples. To support families in this form of community-based care, HFR asks readers to consider redistributing funds to the campaign organized by Roxanne White, founder of MMIWP Families, which raises both awareness and funds to directly support families of MMIP. Roxanne White writes, “Missing and Murdered Indigenous People and Families is a grassroots family, survivor-led collective. Our work is not chosen, it is the result of our loved ones going missing, being murdered, being exploited, trafficked, domestically abused, sexually assaulted, and systematically sexualized and oppressed. The reality for us was that we had no resources or services to aid us in the pursuit of visibility and justice for our sisters, ourselves, and loved ones.” The link for sharing resources and supporting is here.

XL: In recent days, as you know, there’s been the IDF’s ongoing state-sanctioned bombing and shelling of Gaza, this acceleration of ethnic cleansing that’s taking place in Palestine. It’s been heartbreaking to witness, but doubly troubling to witness the media coverage of it and the language that’s used to describe or obscure what’s happening. I’ve been returning to the idea of how language can hide power dynamics, make abstract violences. I’m also thinking about a quote that poet Solmaz Sharif has shared on the role of the poet to “be the caretaker of language, to make sure language stays alive, a democratic medium.” This is all to say, I really couldn’t help but think of your work in this moment, especially. One of the things I love most about Whereas and your more recent writing is your care, your tending towards language—this aliveness, which I find an act of resistance against the way language can fail. I’m thinking of how you often break language clean open—words like “whereas,” “opaque,” even the concept of a comma—to gesture towards something just beyond language, and sometimes something a bit more luminous. I’m wondering, as a way to start, if you could speak to how you’re returning to language in the way that you often do and why that kind of work is important to you?

Layli Long Soldier: I think that there are a few concerns that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. And as you said, there are different kinds of work I’m doing. There’s more recent work I’m doing with murdered and missing Indigenous Peoples, and there’s Whereas—and there are connections there, but there are certainly different ways I’m thinking about language. So what you just talked about a lot, in the political world, there’s a way in which language is used through policy and legalese that is a whole other realm, and it is almost a foreign language because, as I learned with my work with Whereas, even the very word “whereas” carries a particular meaning and power when it’s found in a governmental document as opposed to the way we would use it in conversational ways—as a conversational return. That in itself is a very tricky kind of work, it takes time, and it takes research, and patience as a writer, because we are entrusted with that care as writers, as poets. Readers do expect us to do that work, right? So, that’s one kind of responsibility.

And I have to say that the responsibility to unravel legalese or governmental language is actually not something I always feel equipped to do, but I do my best—that’s all I can say as a poet, as an artist: I do my best—but there’s still always a little question mark above all of that language, every word that’s used in our policy in these governmental documents. Above every term there’s a question mark—okay, how are they using this, to whose advantage, what is the context, what is the history of all this language—and it’s very hard to unravel. I often feel like I need people’s patience and forgiveness as well. I’ll do my best, but it’s still a world that I walk in very carefully.

XL: I’m curious about this—maybe specifically just talking about the word “whereas”—and the kind of research that was required to write a series about that word. What did that research or care look like while you were composing the piece?

LLS: The work I did to respond to that national apology to Native Americans is a good example. So part of the work I did as I was writing my response, I started researching other apologies, other national apologies around the world and here in the U.S. So certainly, the national apology to Native people was not the first apology that the U.S. government has issued.

One of the apologies that was really interesting to me was a Congressional apology made during Clinton’s administration to the Native Hawaiian people, where they basically outlined how that land was taken from the Hawaiian queen—and it is devastating. It’s a devastating document to read. All of the “whereas” statements in that apology outlined everything step by step. I was shocked but not surprised, as they say, right? Then I read further. I read some articles about the aftermath of that apology. Please forgive me if I get some of the details wrong because it’s been a few years since I did that research. What I remember is that a few years down the road, there were some things that came into question and were taken to court that had to do with land rights and agreements between Native Hawaiian people and the U.S. government. The Native Hawaiians took this apology into court as part to substantiate their claim. The court ruled, of course, in their own favor. I’m laughing and crying at the same time—it’s expected. What they ruled was that anything contained within a “whereas” statement, they could not be liable for—it could not be used in court to substantiate a claim. It really, in essence, absolved them of any responsibility. If you wanted to be really sort of skeptical about this process, you could almost turn things on their head and say, well, that enables the government to basically state anything they want to in a “whereas” statement and not be liable for it.  

