It was a resolution that sought to “acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States.” Yet there was so little fanfare that some of us are only learning about its substance now, seven-plus years later, because of a new poetry collection by rising star Layli Long Soldier, Oglala Lakota.

It was the spring of 2010 when Long Soldier first heard about Senate Joint Resolution 14, passed by the United States Congress and signed by former president Barack Obama without ceremony in December 2009. The resolution’s enactment might have marked an opportunity for a focused and more authentic understanding of American history, or even a turning point in the United States’ conduct toward Native Americans. That would have been akin to the processes set in motion in Canada after the historic 2008 apology by then Prime Minister Stephen Harper before Parliament and Indigenous Peoples.

But since the U.S. resolution was folded into the National Defense Authorization Act, the moment of its adoption went largely unnoticed, and it was as close to a non-event as a historic act can be. Nonetheless, her imagination provoked and ignited, it was one that Long Soldier found impossible to ignore.

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