Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

It was all sickness, the whole thing, something that couldn't be cured, but--and maybe it was because I was tired--I felt that I had done something terrible, like I had been the one doing all the violent hunting, and I wanted to get up and right it all, but I didn't know how. Maybe that was how Great-Uncle Robbie had felt, like he had no choices, that no right way existed to fix anything at all. In the moments before my eyes shut, hearing Frick snore and the clock tick toward 4:00 AM, I felt like I knew Robbie, felt like I had memories of him where he took me fishing or hunting, and when I couldn't take the fish off the hook or when I couldn't kill the white rabbit, he told me that was fine, and he unhooked the fish--its jaw popping, gills throbbing--and plopped it into the river, or he took the rifle from my hands, and after all that we walked away through mud or snow until I stopped walking but he kept on going and going and going out there in quiet strides through a dark-pined forest until he was gone.

For the past few years, I've spent each January reading fiction by Native American authors. I call it "Indijanuary." This year, I'm starting with a re-read of Morgan Talty's story collection Night of the Living Rez, because I'm hoping to teach it to my students in the spring. Last year, we did selections from it, combined with a few chapters from Tommy Orange's There There, but students by and large seemed to feel that they were missing something by not getting either text in full. So we're going to try to read the whole thing this semester.

Night of the Living Rez is a collection of stories about David, a Penobscot who, as a child, moves with his mother back to her home on the reservation in central Maine. The first time I read it, I noted that I was interested in the way that Living Rez complicates a very familiar narrative of return and healing: David's return to the Penobscot reservation don't prevent him from growing up to battle with drug addiction; nor do they prevent his sister Paige from being assaulted by their stepfather, Frick. When David and his family first arrive, they discover a jar of corn and teeth that Frick determines has been left as a kind of curse, and it's the first indication that life on the rez may not always be easy. This time around, I had a new appreciation for the way that the stories jump around in time, which encourages the reader to focus less on causality--that is, it prevents us from focusing too intently on the root causes of David's addiction and other struggles--and more on the images and motifs that thread between the various stages of David's life.

This time around, I also appreciated the extent to which Night of the Living Rez is about addiction. In his older stages, David is in methadone treatment, a burdensome regime of injections he must go through at the clinic each day, and which prevent him from participating in Penobscot ceremonies. But David is far from the only person in the book struggling with addiction: his sister Paige, too, takes methadone, and her addiction struggles account in part for an early miscarriage and, I think, the physical vulnerability of another infant who dies. Frick, who represents for David's mom a renewed life on the reservation, becomes an inveterate alcoholic; that moment that shocked me so much in my first read-through--David catches Frick trying to tear the clothes off of Paige--struck me clearly this time as someone who doesn't know where they are or what they are doing because their brain has been so addled by drink. David interprets Frick mindlessness in terms of the zombie moves that he loves; The Night of the Living Rez is the night that addiction turns men into zombies, or the spirits called Goo'gooks.

Whereas There There explicitly frames addiction and substance abuse as the consequences of settler colonial history--the legs of the spider-trickster that show up in characters' bodies--I think Living Rez has a more complicated and nuanced view of the connection. David says quite explicitly that the valuable root clubs at the local museum make him feel worthless in comparison, as if he and his community only have value when interpolated through a white gaze. But we also get the sense that addiction and methadone treatment are fairly common in the area around the rez, and that whites (like his bitter ex-girlfriend Tabitha) are not immune from the effects of rural poverty and neglect. The question for Talty seems to be more about the cure than the cause: why is it that David must choose between methadone and the sweat ceremonies of the reservation? Does one of these offer a "real" cure for him? As with Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, I think Night of the Living Rez asks us to consider what is meant by the word "medicine"--that jar of corn and teeth is "bad medicine"--and whether sickness and health are concepts that take in whole communities and relationships, and not just what can be measured when David pisses in a cup.