hello here is my lecture on the poem 38 by laylee long soldier this is another one of our creative arguments as i'm sure you've noticed um and i i know it's another poem next week we won't read a poem um but i wanted to highlight these amazing examples to me of a way of working argument into a creative expression so um let's talk a little bit here about the form or the genre of this particular piece um within sort of literary genres or even within poetry genres i talked a little bit last time um when we talked about rankin about documentary poetry or docupoetry um and i mentioned that my own work is kind of in that line currently in the last couple things i've done actually i'm really interested in that um so um i wanted to go a little bit deeper with this poem because i think it needs it more than rankings rankin's poem obviously is about things that are contemporary to us in fact super contemporary right she wrote the book a couple years ago and the things that she read about just flared back up again this past summer so whereas this is not as this is more historical and stuff that may not be familiar to you so i wanted to do a little bit more of describing what documentary poetry does and why poets employ it so the idea here is that it's that it is poetry that is derived from historical or journalistic sources and it often plays with or undermines or subverts the language used in the source material so um laylee long soldier is definitely doing that here with the title of the book of poetry that that 38 comes out of it's called whereas whereas being language that we see only used in formal declarations political resolutions um you know that kind of statement that's very much a formal of the state kind of language or of an organization some sort of bureaucracy right we don't see we don't use the term whereas very often in our own lives you can use it and some people use it in conversation but it's not very common it's typically seen as a legalistic kind of language um and so that's important here i feel like i may have included that on another slide but um but that's important here in the sense in the sense that she does play around with language in that way and there's other ways in which she does that in this text as well where she's kind of taking taking a historical moment the historical record um government documents you know the sort of what is out there and and showing it to us from a different perspective so it's a great way documentary poetry or docupoetry is a great way to comment on historical incidents of the past or of the present and to introduce um your own sort of subject position if you are a person of the of the group that has been impacted in some way to kind of undermine the sort of um you know the sort of dominant narrative right there's that expression it's a cliche but uh has some some value the idea of the winners write the history books um so the idea here is that in both her case and in rankin's case it's it's a retelling from the other side right from the side i don't want to use the term losers but the side of people who you know don't dominate um and how they see it and how they understand that those some of those same moments that we celebrate as part of our history um so one thing to think about here with the docupoetry is to compare how long soldier uses this approach compared to how claudia rankin used it they're both using docupoetic techniques but there are some there are some differences between them and i would invite you to comment on that if you'd like to in the um the lecturing and reading response at the end of the week um so um as i pointed out here um you know uh she is commenting on the historical record um and you know her her immediate the immediate occasion of the poem the thing that made her write this was that she was responding to a congressional revolution resolution that occurred it contemporaneously um was while uh obama was president um that was an apology to the um to her people for this particular event when the 38 soldiers were or the 38 uh lakota were um were hanged um and there was no meaningful action of any other kind other than just an apology um and so it's her kind of attempt to sort of say well you know thanks for the language but you know what does that get us um as you know native american or indigenous people live primarily um the the american solution to taking their land and you know um doing what they wanted to with it you know building cities and you know farmland and all that kind of thing was to relocate native americans to um land that was less frankly less useful in most cases um you know they were pushed further and further west into you know of course and further east i guess if they were the native americans of the west coast kind of into the into the sort of the mid the middle of the country you know where there's a lot of sort of open land and a lot of it is really rough land right i mean this the southwest american southwest is you know arid and dry and difficult and now granted there were native americans there already but others were sort of pushed in that direction they were pushed to places like oklahoma you know um south dakota that are fairly you know fairly uninhabited even now by by immigrant white people um or enslaved black people or formerly enslaved black people um who are um you know it those those areas are are sort of considered you know not really very useful by the rest of us and so that's where they were put so there that's where the reservations are and so the whole politics of indigenous people is that they have they have you know the right to some autonomy on their in their reservation areas but that's always in conflict with the united states government um at times you know there's there's frequent conflicts that come up so there's certain things that are laid out in treaties and then there are violations of those treaties pretty frequently um and of course pushing people into those areas means that that they're cut off in some ways from the rest of american culture american you know economic opportunity all of those kinds of things and so it causes numerous problems for them it causes many societies cause many societal um concerns and in issues um so um one of the things she's trying to do here is uncover the historical record and critique and in fact she critiques president lincoln who you almost never hear criticized um in you know by anyone else in america um she um she is um you know criticizing him for his sort of you know you know assent to this this execution of these people who were trying to defend their land um and felt that they had been unfairly treated by um the you know the white settlers who had come into their their areas who they traded with and things like that and when they when they you know felt threatened and you know ended up you know committing what we would consider crimes i mean they were they killed some some white settlers um they were you know um harshly punished for that um her argument is that it was unjust because they were pushed to the breaking point um so if you compare that to lincoln's status as a revered american for um his role in the in you know signing the emancipation proclamation and freeing the slaves right um that is something that um you know is an interesting comparison um i think one thing we're learning right now in this particular historical moment is that um people who are um considered founding fathers who are considered um you