At the bridge to the reservation, the river was still frozen, ice shining white-blue under a full moon. The sidewalk on the bridge hadn’t been shoveled since the last nor-easter crapped snow in November, and I walked in the boot prints everyone made who walked the walk to Overtown to get pot or catch the bus to wherever it was us skeejins had to go, which wasn’t anywhere because everything we needed — except pot — was on the rez. Well, except Best Buy or Bed Bath & Beyond, but those Natives who bought 4K Ultra DVDs or fresh white doilies had cars, wouldn’t be taking the bus like me or Fellis did each day to the methadone clinic. That's another thing the rez didn’t have: a methadone clinic. But we had sacred grounds where sweats and peyote ceremonies happened once a month, except since I had chosen to take methadone, I was ineligible to participate in Native spiritual practice, according to the doc on the rez.
Natives damning Natives.
Although technically a collection of twelve short stories, Night of the Living Rez reads like an episodic novel (so I am moved to review it like one, despite each story being a perfectly composed pearl; consider this the review of the necklace they form together). Each story centers on David (“Dee” to his friends, or to his Mom, “gwus” [boy]) — a member of the Penobscot Nation whose mother whisked him away from his white father’s home in the middle of the night to raise him on the reservation in Maine where she grew up — and the stories jump around in time from when he was a boy playing stick fights in the swamp with his buddies, up until he’s late-middle-aged and visiting his Mom in an elder care facility. Author Morgan Talty fully fleshes out David and his family in these stories: this is modern life on a reservation, with poverty, addiction, and trauma, but also community, friendships, and love. There’s a fascinating blend of modern and traditional worldviews in these tales: as the title implies, the spirits and monsters of the Penobscot belief system haunt the land throughout David’s life, but even more compellingly, the title story itself is one of modern circumstances and their horrifying true life consequences. I loved everything about this collection: David is a character you can’t help but root for — not in spite of his flaws, but because you witness how they came to be.
She’s dressed nice. Casual. A white T-shirt and black yoga pants and white sneakers. She doesn’t do yoga. All the white on her makes her look more Native, more Indian (she hates that word — Indian). But nothing makes her look young. She’s Native, and she has trauma. So do I — I’m the one who saw it — but she thinks she has more. She doesn’t say that, but she thinks it. Maybe she’s right. Maybe older Natives have more trauma than younger ones.
Central to these stories are David’s relationships: with his friends (and especially his best friend as a young man, Fellis) and with his Mom (who drinks boxed wine nightly with her live-in boyfriend). In the first story, Burn, David (who was unsuccessful in trying to scam some pot from a dealer) stumbles upon Fellis in the woods. Fellis had passed out in a snowbank, and when he woke up and realised that his hair had frozen into the ground, he was trapped until David found him, cut off his braid, and helped him home. Fellis gives David some money to go buy pot and snacks, but he also asks David to retrieve his hair from the woods so they can burn it and keep the spirits away. And this really sets the tone for the book: Until Fellis mentions burning the hair, these could be any two young guys; there’s a universality to the experience, but the ending makes this a particularly Indigenous tale.
The second story, In a Jar, tells the story of David and his Mom’s resettlement on the reservation. Nearly immediately, David finds a glass jar beneath the stoop of their new house — “filled with hair and corn and teeth. The teeth were white with a tint of yellow at the root. The hair was gray and thin and loose. Wild. And the corn was kind of like the teeth, white and yellow and looked hard.” — and recognising bad medicine when she sees it, his Mom calls her friend Frick, the medicine man who will eventually move in, and he performs a cleansing ceremony. Even so, in the stories that follow, David and his family never seem quite able to shrug off the buried curse (which I reckon one could read as the lingering effects of colonisation, systemic racism, intergenerational trauma, etc.).
With stories that jump around nonlinerally, traumatic events are hinted at and then revealed — we see David attempting to rob his grandmother for drug money before seeing him as a ten-year-old boy and learning what set him on that path — and the format was a very satisfying reading experience of foreshadowing and then filling in the blanks; with each story standing artfully on its own.
How’d we get here? That’s Fellis’ question, but it’s mine too. How’d we get here? I’m starting to think that each time I ask it, each time I consider an answer, I wind up further from where I should be, from where I was. Where I had been. I left a lot of things behind. Or maybe that’s not it — maybe it’s that a lot of things had left me behind. Friends. Family. Relationships. The future.
I did love everything about this: From Talty’s sentences to the perfect little world created in each individual story to the overall whole they formed. There’s pain and humour and life to be found here and I leave feeling like I have witnessed something absolutely true about the modern Penobscot experience; I could ask for nothing more.
