WHEREAS

114 pp. 2016 Whiting Award winner Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota) introduces part II of her debut collection, WHEREAS, recipient of the 2018 National Book Critic Circle Award in Poetry, as well as the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, by overtly labeling it as a response to the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans: it is, she explains, "directed to the Apology's delivery, as well as the language, crafting, and arrangement of the written document" (57). If the US government sought to pigeonhole the "more than 560 federally recognized tribes in the US" (57) into "Native Peoples," avoid the word "genocide" at all costs, and gloss over atrocities-past as well as present-from forced removal to boarding schools to contemporary conditions on reservations, then Long Soldier's poetry challenges the government's declarations at every turn, while also figuratively reenacting the violence perpetrated against the many Indigenous nations using the very language of the US government. [...]as others have noted, reading Long Soldier's work without a copy of this legal document at hand will result in missing many of the intricacies of her text. Whether drawing on Lakota/Dakota/Nakota writings, history, or what might be personal experience, Long Soldier strings events of the past-like the execution of the Dakota 38 memorialized in the last poem of part I-together with more recent ones-like the confrontations between armed government forces and the #NoDAPL Water Protectors at Očhéthi Šakówip camp recorded in "Resolution (6)"-to reveal that, congressional apology or not, much remains the same.