Panels of wood line the four walls of Room 315 Wheeler Hall. Brown wooden trim surrounds the beige wall panels in a style known as raised wainscoting, which resembles picture frames constructed with stiles and rails. This kind of molding is typical of Neoclassical and Beaux-Arts interiors popular in early twentieth-century academic buildings. This style emphasizes symmetry, evoking a sense of order and permanence. The wooden molding is bathed in amber light by the sun's setting rays which flood through the floor-to-ceiling windows that line the north wall. This room is beautiful. This molding is beautiful. This sunlight is beautiful. This room stands on the stolen territory of xučyun (Huichin), the ancestral homeland of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people. From this stolen land, its resources — its wood — have been uprooted to line the walls in the style of its colonizers. Yet the sun still shines through, a reminder that resistance is more than the memorialization of suffering: it is also the persistence of belonging.

On April 1st, 2026, the Arts Research Center hosted a poetry reading with guest poet Layli Long Soldier in the Maude Fife Room. The Arts Research Center is a place where boundaries dissolve — between disciplines, between theory and practice, between the university and the world beyond it. Artists, scholars, curators, and civic arts leaders come together at the ARC to think, make, and challenge one another. The ARC nurtures emerging research and artistic experimentation while building connections among faculty, students, and arts professionals. As part of a twenty-five-event series celebrating the center's 25th anniversary, Long Soldier’s poetry reading embodied the center's goals and values. In her poignant introduction, ARC director Beth Piatote noted that the series features "twenty-five events that amplify the essential role that art plays in our spiritual, creative, critical, political, and material lives."

The poet Layli Long Soldier is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Long Soldier earned her BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and her MFA from Bard College. She has published two collections: Chromosomory (Q Ave Press, 2010) and Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Poetry Magazine, theNew York Times, theKenyon Review, PEN America, BOMB, Native Voices (Tupelo Press, 2019), and theLarger Voice (NACF, 2022). Long Soldier has also worked as an artist, educator, and critical writer. Her essays and poems together examine how institutional and political language shapes — and often distorts — Indigenous life and sovereignty. Blending formal experimentation with historical and political reflection, Long Soldier’s style bends grammar, white space, and the structure of an essay or poem to expose the distance between institutional language and lived experience. Her work centers Indigenous resistance and belonging while exploring how language can both silence and sustain Indigenous existence. Long Soldier teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and served as the 2024–25 Endowed Chair at Texas State University. Through her poetry, teaching, and critical work, she continues to expand conversations about sovereignty, memory, and the power of language to witness and resist.

Long Soldier’s reading drew from a wide range of poems across her past collections and projects. While these works differed in form and subject, they were united by a central theme: that Native American cultural persistence must be understood as dual. Professor Geoffrey O’Brien foregrounded this duality in his introduction. He began by referencing the term “victim framing,” coined by Gerald Vizenor in 1993 to critique the portrayal of Native American culture in popular media such as books, films, and music. O’Brien extended this critique by examining the implications of the term “survivance,” often used to describe the continuity of Native existence through genocide, dispossession, and relocation. He argued that such language risks reducing Native life to the tragedy of mere survival. His invocation of “victim framing” was not meant to dismiss the importance of recognition, but rather to emphasize Long Soldier’s commitment to a form of resistance grounded in both recognition and belonging. Long Soldier herself identifies “victim framing” as a modern symptom of colonization, calling it the “trap we are born into.” In response, her poetry engages deeply with grief and loss, while resisting the paralysis that can accompany it. She urges movement toward the “yet” — toward what is still possible. Through ritual, story, and song, she imagines a resurgence that reclaims belonging and affirms the ongoing vitality of Native culture.

O’Brien invoked a performance by Long Soldier when she was a guest poet in the English department's  Lunch Poems series in 2018. During this earlier reading, Long Soldier explained that her collection WHEREAS is not defined solely by resistance, but instead constitutes a space of belonging—one that speaks to a generative community rather than only the attacks against it. In the title poem, “WHEREAS,” the word “Whereas” is repeated at the beginning of every sentence:

Whereas in a stirred conflict between settlers and an Indian that night in a circle;
Whereas I struggle to confess that I didn’t want to explain anything;
Whereas truthfully I wished most to kick the legs of that man’s chair out from under him;
Whereas to watch him fall backward legs flailing beer stench across his chest;
Whereas I pictured it happening in cinematic slow-motion delightful;
Whereas the curled hand I raised to my mouth was a sign of indecision;
Whereas I could’ve done it but I didn’t;
Whereas I can admit this also took place, yes, at least;
 

The poem “WHEREAS” responds to President Obama’s 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. In the document’s preamble, the word “Whereas” is repeated at the beginning of each sentence as well, emphasizing the authority and juridical force of the text. Long Soldier carries this charged repetition into the space of poetry, reworking its formal and political implications. In her hands, “Whereas” transforms into a litany — a chant that draws attention to its constituent parts, “where” and “as.” Through this shift, “Whereas” becomes an unnamed nation, an indeterminate space that, as O’Brien suggested, can signify “the trauma of dislocation and reservation; where am I, where are we, in the as of as it has been.” At the same time, O’Brien noted that it can also gesture toward another “where” — a space for gathering and remembering, both virtual and real. In this way, Long Soldier’s poetry, like her citizenship and linguistic inheritance, operates within a dual realm. It does more than survive within that duality; it actively reworks it. Her resistance acknowledges past suffering while moving beyond it to assert a renewed sense of belonging for Native communities. Long Soldier’s art creates domains, not dominion.

