135 X’s
An Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

In 2022, I was commissioned to write a poem for a film titled Lakota Nation vs. United States. For this project, I chose to engage with the 1868 Treaty of Ft. Laramie, which determined the land base and crucial legal agreements between the United States Government and several bands of Očeti Šakowin people and the Arapahoe. This contract set land boundaries for our tribal nations that extended across more than half of the state of South Dakota—and most importantly, included the Black Hills, our place of our origin. This place remains, in present day, our spiritual center. As many know, the land base in our treaty has significantly diminished over time through continued military force and seizure, Congressional Acts, and Supreme Court rulings. Yet, our treaty does exist as a living document, essential to determining current tribal rights and sovereignty. How do we understand a contract like this? What language rules as law and justice? These questions were at the heart of my meditation and writing “135 Xs.”

Yet, the piece I wrote for the film was, what I consider, an initial draft. As time has passed, I’ve wished to extend beyond the legalese and shape the piece into an honoring of our Native leaders who signed the treaty and their people—our people. UC Irvine gave me this opportunity and in spring 2023, I presented a new section on the names of those leaders—all 135 of whom signed the 1868 Treaty of Ft. Laramie with Xs. I began with the Oglala Lakota leaders, who represented my own band. These are visual poems, one might say. Ultimately, I have hoped these poems might be useful to our community, especially the young ones, as visual aids to remember the names of our beloved relatives.

NAMES

I’d like to say a few words about our people’s names, especially pre-1900s. This is what I know, though there’s much more to share, I’m sure: First, Očeti Šakowin people did not take “last names” or surnames in the way that European cultures do. We had our own names as individuals—men, women, and children alike. No person was the property of another; no one carried any particular matriarchal or patriarchal branding. We remembered the names of family members before us through lengthy introductions. And we remembered them as individuals—our grandmothers and grandfathers are spoken of with egalitarian regard. We earned our names through our character, behavior, and deeds. And our names changed several times throughout our lives, depending again on our qualities, achievements, relationships, or virtues as we grew older. This Lakota understanding of human nature—the inevitability that people —and our way of upholding this is as a basic truth, is what I most appreciate about our older ways of naming. But I hope to be clear: as I write, I do not intend this to be an anthropological text to define our culture to non-Očeti Šakowin people. I wanted to say a few words about historical names because I am a poet. And I want, as a poet, to convey something of my indescribable delight in our ancestors’ names—the language, the imagery, the embedded stories. One name is, potentially, a pivotal image within a poem—because we understood a name as the embodiment of essence, metaphor, and symbol. And a group of names forms a constellation—a structure of starlight that holds a poem together in interesting ways. To me, this is magical. I love my people for their poetry. They are born as poems. They become revised poems as they mature. Our friends, relatives, and community—together, their names form a cherished book with surprising turns. I hold this book to my chest and read it again and again.

OGLALA