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.

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

Star- and moonlight hit the water. Down by the river, I sat on a rock, wishing I'd eaten and grabbed those pills and had a cigarette. Wishing I'd never heard of Antiques Roadshow. Maybe even wishing I was a winooch and didn't live on a reservation whose history was in a little museum and could be stolen for a buck. Didn't make any sense that parts of us were worth so much and at the same time we were worth so little. "You're nothing."

David is young when his mother, a Penobscot woman, leaves his white father and comes north to Maine to return to the reservation. It's disorienting for young David, of course, and not least because his mother has come to live with an older Native named Frick who seems to have a low opinion of David's connection to his indigenous background. David's sister, Paige, appears as well, mysteriously pregnant, and then mysteriously un-pregnant. As he grows up, David's life on the reservation becomes a checkered one. As a teenager, he develops an addiction to pills, and then methadone. As the lives of his mother, of Frick, and of Paige unravel in devastating ways, he finds himself--as he was as a child--challenged to provide meaningful support, or stability amid the chaos.

There is a familiar kind of story I have seen in many books by Native writers, a story in which lost Natives, mixed up with substance abuse or crime or simple despair and mental instability, find safety and wholeness by returning to their land. That's the story, more or less, of James Welch's Winter in the Blood, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn. Contemporary Native writers have been interrogating that story, I think, in interesting ways: Tommy Orange, for instance, in his novel about Natives living in urban Oakland, remarks that "the land is everywhere or it's nowhere." I'm interested in how Night of the Living Rez presents this story: David's "return" to the Penobscot reservation brings him closer to his sister and his grandmother, and to Penobscot life, but it's troubled in many ways that subverts the straightforward positivity of such narratives.

For instance, there's Frick: when David first arrives, Frick chastises him for his inability to shoot and hunt, suggesting this makes him deficient as a Native. It's only later (or I missed it the first time) that we learn that Frick is a western Native, not Penobscot at all--a small but clever dig, I think, at the way certain ideas about Native people dominate American cultural media. And yet, the reservation is always being mined for media. One subplot involves David's friend Ferris breaking into the Penobscot museum to steal a "root club," having seen one go for big bucks on Antique Roadshow. In the title story, a film crew trying to produce a documentary on the reservation ends up filming one of the most harrowing and traumatic experiences of David's life. These details provide a vision of Native life that is offered up as a consumable commodity, even as Natives like David remain, or feel they remain, estranged from it. Running from the cops, David ends up hiding out in a sweat lodge--a grimly ironic symbol, until he returns later to actually go through with the sweat lodge ceremony: "[A]nd right then my body sweated all that was left in it, which really wasn't very much at all." So there is a positive vision here; I don't mean to suggest there isn't--only that one of the things Night of the Living Rez suggests so eloquently is that sometimes, coming home isn't enough.

Not every story in Night of the Living Rez landed for me, but one thing I did really enjoy about it was its structure: David is the narrator of each story, but the stories are out of order chronologically; the book skips from child David to the teenage "Dee" to the adult, looking back. Partly this structure helps the book to subvert familiar expectations about problem and resolution, sickness and recovery, alienation and integration. Like my old friend Infinite Jest, it struck me how much Night of the Living Rez is a story about addiction--David waking up in a grain silo, David stealing money from his grandmother to pay for Klonopin, David adrift at the methadone clinic--and the structure reveals something about the halting and peripatetic nature of recovery. The title story, maybe the best story, reveals that it's not just David who struggle with substance abuse: Paige and Frick, too, stumble around like the zombies suggested by the title, and the abuse facilitates horrible acts that rupture lives. But although there are no simple solutions, life goes on--the "Living Rez."