When the MacArthur Foundation unveiled its 2026 class of fellows this week, two of the names belonged to Native women who work with old documents to say something urgent about the present. Layli Long Soldier is a poet and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. Elizabeth Ellis is a historian and an enrolled citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma.
Each will receive $800,000 from the foundation, and neither owes anything in return. The foundation describes the money as a bet on what a person might do next, not a trophy for what they have already done.
A poet and a historian don’t seem to have much in common, but spend an afternoon with their books and you start noticing the common threads running through their work. Long Soldier and Ellis both keep circling back to treaties, congressional resolutions, and dusty colonial paperwork. And both keep finding what those papers were written to leave out.
Layli Long Soldier
Long Soldier is known for Whereas, her first full poetry collection, published in 2017. Anyone expecting tidy stanzas gets thrown off fast. Words pile up into shapes. Lines get crossed out. Some phrases just hang in the empty space. Here and there she writes out the word “comma” or “period” instead of using the mark, and you end up reading slower, paying attention to punctuation you’d normally skip right past.
A lot of what she works with isn’t poetry at all. She lifts lines from congressional statements, newspaper reports, and history books, then rearranges them until the cruelty tucked behind careful legal wording shows through. Take “38,” a prose poem about the 1862 execution of 38 Dakota men, the largest mass hanging in U.S. history, carried out after what textbooks tend to call the Sioux Uprising. Long Soldier points out what those textbooks often gloss over, the Dakota were starving. Treaties the government wrote in murky terms, and then broke, had already cost them their land and their food.
Then there’s the title poem, her response to the 2009 congressional resolution apologizing to Native Americans. Long Soldier puts the apology’s stiff legal voice up against Lakota traditions and teachings. The result doesn’t really read like an answer. It reads more like two worldviews colliding, with neither backing down.
Her work does not stay on the page. The Obligations poems first took shape as a hanging sculpture modeled on a Lakota star quilt, with a poem written inside each diamond point. Viewers can read the lines from more than one direction, and the points can be moved around, so the poems keep changing. The poems explore what people owe one another and how to stay in relationship. Those poems will be printed in her next book, We, due out from Graywolf in October 2026.
Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2009 and an MFA from Bard College in 2014. Her poems have run in Poetry, BOMB, and The Kenyon Review, and they appear in the 2022 documentary Lakota Nation vs. United States. She has taught at Diné College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Randolph College, and her alma mater, IAIA, and she held the endowed chair in creative writing at Texas State University for 2024–2025. She makes her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Elizabeth Ellis
Ellis is an associate professor of history at Princeton and her research asks a question most scholars of early America skipped. The standard story of Native politics centers on big confederacies, the Haudenosaunee, the Muscogee, the Oceti Sakowin, and on how they fought slavers and settlers. Ellis wanted to know what happened to the many small nations that never merged into anything larger.
She lays out her answer in The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South, published in 2022. The book follows the peoples of the Lower Mississippi Valley, the stretch now known as Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among them were the Biloxi, the Capinan, and the Pointe-au-Chien. Well before any Europeans showed up, these groups were already taking in refugees, sharing villages with neighboring nations, and making alliances loose enough to undo if things shifted. Once French and British colonists arrived, those old habits turned into diplomacy. For most of the 1700s, small nations used them to set boundaries for settlers, including where they could live.
Staying flexible is how they survived. Late in the century, as the United States tightened its hold on the region, many of these nations dodged forced removal by relocating somewhere safer and starting new towns with other peoples. Here’s the catch, though. To win federal recognition today, a tribe usually has to show a paper trail with Washington, mostly through treaties. Nations that got by through moving around and keeping things informal often don’t have those documents. Ellis rejects the idea that no treaty means no people, and her research gives these nations real historical evidence to use as they push for recognition.
She also works directly with Native communities. Through the Reclaiming Stories project, she partners with the Peoria and Miami nations and several museums to study painted deer hides from the 1600s and 1700s, which preserve accounts of historical events and Indigenous knowledge. What she learns there will feed her next book, a long history of imagery and communication across the early Indigenous Midwest and South.
Ellis holds a BA from Tulane University (2010) and a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2015). After a postdoctoral fellowship at Penn’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, she spent five years at New York University as an assistant professor and co-director of its Native Studies Forum before moving to Princeton in 2022.
A well-earned honor
Congratulations are in order for Long Soldier and Ellis. A MacArthur fellowship ranks among the most coveted awards in American intellectual life, and landing one means people across the country have been following your work closely, whether you knew it or not.
For Long Soldier, the timing couldn’t be better. We hits shelves next month, and she gets to send it into the world with about the biggest vote of confidence a writer can receive. Ellis is still early in her career, with a new book underway and her deer hide research alongside the Peoria and Miami nations still unfolding.
Their wins reach past the two of them, too. Native writers and scholars have spent generations fighting for a seat at the table, and here are two of them being told, in effect, to keep going and given the monetary support to do so. There’s a saying that goes “when one rises, we all rise.” Their win gives all of NDN Country good reason to celebrate this week. We can’t wait to see what they do next.
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