So, let’s just put it in a silly example. If I wanted to issue an apology—let’s pretend I’m the U.S. government—I could say to you, “whereas I stole your car last night, whereas I set it on fire at three in the morning, whereas I also stole your dog”—it’s silly, right? I could finish this whole list of whereas statements and then issue an apology to you for it, and I would be exempt from anything within those whereas statements. You could almost say this could be a pre-emptive measure as well. To say, we will issue this apology so that we not are not legally bound to those wrongdoings anymore.

I can’t read into things, and I can’t say that’s why apologies are issued. I fear becoming too jaded, but my point is really, after reading all of these things, I’ve realized how much power there is in just that word “whereas” and when it begins as a statement within one of these congressional documents—it’s a lot of power in just that one word. It’s a whole other world, a whole other language, almost.

It’s not easy to unravel that, and I actually say that—I write that in the poem “38” in Whereas trying to unravel and look at this trail of treaties, for example. Even treaties within my own tribe—where we had early treaties that were then a few years later, new treaties were formed—and it was very difficult to follow the changes. It was a mess for me, to understand the legal language and the language of policy, and so I wrote that and said, “it’s a muddy switchback trail to follow.” But I know I’m not the only one on this trail trying to decipher all that’s put in front of us. It’s difficult.

XL: I’d love shift to talk a bit more about your work with ASU where you were invited by the school to write new work in response to issues surrounding missing and murdered Indigenous Peoples in order to bring visibility to this violence which is often erased in the media. First, I just want to thank you for such a powerful and incredibly graceful reading back in March and your work with the activists and community organizers to make that event possible. I wanted to ask, though, about how you approached this new project. Agnes Woodward, one of the organizers at the event, mentioned that in this activism work, the missing persons’ families and their voices are always included—there’s that families first aspect—and I know that was something that you also held close and considered while writing this series. Agnes also mentioned that “we’re used to a lot of sensationalization and harmful coverage of family members when this issue is covered by the media.” I was curious to hear how you navigated centering care in this particular project. 

LLS: Thank you for that question. That leads me to the other side of the coin. Thinking about the language of policy is one kind of responsibility that I have to manage sometimes, but also now with missing and murdered Indigenous Peoples, it is a lot of emotional care to be mindful of the language I’m using. First of all, I wanted to participate and engage in this work, like all of the other community people, to create awareness, but at the same time, first and foremost, I was aware that some of the readers or listeners would be survivors or family members, and so I did not want to make work that would hurt or retraumatize our loved ones. There’s a very delicate balance there, of sort of creating awareness, but making the work emotionally manageable—both for me as a writer and for our loved ones who may be listening or reading.

I’ll give you an example. After the event, I saw a Facebook post from someone who was watching the event, and this person was a survivor. I saw that they said they had mixed feelings, and I’m okay with seeing and hearing that kind of feedback. It’s important to me. Because it was another sign, a signal to me that to engage in this work, you are engaging in very difficult emotional territory—great loss, great trauma, and pain. And it’s almost scary. If I can be very honest, as a writer or an artist, it’s scary for me to engage in that. It is a great responsibility. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I’m very aware and trying to be very careful with how I approach things.

We can talk about approach as well. It took months for me to get to the place that I did with the poems that I read in that event. I tried—I want to say—four or five good, healthy attempts at writing poems on this issue. And they were interesting—all of them. While I was writing them, I thought, “yes this is right, this is the way I want to do it,” and they sat for a while and I realized, “okay, it’s not quite hitting the mark.” It it took me time to get where I did. And even, I think, part of it was emotionally getting myself ready and prepared to be able to address it in a way that does service and justice to the issue, but also is again, manageable emotionally. So we want to hit a kind of balance. We want to approach it in a balanced way so that we feel the gravity of it, but we don’t feel pulled under.

XL: That’s such a delicate line, right? And it sounds like it was a process, really. There wasn’t an “I know how to do this right away.”

LLS: It was a process. Finally, the way that helped me, that felt the best way to do it was to start entering the pieces through location. So that’s how I started. I had a few constraints on myself already. For example, one of the constraints is I do not want to name any of our missing people or their families. I want to leave that specificity out of the pieces out of respect and honor for those families, right? However, I don’t want the piece to lose all specificity. That’s important, of course, to the work as well. So again, trying to maintain that balance. One of the ways that I found I could enter the pieces was through location. For example, I have a poem that is dedicated to arroyos, and so I start by unpacking or looking at what an arroyo is, the geology of it, the regions that you find arroyos, and then I began thinking about and questioning why this is a place, a common place, to find our people.

