LAYLI LONG SOLDIER has been widely recognized for her command of the visual aspects of poetic form and her use of “documentary poetics,” drawing upon found texts, historical documents, and events. While her sculptural and process-based works have not yet received commensurate critical attention, her book We/Wé, forthcoming from Graywolf Press, collects these projects for the first time, presenting them alongside related essays and poetry. Her close attention to visual phenomena and spatial logics has endeared her to fellow artists like Jeffrey Gibson, whose installation at the 2024 Venice Biennale took its title, “the space in which to place me,” from her 2017 concrete poem “He Sápa.”
Long Soldier’s watershed publication WHEREAS (2017), which won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, took as its central conceit the Obama-era joint resolution S.J. Res. 14, “To acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States.” In the book, Long Soldier adopted and then upended the affected neutrality official statements like treaties, executive orders, and resolutions. The philosopher J. L. Austin would have called these government-issued utterances “performative,” his word for speech acts that alter real-world conditions by creating new truths. Long Soldier’s poems make clear that the language used in governmental apologies is just as performative as that of the nefarious declarations that attempted (unsuccessfully) to dismantle Plains social structures. Her writing also asserts that words, often expressed in the Lakota language, are just as capable of fostering vital human and nonhuman connections. To be effective, the speech acts that bind us together or break us apart require the assent of our whole society. Plains culture remains, as does the harm S.J. Res 14 attempted to repair.
I met Long Soldier while curating the 2023 exhibition “Invisible Prairie” for Tinworks Art in Bozeman, Montana, which featured artistic representations of the Northern Great Plains that disregarded European landscape traditions, with a special emphasis on sound and language. For that show, she interpreted a selection from her “Day” and “Night” companion series of poems, originally commissioned by the Holt/Smithson Foundation as part of the World Weather Network, a two-year project that brought together arts organizations to address weather and the changing climate. Long Soldier designed a site-responsive sculpture that would provide a dynamic, spatial experience of the final poem in the series by engaging shadow and reflection in collaboration with the movements of the sun. Day Poem: Sun Mirrors, 2023, comprises eight panels of plasma-cut steel, each mounted with a round mirror, arranged in a circular formation on a large concrete pad. The text, addressed to her child, directs the viewer’s attention to an unseen landscape. One panel reads, LOOK AT THE LAND LOOK AT THE MIRACLE LOOK AT SEEDHEADS DELICATE AS CHILDREN LOOK AT GREEN BLADES SWAYING LIKE SILVER. . . . As the viewer moves around the circle, the speaker redirects their attention to a linguistic environment: LOOK AT THE CLAIM LOOK AT THE DEED AND TITLE LOOK CLOSELY AT THE LANGUAGE LOOK AT YOUR INSTINCT AND INTUITION LOOK AT ACTIONS NOT WORDS.
Day Poem: Sun Mirrors is an ongoing project and will be reinstalled at the art space Racing Magpie in Rapid City, South Dakota, this summer in collaboration with interdisciplinary artist Mikayla Patton, who will be adding decorative motifs drawn from Lakota material culture. Below, Long Soldier discusses her process, in which sculptural and poetic forms emerge sympathetically. She also addresses the importance of generative constraints and the central roles that trust and kinship play in her work.
—Melissa Ragain
I LOVE WORKING OUTSIDE of the page, and in many ways that’s what you see when I’m making sculptural pieces. I want more space, and I want color, and I want texture, and I want to touch and feel something. That’s my favorite place to begin.
There are two ways of understanding the page—there’s the sonics of the piece, which a poet always attends to, and there’s the visual field. One way I view the page is as a kind of notation. Poets want to make sure that every line break, space, comma, and so on creates the sound, pace, and rhythm that they intend. That’s one way I work with space on the page. When it comes to the visual, I don’t believe that we have to start with an 8.5-by-11-inch white space to make a poem. That’s a random dimension determined by papermakers. Constraints are important, but we don’t have to accept those as our own constraints.
The book I’m finishing now has a twofold title. If you add an accent mark to the English pronoun we, it changes into the Lakota word Wé, which means “blood.” Most of the projects in this book are also different from my others because they involve collaboration, mentorship, and knowledge from relatives and community members. For many of the works in We/Wé, I don’t consider myself the sole maker. For example, in an installation for the arts organization Racing Magpie, curators Mary and Clementine Bordeaux conducted interviews with six Lakota women, all of whom were educators and Lakota language speakers, about the Lakota phrase Mitákuye Oyásiŋ (which translates to “all my relatives” or “we are all related”). We consider all of creation as our relatives, not just humans. I wrote the eight “Obligations” poems included in the new book based on the insights in these interviews, and they formed the basis of the installation for that show.
