WE: Layli Long Soldier in Conversation with Heid E. Erdrich

Birchbark hosts Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier, joined by Heid E. Erdrich, for a reading and discussion of her new collection, We.
About this Event

In We, Layli Long Soldier examines what it means to be in community, to be in relation with family, nation, history, and language. We is the first-person plural, the pronoun of inclusion in English. It is also Wé, the Lakota word meaning “blood”—what is shared and what is shed.

In this ingenious and insightful arrangement of poems, lyric essays, and her own visual artworks presented in full color, Long Soldier creates unique spaces of collaboration, mentorship, and shared knowledge. The 184 X’s signed to a broken treaty, the fringes of a winged dress braided in honor of children lost to Indian boarding schools, and intricate Lakota star quilts become shapes and patterns that convey collective kinship, memory, and grievance. “From this day forward,” Long Soldier writes, “I declare a war of language.”

We is a visionary new collection by a writer and artist whose unfolding works are among the most groundbreaking of our time.

“Layli Long Soldier's communal, revelatory, intimate collection vibrates with visual and poetic meaning. We, or Wé, is an offering to the best within us all.”—Louise Erdrich
“In We (Wé), Layli Long Soldier leads us across her poetry, storytelling, and visual artwork, creating vivid and captivating imagery, both on the page and within our imaginations. . . . I felt my life reflected as a mother, a Lakota woman, a tribal and US citizen, a human, and a relative.”—Dyani White Hawk

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Layli Long Soldier is a poet, artist, and citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She is the author of WHEREAS, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Heid E. Erdrich’s 2024 book is Verb Animate. Her 2020 book Little Big Bully won a National Poetry Series award. She is a curator, editor, and teacher. Heid edited New Poets of Native Nations and co-edited the 2025 publication Boundless: Abundance in Native American Art and Literature. Heid is Ojibwe and enrolled at Turtle Mountain.