At October’s end, UC Berkeley’s Native Community Center in Anthony Hall hosted a talk by Professor Brandi Bushman on the apology as a rhetorical form, entitled “Apology and Apostrophe: Animating Native American Absence in Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas.” Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College. Her full-length poetry collection, Whereas, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. 

I read Long Soldier’s Whereas for the first time last spring, in an English course on Native American Literature led by Beth Piatote. The poem addresses the 2009 congressional apology to the Native people, highlighting inconsistencies between the government’s words and actions. During one lecture, Professor Piatote instructed us to line the walls; students stood in a circle around the hall, taking turns to recite a word from the poem “Whereas.” Our voices varied, each word escaping through different intonations, accents, and pronunciations, some emotional, others stoic, all creating something miraculous. I recall thinking that the poem should always be read this way, in a form that conveys the expanse of its representation, embodying voices for those without one, whose voices were stolen.        

Sponsored by the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, Native American Student Development, Native American Thriving Initiative, the Department of English, and the Department of Rhetoric, the event promised to address Long Soldier’s poem, and thus I attended, enthusiastic about delving more deeply into the poem's expansiveness.   

Bushman is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and was formerly a Mellon Gateway Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies at Brown University. She graduated with a BA in English from UC Santa Barbara and received her MA and PhD in English from Princeton University. She is a registered member of the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians. Bushman’s research interests are interdisciplinary: she specializes in Native American literature, literary and critical theory, and the history and politics of Native California.

Bushman began with gratitude, expressing her appreciation for those who supported the event as well as her fondness for Berkeley. “I spent my whole life in the Central Valley before entering this wild world of academia, so getting to come work at Berkeley has really felt like a return home in several ways,” she commented. Before delving into the talk, Bushman explained that she would be reading a chapter from her current project: a book about modern Native American literatures written between 2010 and 2021. “They were largely written during this period of time that was electrically charged by the hope for and the possibility of a certain manifestation of multicultural, democratic inclusion that the Obama era signaled, which then, of course, sparked the intense pushback of white resentment with Trumpism,” she explained, adding:  “This was a time when the notion of reconciliation between the state and Native tribes was really being woven within governance itself.” 

Bushman is interested in identifying and understanding how these literatures offer a method of reckoning with the mistreatment of Native people, their “expression of a particular experiential state of negative affect that can't really be redressed or ameliorated by either this particular tenor of the settler state on one hand, or projects of tribal nationalism and the aspirational paradigms of resistance and sovereignty that likewise kind of chart onto commensurate affective paradigms of reparation and hope.” According to Bushman, the heavy emotional experiences among Indigenous communities carry a lasting impact that cannot be erased or remedied by purely conceptual notions of healing. Bushman’s research attends to instances of ontological negation  —  a philosophical concept that describes the negation of an individual's or group’s originary existence  —  as they appear in these literatures.  

On this day, Bushman read from what is now the first chapter of her project, which focuses on Long Soldier’s Whereas. “This ventriloquized, amorphous figure of the United States expresses its regret for wrongs that are firmly situated in the past,” Bushman explained, describing the violence, mistreatment, and neglect Native people experienced at the hands of the United States, and the official congressional record that apologizes on behalf of its citizens. “The apology arrives bereft of any plan for material or monetary redress for the harms the United States and its citizens have inflicted on Native people,” Bushman concluded. 

Before proceeding further with her inquiry, Bushman offered a thorough reflection on the current conditions faced by Indigenous communities. She called for emphasizing Native experiences of erasure and prioritizing investment in reparation, explaining that these strategies offer the strongest, most tangible method of holding the settler state accountable. For this particular chapter of her book, she described having two main interests: “Firstly, I'm concerned with how settler states deploy figurative language in official legislation to covertly instantiate racial politics, even within legislation regarding democratic inclusion and a sensible settler benevolence. Secondly, I'm interested in how this rhetorical misfire betrays the state's necessary ongoing production of native ontological incapacity, and how Native authors, in turn, appropriate the same figurative language to issue a response.” Bushman is concerned with how language can be used to convey multiple meanings that are not always straightforward or truthful. The government uses abstract language to conceal racist or discriminatory messaging, at times emulating generosity and compassion while ensuring that unequal power structures remain. An accidental consequence of this tendency  —  that the government's language reveals the settler state’s dependence on Native people's lack of autonomy, in an effort to justify its own existence  —  is the ability of Native authors to assert their existence by reclaiming this symbolic language. 

“This is the labor that Laili Long Soldier performs in her poem ‘Whereas,’” Bushman said, describing it as both a response to the government’s apology and a paradox that calls attention to “the period's audacious hope of multicultural inclusion in America, and brazen perpetuation of American colonial exploits.” Invoking an interview in which Long Soldier calls the writers behind the congressional apology “poets,” Bushman challenged us to take Long Soldier’s assessment seriously, regarding the apology itself as a work of poetry. 

What followed was a fascinating analysis of both poems, which appear connected, even in conversation. Bushman referred to literary theorists Jonathan Culler and Barbara Johnson, who elucidate how poetry inspires or impedes change, on the one hand, and how language grants one or strips one of the ability to forgive, on the other hand. 

Bushman read an excerpt from W. H. Auden’s poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” which proved especially illuminating in her analysis of Long Soldier. I read it later that day, again and again, thinking about it for nights after:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Auden’s irony — claiming that poetry “makes nothing happen,” while describing it as moving through painful, unideal circumstances, almost as if it were alive, “a mouth” — reminded me of literature’s resilience, its capacity to record history and imagine a better future simultaneously, something that will outlive us all.

The congressional apology concludes with a disclaimer that its words will not precipitate any real change; Long Soldier’s poem does the same. Bushman called this a “structural antagonism,” adding that “this unveiling, the capacity to animate the experience of ontological negation for just a moment” is fundamentally “limited to the happening of the poem.” I recognize this reality as both hopeful and hopeless, but prefer the former. Although the poem’s meaning is confined to where it was created and spoken, there is always a hope that someone will hear and be changed by its message, or at the very least, carry it with them. I put my faith in literature — willing life and magic into it — to enact change, inspire accountability, heal suffering. To create a more just world.