I tell my students that content and form are like a bicycle. Content is one wheel and form is the other, and the two of them need to be equally strong and moving at the same velocity to carry the poem where it needs to go. In this case, the shape was determined by the eight segments of the star quilt, made up of smaller diamond-shaped pieces. For the gallery installation of the “Obligations” poems, I was working with a heavyweight cotton paper that I laser-cut with short bits of text. Each of the eight segments was a foot long, made of about thirty-six individual diamonds, totaling 288 for the entire piece. People can start at the top of one diamond and weave their way down to the bottom diamond choosing any direction that they want to go in, and make up to ten or twelve different poems. Lakota people often honor each other with star quilts for special occasions such as birthdays, graduations, or funerals, so I wanted to use a visual form for my poems that symbolizes kinship and was easily recognized by our community. The structure allows space for a reader, and even for me as the writer, to choose their own pathway and what they’ll walk away with. I am not dictating; I don’t want to tell readers a moral or lesson, but to open up considerations about being in relation to others. The star quilt poems also work collectively or relationally. Obligations 2 from that series has circulated heavily on Instagram and Reddit threads, in response to the pandemic and other moments of collective mourning. Even though you can choose your path from the top of the poem to the bottom, there is no way to read that poem without moving through “the grief,” which takes up an entire line.
I am not dictating; I don’t want to tell readers a moral or lesson, but to open up considerations about being in relation to others.
I am known for “documentary poetics,” but that is just a way of holding up a mirror. As in, look at the language of this document, look at the way it’s set up, look at the structure. I want the reader to see for themselves—I am just bringing it to their attention. You can choose what you want to do with it. Likewise, in the installation A Line Through Grief [2017–] at the SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art [in Quebec], I created three balsa wood boxes. I asked people to submit something they are grieving in the first box, to place questions that they asked themselves during that process in the second, and to place ways they dealt with grief in the third. At the end of the exhibition, the curator sent me the submissions. The amazing thing was how many of us are carrying some form of grief. I have a little stack of maybe twenty-five pieces of paper, and all of them say, “Why?” I created a series of epistolary poems from these groups of responses that move from loss to questioning to healing.
I’m fascinated by how these kinds of intentional constraints push me into a space of immense possibility and allow me to work with very heavy subject matter—let’s say colonization, or boarding schools—that require so much emotional energy. Having a device distracts from the emotional content so that I’m working with another part of my brain. Figuring out how to work with a material or process lifts some of the emotional energy that I might otherwise be hindered by.
The sculpture Carrier [2021] appears in my essay “Now You Will Listen,” which is about my kid’s experience discussing traumatic histories in the classroom. Carrier takes the form of a winged dress and began right after we heard the news about the remains of 215 children whose unmarked graves were detected by radar at Kamloops [Indian] Residential School in Canada. When that news hit, it was really devastating because it affirmed a history that we always knew. At home, it was a very difficult moment for my kid and me. We didn’t know what to do with our feelings. Both of us are artists, and I had these huge spools of fringe. The first thing that happened when Native children went to these institutions is the school administration would cut their braids off. We started cutting fringe and creating long braids in honor of those children. The braids were so tiny, but it was amazing how much time it took. But we kept going until we had 215. And then as I was braiding, I started adding silver caps and wire because I intuitively knew I was going to make something with them. One of my aunts and a niece helped us; there was a lot of sharing and collaboration that went into it within our family. I wanted to keep it very minimal, but I started thinking about fringe and our traditional clothing and dresses. I began to visualize this dress, made of window screen, almost as a person, carrying all these little braids back.
I’m always learning from this process of making things, because there’s a lot of trust involved. We don’t know if the work will be good, or if it will have the impact we hope for. We don’t know if we’re even up to the job of making it. We have an impulse, but do we have the strength to make it right? All of it is a process of not knowing and trusting both the work itself and ourselves, constantly checking in with ourselves, our instincts, our motivations. Are we making this work from a good place? Have I set aside ego? Have I set aside expectation? Am I doing this with a sense of integrity and care? All those things are constantly in play. The anthropologist Ella Cara Deloria wrote about something called “social kinship,” wherein “one’s social kin . . . would be the same as one’s friends, neighbors, and acquaintances in white society.” She argues that because the Dakota word Wacekiya translates both as “to address a relative” and “to pray,” the concept“implies that in every meeting of two minds the kinship approach is imperative; it is the open sesame to any sincere exchange of sentiment between man and his neighbor or man and his God. Once the channel is clear between the two, a reciprocal trust and confidence are guaranteed.”* There’s a level of trust that we develop in our “social kinship” with others, but also in kinship with ourselves and in kinship with the things that we’re making. Whether it’s a poem or a visual piece, it’s a relationship. It really boils down to relationships.
*Ella Cara Deloria, Speaking of Indians (New York: Friendship Press, 1944).
