Speaker
The speaker or narrator of most of the poems in this collection remains unidentified on a singularly personal level. Throughout the text, however, they are all linked together by the common unifying component of that speaker sharing a distinctive collective identity, that of a dual-citizenship member of Oglala Sioux tribe, a subset within the more encompassing Lakota Nation who is also considered, technically speaking at least, a wholly recognized citizen of the United States.
Dakota 38/Abraham Lincoln
The Dakota 38 refers to what has historically been characterized as largest single one-day execution in the United States. The day after Christmas, 1862, thirty-eight members of the Dakota tribe where all hanged under the auspices of an order signed by Pres. Abraham Lincoln. These men were hanged for taking part in what has been termed the Sioux Uprising, but the key element of the story is that this execution took place the very same week that Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
President Barack Obama
The title of the volume alludes to the opening word of at least twenty lines contained within S.J.Res.14 - A joint resolution 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. This Congressional resolution was signed by Pres. Barack Obama as the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans in 2009. This non-binding resolution offering no substantive policy changes toward treatment of Native Americas was insulting enough, but injury was added to the whole meaningless exhibition with an absence of pomp and circumstance including the failure to publicly read the proclamation as well as the jaw-dropping decision to not invite any actual tribal leaders to attend the signing.
The Fourteen-Year-Old Girl
The Fourteen-Year-Old Girl appears as a character in this book courtesy of being an anonymous person who posted a comment to a New York Times article about federal sequestration of funds from Native American reservation programs. The young girl writes about how she had recently visited just such a reservation in South Dakota as part of a trip taken with her youth group and how shocking it was to see the living conditions there. In response, upon returning home, she initiated as petition on the official White House web site calling for a formal apology by the government to native tribes as well as payment of reparations. The author’s response takes the form of a prose poem in which she informs the well-meaning teenager that the U.S. government had already issued a formal apology (S.J. Res. 14) even though it was not made public and, ironically, this apology came with the strings attached of taking money away rather than increasing funds for reparations.
