Night of the Living Rez

This brief opening story introduces two of the collection’s central characters, Dee and Fellis, and uses one of the collection’s primary and most complex symbols—drug use—to both characterize and provide conflict for these characters. Dee’s lie to Rab demonstrates both Dee’s resourcefulness and his desperation. The encounter with Fellis shows just how dire the eventual consequences of Entrapment in Cycles of Trauma can become. In this opening tale, Fellis’s plight foreshadows what might become of Dee if he’s not able to break out of the cycles of poverty and drug use.

Talty uses Fellis’s hair in this story not only as a site of conflict but also as a way of introducing the complex attitudes these characters have toward their Indigeneity. Throughout the collection, long, braided hair on men is a marker of Penobscot heritage, and cutting this hair can be viewed as a rejection of tribal identity. Dee’s immediate impulse to shear Fellis’s hair and Fellis’s initial resistance to this idea demonstrate a difference between these characters in how they view their own Indigeneity. From the outset, Dee seems to be more distanced from his identity and less afraid of the cultural impacts that might come of this distance; Fellis, by contrast, is more attuned to how such distancing might be perceived. This distinction is reinforced by the heavily symbolic choices the characters make with regard to the hair at the end of the story: Fellis insists that the hair must be burned to hold true to tribal norms and avoid evil spirits, while Dee decides to leave the hair stuck in the ice while prioritizing acquiring marijuana.