I have another piece dedicated to rivers, specifically the Red River. Although I do not name that river in the poem, I think that it becomes obvious if you read the piece because it’s a river that crosses national borders and so on. But this is also a well-known river where hundreds of women have been found. And so I start by meditating on what a river is, what a river is in the human body—we have rivers of veins in our body, these channels of energy, and also in the land. What does a river represent in our psyche? What does it do for us? And also thinking about movement, and water, and cleansing, and also what a river can hide. What a river carries away from us. And all of that. That felt like a way in which I could explore this subject, think about it in a meditative way. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but to be able to sit with the subject, again without feeling like I’m being pulled under completely, submerged in the loss and the grief.

XL: I really enjoyed that poem—the one of the river, how it moves across those different associations as a way to thread through a way of talking about this grief without, as you say, submerging. The associations allow us to move through it before or if we submerge.

LLS: Yes, exactly.

XL: I was revisiting those pieces you wrote for this project, and all of them hit really hard—but there was a line that stuck with me from the first prose poem that you shared at the event, which I read as an elegy—well, each of them are a kind of elegy, but this one is both an elegy and an ars poetica. The speaker states toward the end, “But you should know, the family does not use missing and murdered Indigenous woman when they post about her. They speak in the burning language of mourning. But when I sit down to remember murdered and missing Indigenous women, when I use these terms, I cannot help but reach to her, my blood, my wé. Can I write anything for you, about you, Sister, that makes a difference?” We talked a little about this, about what a poem can do here that allows for awareness but doesn’t retraumatize. I’m curious if this poem, or this poem series, offers an additional answer to the question?

LLS: In all honesty, I don’t know. But I think that’s what I’ve come to as an artist, because that’s a continual question. For example, did Whereas make a difference in anything? I don’t know. Has it made a difference in policy, in governmental treatment of Native people? Has it made any kind of impact on our lives? I don’t know. But what I do know is that I am a part of a whole—I’m part of a whole community, part of a family, and all of us have different abilities and have different things to offer, right? And if we’re all offering what we have together, hopefully, collectively—together—we can make a difference, right? And so I have to remove my ego and say it’s okay if my poems don’t actually change anything, I’m still going to offer them. I’m still going to make them. Because this is what I have. This is what I have to give—so I’m going to do my best. I think we’re faced with that in so many different ways all the time in life anyway. Like, if I do something for a friend who’s in need—does bringing them muffins actually change their life? Does it? Does it really change the bigger problem? Maybe not, or maybe it does, I don’t know. But I am connected, and I will do whatever I can—offer whatever I have in the moment. In that line that you quoted—“Sister, I don’t know if this poem is going to make a difference”—it’s certainly not going to bring you back. I have a cousin who was found in an abandoned house in Texas, so that piece was inspired by her—and you know, my family does not talk about her in terms of missing and murdered Indigenous women. I haven’t seen one person use that language when we talk about our sister when she was found. She’s just gone, right? But we just have to continue doing our best and contributing whatever we have. So it happens that I have writing skills—so I’ll do something, I’ll do my part. Even if it’s just to ease our hearts, to feel acknowledged, to feel seen, and to feel heard, at least by our own community members and our own families. That’s half of it—half of the healing work is just to feel acknowledged. Even if that’s all poems do, allow for our loved ones to feel seen or heard or listened to, then maybe that’s how they can contribute to the overall good.

XL: I really appreciate your mentioning the idea of connectedness and community. There was one speaker on the “Bring Them Home” panel who said that in part, this work was—aside from awareness-raising—about the conversations that this project allowed and would allow: creating art allowed for people to gather and commune and share stories.

During the workshop that you held in April 2021, you shared “Obligations 2,” and explained it was also a poem born out of a deep collaboration with community. I wanted to lift up this poem because it spoke to me during this grief-filled year of the pandemic, and when I heard you read it in the multiple ways that it could be read, I was really astounded by the spaciousness that it offered. That it invited the reader to engage, participate, collaborate in its meaning making. There’s a tending to grief here that feels so communal to me. Could you speak to how this poem came to be and perhaps even some of the love that’s inherent in grief that comes through in this poem?

