Close Talking

In this larger episode, Connor and Jack explore an excerpt of Layli Long Soldier’s sequence “Whereas Statements,” which responds to the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans that US President Barack Obama signed on Saturday, December 19, 2009. They discuss how Long Soldier interrogates and writes against the language of the Apology, the effects of her syntactical experimentation, the surprising commonalities of legal and poetic language, and how indigenous writers are often read reductively as only their indigeneity. Read the poem below. Read a long excerpt from the sequence here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/magazine/from-whereas-statements.html More on Long Soldier: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/layli-long-soldier Check out Long Soldier’s collection, Whereas, here: https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/whereas Check out the full text of the Congressional Apology here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/14/text Read the referenced review