Whereas (book)
book by Layli Long Soldier
Whereas is a 2017 collection of poetry written by Oglala Lakota author, Layli Long Soldier. The collection was written as a direct response to S.J. Res 14, a congressional apology and resolution to the native peoples of the United States. This apology, signed by President Obama in 2009, is relatively unknown as it was closed to the public. Thus the apology itself was never directly pointed towards any people of indigenous descent. Whereas is a personal reaction to this and a documentation of life as a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe.
Reception
In 2017, Whereas was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry. In 2018, the community continued its praise by awarding the collection the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and as a finalist for the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Whereas has received primarily positive and enthusiastic reviews. Natalie Diaz of The New York Times hails, “Long Soldier reminds readers of their physical and linguistic bodies as they are returned to language through their mouths and eyes and tongues across the fields of her poems." In The Los Angeles Times, John Freeman writes, "She has rubbed two languages together and made their shared silences into gravel — paving a perch from which a reader can see clearly. Like all balconies built of stone and glass, you will not believe how strong it is, but you can stand on it.
“Whereas (book)” enters the record as book by Layli Long Soldier. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Whereas, book and Layli can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Whereas (book)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Whereas, book and Layli provides the most credible route into that argument.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q60744302. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2017, 2009 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Whereas (book)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.