LLS: Those star quilt poems are some of my favorite poems to talk about. The star quilt poems come out of a place of true collaboration and love and care in our community.

I collaborated with two other artists—Mary and Clementine Bordeaux. They’re sisters, and they’re also Lakota from South Dakota area, and we did an exhibit together titled Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ, which means roughly “we are all related” or “all my relatives.” Clementine has a background in documentary film, so for this exhibit she interviewed six women in our community who were educators and speakers of our language.  She interviewed them specifically on this phrase, mitákuye oyásʼiŋ—what it is of “relationship,” what it is to be a relative in our culture—the deeper meaning or the wider context of that phrase. She had the most beautiful interviews, and in the process, she shared some of those audio clips with me, and that’s how I made those poems. One of the women was talking about dealing with grief as a community, and how important it is for us as Lakota people to tend to our grief, to take care of it, to work through it in order to be good relatives—we have to heal. We have to heal. Because if we don’t, that grief turns into other things. It turns into anger, sometimes rage, or what have you—all of these things. We have to take the time to care for our grief and help each other heal and so on. So that’s where that came from.

XL: They’re so beautiful. I love what you shared—and, too, it reminds me how poetry also becomes a place to communally process grief—because oftentimes, in the non-poetic world, things move quickly, and we don’t have time to sit with these feelings. I think your poetry, both in this particular poem and the ones that we were speaking of earlier, allows for some of that space, a communion of sorts, to tend to grief.

During the workshop you offered, you discussed some work from your new project, “We,” which, if I’m not mistaken, is partly built out of a number of collaborations. You mentioned creating  an “ethics of relationship” with your collaborators or with your community. Can you explain a bit more on what that means and why that’s important?

LLS: Well of course there’s certain ethics we want to create when we collaborate with others in our community. The first thing is to acknowledge and credit anyone that we’re in conversation with, because none of us are just a floating island making things out of some singular power from God. It’s about connection, right? It’s about others.

In that workshop, what I was focused on was creating an ethics of relationship with your own art. A lot of it is based on seeing your art almost as its own being—your work, your poetry, your art, what you make, as having its own life. And so understanding it in that way, then, it becomes an entity—a being with which you are in relationship. And when we have relationships, we have agreements or understandings with each other. Whoever it may be, mother and father have agreements with children, right, and vice versa. Friends have certain ways of interacting and ways of being there for each other. That was really what I was trying to get at in the workshop with the participants: let’s start thinking about what kind of agreements we make with our art.

There are certain things I have agreed upon with my art that have helped guide me and have helped me make certain decisions. What I want to participate in and what I will not. What I am interested in and what I am not. It’s very important because we live in a capitalistic society that pushes us to produce, produce, produce—and it’ll keep you producing until the world stops spinning, or until we’re completely burned out. So we need that foundation—that contract with ourselves and that contract with our work. Those terms and those ethics.

XL: I remember you mentioning something about not only thinking of the product, but your experience in making that—that process where you are learning, growing, and becoming a better person.

LLS: Exactly. That’s right. That is what is most important to me in my work. That’s my primary agreement with my art. I will give my work 100% of myself, but I also, in return, need to get something out of that work. I need to grow from that work. I need, in some way, to become a richer person and not monetarily of course. I want to learn something more about our language, our culture. It has to be a reciprocal relationship, so that determines a lot of the decisions that I make. I do not want to be a person who just produces—like a cow making milk, you know—I’m just going to give, give, give, and in what way am I learning or growing? I don’t want to be a person who then begins to recycle material, or recycle forms, or recycle subject matter. It’s okay to return to certain subject matter, but are we growing and changing as we do that?

I feel very lucky. When I was an undergrad at the Institute of American Indian Arts, I studied with Arthur Sze, and he was influential in establishing a kind of ethics in the classroom. One of the values he stressed was quality over quantity. And I remember him telling me, I would prefer for you to turn in one good, well-developed piece at the end of the semester over ten poems that met the requirements and deadlines. Now, he wasn’t encouraging us to slack off and just turn in one poem, right? Most of the time we did meet the requirement of ten poems—that was our portfolio. That was always there in the room—we understood that. The point was he just wanted us to give every line and every word care.

I feel so lucky to have had that as a foundation, because I do know the pressure, I mean, our studies in writing start at that level. They start in undergrad and then go to grad school maybe, and so I think the training we have can really impact the way in which we move forward later on. So that’s an example of sort of slowing the wheels of productivity and capitalism and the push to just make, make, make, meet deadlines, and say yes to everything that comes your way and so on. That is not the goal. It is to make something that is really from the core of who we are, the essence of who we are, and to treat it with real care.