Long Soldier’s first reading was a long poem titled “184 X’s,” which engages with the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. She dedicates the poem to the 184 Northern tribal leaders who signed the treaty. Among them, she highlights Red Cloud, who famously remarked that he had been swindled: “I am not hard to swindle because I do not know how to read and write.” At its core, the poem uses the “X” to confront what these leaders could neither read nor sign with their own names. Instead, they were forced to mark the treaty with X’s:
 

X marks
an unusual declaration, then, that I felt a love for our land
long before I existed.

X marks
Love, defined as intense feelings of affection or care; a deep sense of belonging; the force through which life itself is created.

X marks
a line I once wrote: everything is in the language we use. And X marks my humble correction: at critical moments, everything is in the language we do not understand.
 

"184 X's" almost acts as a supplementary document meant to be read alongside the original treaty. It communicates the lost narrative of the tribal leaders — a narrative that depicts a love connecting the land to its people. The lines following each "X" establish this narrative while acknowledging how it was reduced and homogenized into a two-mark signature. Long Soldier's poetry engages with legal documents used to undermine or enforce cultural erasure. Just as her poem "WHEREAS" reconstructs Obama's 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology, "184 X's" reconstructs the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie to restore the voice of tribal leaders. In doing so, she reclaims the legal power that was used to enforce cultural genocide. She leverages the treaty's  legal power not to illustrate the suffering it imposed, but to reveal how it can be reclaimed to restore the original narrative of love and connection. In doing so, Long Soldier transforms a document of exploitation into a reinstatement of belonging.

At the end of Long Soldier’s reading of "184 X's", she discussed her difficulty continuing to write lines for "184 X's", . She felt an internal shift of energy in writing "184 X's” that went from honoring to demoralizing. In this moment of reflection, Long Soldier admitted, “I think it was becoming difficult to just say colonization is bad . . . cause I already knew that,” to which the room responded with laughter. I was surprised by the nonchalant nature of her tone when describing a topic so heavy and complicated. Yet she continued on to discuss how she took this moment of dissatisfaction to reground herself in her initial goal of honoring the leaders of native tribes. In doing so, she focused on the significance of the leaders' names. In native culture, names were earned through merit and achievements. Long Soldier then described the native custom of immortalization for those who have passed. In Lakota culture, there was frequently a connection between death, the afterlife, and the spirit world with the night sky; stars were viewed as ancestors, spirits, or markers of the journey after life. The names of the leaders “were like little poems — full of imagery and stories.” The final product, Long Soldier said, “was reminiscent of a star map.” While the poems themselves are just the English translations of names, she described a sense of reward in writing the collection. While “184 X’s” remained an important tribute to Native tribal leaders, Long Soldier recognized that her initial draft began to perpetuate a form of “victim framing.” In shifting to work on “Constellations,” she continued her goal of honoring Native leaders, but this collection instead focused on memorializing the richness of Native culture rather than the suffering caused by its erasure.

In the Q&A session following the reading, an audience member asked how Long Soldier navigates spaces that may include people who tolerate social inequalities such as classism, racism, and sexual violence. In response, Long Soldier unassumingly said, “I mean… I don’t know.” I was genuinely taken aback by this blunt response. However, Long Soldier went on to explain that she cannot control what will happen at her readings or who will be present. She told an anecdote about a conversation she had with a student while teaching in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. The student, from a Northwestern tribe and a family of creatives, said that while they knew they could write about many things, they found themselves unable to stop writing about their community because that was all they really wanted to write about in the end. Long Soldier reflected on how deeply she related to this desire, describing it simply as “love.” She then spoke about her own relationship to writing: “It’s not to prove a point, it’s not even necessarily a form of activism. It’s because I love my family, I love our people, and I love our culture. It comes from that place.” At that moment, it became clear to me.

Initially, I believed Long Soldier’s playful tone and sometimes nonchalant responses were at odds with her themes of colonization, survival, and native alienation. I was genuinely confused — why would someone with such influence appear so indifferent, even dismissive? Yet in that moment, I realized that this was precisely her point. As O’Brien discussed in his introduction, Long Soldier’s poetry can and does function as a form of protest for the persistence of Native American culture. However, to read her work solely through the lens of protest would be to confine its meaning to survival alone. Instead, Long Soldier writes out of love — love for her people, her culture, and her sense of belonging. If she were to write only for acknowledgment or recognition, she would risk perpetuating the very “victim framing” she resists. By writing from a place of love, Long Soldier fulfills the hopeful aspirations of the 184 tribal leaders and their communities. She creates a domain of belonging, one in which Native American culture is not isolated or peripheral, but an integral part of American history and of the art still to come.