know people who are like who settled a lot of the land um in america who established institutions um are not um you know purely good people right there some of them were not good people they were just rich people um which isn't the same thing right they may have given money you know benefit benefactors and given money but they may have also been racist they may have been you know cruel they may have been or horrible to their workers there's a whole range of possibilities there so one of the things she's trying to do is because she's an outsider to that culture she is trying to show us the perspective of that outsider perspective what she sees and how she understands that history that most of us don't even learn necessarily in fact it is erased right her heritage um as an indigenous person is not something that we really get to hear about right in our history books if they cover these if they cover native americans it's in this sort of you know these are the things that happen and that's it we don't usually get to see it from their point of view um so um so that's what i mean by saying that her heritage is erased by the usual record and we don't get to hear the other side of the story okay so um i already talked about the whereas language um a minute ago so i'll skip over that notice too that she uses um the way that the the poem flows if you read it is it's a very calm very slow to unwind poem where she's really building towards what she wants to say it's not an anger or an overtly angry poem um it's not a passionate seeming poem it sort of is like this sort of cold um factual sort of presentation of things that are deeply personal to her right so she's trying to be like very logical very rational very you know um very much in the language of the oppressor let's say right the language of government right so she's trying to use that language and sort of undermine it through this sort of very passionate important story that causes pain right even though it's it's you know a while ago 150 or more years ago now you know it still causes pain right it's one of those things that that is a you know a massacre that you know i'm sure that you know people that she knows or the descendants of those folks right that kind of thing so um so she her use in this particular poem the thing that jumped out at me the first time i read it was when she says really early on the sentence will be respected right that's an interesting thing for a poet to say because poets don't always write in sentences some poets do and they very much care about the structure of a sentence but there are many poets who do not who write in fragmentary ways or who are blurring the lines of language and she does that in other poems and whereas but in this particular poem she's decided that she wants to go with you know a very formal a very structured a very very much the language of like the english language um the language of government approach right which which makes sense in this case for what she's trying to do so the audience for and the purpose of a work like this um is you know for you to interpret to of course um you know i think she's trying to shine the light on something that we don't normally see or think about um we are very familiar with um you know the history of black people and their enslavement you know we learn about that we learn about it because of the civil war because it needs to be covered fairly fairly in depth in order to understand you know the sort of implications of that which is obviously crucial and important part of our history um we learn a lot because because black people have stood up for their civil rights starting in you know well starting way back but um certainly during the civil rights movement within my own lifetime um and then now with black lives matter as we've discussed you know at some length in this class um those things we've heard about and we're familiar with even if those are not our histories we do know something about them because they've been brought to our attention with force and passion as you know the people who are you know directly affected want us to know and want us to be held accountable right so in this case this is something that isn't as apparent because while people do speak up about it there aren't as many and it hasn't had quite the ground swell so it's interesting to talk about it in that way and to think about it as sort of running parallel in some ways to um to the black lives matters movements things of that nature you don't see quite the same thing in the indigenous um culture although indigenous cultures but i did notice that when the when the the uh the protests were happening um back in june around the george floyd event in minnesota which is of course where her ancestors are from and where this poem is placed in minnesota um you know i noticed that native americans were out there with the black lives matter protesters and i thought that was really interesting um and so when i read this again for for this class for you know to to to record the lecture i thought about that that there is sort of a a sympathetic um they both understand i think both of those groups of people understand that they're fighting for essentially the same kinds of things so in many ways what all of this work does that we've read that's on these topics is it provides witness the concept of witness that is has a religious connotation but also has a governmental connotation the idea of saying what you know saying what you saw saying what you heard saying what your what your family history is saying all of those things and making sure that other people know about it because that's the way things become account people become accountable that's the way that things change and so that the intention here is very much in that in that cast of of bearing witness to something and i think that that's an important thing to keep in mind as you as you think over the text um to write about it for the for the lecture um it's a that's what she's attempting to do here this book was really successful um it was published with a really good small press and um is it was a nomination nominated for the griffin prize which is actually a canadian prize for sort of north american literature they have a canadian category in an ameri like a like sort of outside kind of category um it may even be global i don't know but this usually works in english and it's usually like north american work um and you know like only the like you know it's a very prestigious only a couple of people are even nominated for you know like are actually in the running for it um and um so she she was um a nominee for that prize um and here is her reading from the poem at the the griffin um the griffin pride like at the part of that it was part of the the the ceremonies around that prize and there's a there's a youtube video here of her reading from it it's 16 minutes long so make sure that you if you're gonna watch it you set aside the time but it's interesting to sort of see it's a little bit of contextualizing but it's mostly her reading the poem um and so it's interesting just to hear it in her own voice so even if you don't listen to the whole thing it's kind of interesting to sort of dip in and out and hear how she reads it i think it's always valuable if you can get a chance to hear a writer read their own work you kind of pick up things that you may not have otherwise thought of when you read it so um okay that's it for this week