XL: That makes me think about how the workshop model is geared towards that kind of production if we don’t question it or think of ways we might amend it—to prevent it from turning into a weekly poem factory.

LLS: Exactly. You say poetry factory, I say art machine. This country, this world will turn you into an art machine if you’re not careful. Like the dairy cows with those devices hooked up to you, pumping you dry all day. If you’re not careful that can happen. We don’t want that. We want to contribute something beautiful.

XL: This is my last question—getting back to this idea of collaboration, but in a different form. Another piece that you mentioned was a collaboration with a literary ancestor—Zitkala-Ša—and working with her short story, “The Widespread Enigma of Blue Star Woman.” I really love this idea of collaborating with other writers, particularly ones you have a meaningful relationship with. It’s also a way, too, of working with archive, which is also something we’ve been discussing in the creative writing program here. Whereas is doing that kind of work as well—there’s an intervention of archive in Whereas—that government document the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans you spoke of earlier—and I’m just wondering how you began interjecting a poetic voice in these archives, how is it collaborating with what existed? Additionally, why is this work important, or what are the possibilities inherent in this form of collaboration?

LLS: For me it’s been very useful to work with literary ancestors for a number of reasons, especially those ancestors with whom I share a cultural background as well—so a lot of Native writers. You can see some of that already in Whereas. I do actually have one little piece already using work from Zitkala-Ša in Whereas—it’s in a poem titled “diction” where I worked with one of her texts, and I put it under erasure—a few of the lines. It was on her practice of doing beadwork, but I was able to use some of the ideas she was talking about and connect it with a writing practice, and so that was the beginnings of it.

Now, I have those star quilt poems using The Widespread Enigma of Blue Star Woman. For these poems, I went back to that story, and what was important to me about that piece was that it’s a piece about Blue Star Woman whose parents and family were undocumented. She was an orphan, and as settlers came and began to impose things like land rights and allotment on the people in that region, her rights came under scrutiny—her rights to land. Whereas prior to settler contact, she was able to live as a person with a little home and on the land with no issue. But as soon as all of these policies and governmental people came in, there were all questions around her identity. That’s the first half of the story.

The second half of the story is about a tribal leader who goes to jail for resisting some of the imposition of these policies—of taking their land and containing the people and so on. So the story kind of shifts. But what was important to me was that when I stripped away the particulars of that narrative, when I looked at the parts of speech—such as some of the dialogue and the verbs and the nouns and those kinds of things, even the adverbs and the adjectives—what I found by just looking at the particulars of language is that we are using the same language now in present day to discuss identity within our community, to discuss certain tribal or land rights amongst each other, and to discuss resistance.

Some of the issues in that series of poems are very specific to the Native community in the sense that we have conversations about rights and identity amongst each other that maybe mainstream America isn’t always aware of. But it can be really difficult—those are difficult conversations, you know.  They’re sometimes very heated or very emotional or very painful, but it was helpful to me to see even in Zitkala-Ša’s time she was thinking about those things and she was writing about them.

So even the idea was that the old teachings we have, our family names, all of these things, all of this was passed orally. It wasn’t documented, and so this shift in time and in documentation has created a whole set of obstacles and problems that we never had before amongst each other as relatives, as kin. In that regard, working with Zitkala-Ša’s language, as an ancestor—she is Dakota not Lakota, but we’re part of Oceti Sakowin which is our larger family group—was really revealing to me, and it was important for me to work with that story.

XL: Thank you so much for sharing that process and that discovery, too—how in stripping away the particulars you found those underlying ideas still the same.

LLS: Yeah, it’s still the same. The same language. I’ve realized that the pain that we have now is very old. It’s very old, and I think it’s just a way to look at this. Let’s look at this together and say, oh my goodness, we’re part of a long history. It’s nothing new, so how can we change this for each other? How can we change some of that language in the ways that we’re talking to each other or talking about each other.

Xu Li is a writer and educator born in Beijing and raised in southeast Michigan. She is an MFA candidate at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ, where she now lives with her dog, Ash. Her recent awards include the 2021 Swarthout Award in Creative Writing and Robert Haiduke Prize in Poetry. Xu teaches composition and poetry and is currently an associate editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review.