Night of the Living Rez

Fellis is a secondary character who appears in all the Dee-narrated stories. It is unclear when or how Fellis entered Dee’s life, but his presence gives Dee more access to drugs and more opportunity to commit crimes while searching for money. Fellis is a significantly more violent character than Dee. He often uses violence as a means of “solving” interpersonal conflict, as in his interaction with Daryl in “Earth, Speak.” He’s also verbally and emotionally abusive, as seen in his interactions with his mother in “Get Me Some Medicine.” Fellis physically fights only once with Dee, when Dee breaks his nose after he verbally abuses his own mother. The fact that Fellis never confronts Dee about this, and moves past it despite Dee’s attempts to talk about it, suggests that Fellis understands the harmful nature of his actions but doesn’t possess the emotional resources, or desire, to change how he interacts with the people in his life.

Fellis’s arc through the collection is ultimately tragic. Through the Dee-narrated stories, there is a slow escalation in Fellis’s schemes for quick cash, ultimately leading Dee and Fellis to their robbery of the tribal museum in “Earth, Speak.” Dee learns of Fellis’s fate—getting arrested after fleeing to Boston—from his mother while in methadone withdrawal. Fellis isn’t mentioned again in the collection after this event, disappearing from Dee’s narration just as he vanishes from the reservation.

David’s mother is one of the collection’s most complicated and dynamic characters. She is deeply committed to her children and yet is often in conflict with them—particularly Paige. The push and pull of her relationships with her children is exemplified by her fight with Paige in “The Blessing Tobacco,” when she tries to support Paige’s new work in a pawnshop by selling her valuable jewelry, only to get in a fight with her daughter when she receives less money for the jewelry than she believes she’s owed. David’s mother is often torn between competing loyalties—loyalties to her children, to her own self-worth, to her mother, and even to Frick. Like many victims of domestic abuse, David’s mother goes to great lengths to appease the emotionally unstable and often abusive Frick: Though it is unclear what exactly happens after the events of the story “Night of the Living Rez,” David’s mother does decide to stay with Frick even after he has attempted to sexually assault Paige.

Like most of the characters in Night of the Living Rez, David’s mother is coping with Entrapment in Cycles of Trauma. One of the traumas she shares in “Food for the Common Cold” is the loss of a child. Despite dealing with this particular trauma, David’s mother takes the most active role in caring for Bedogi when Paige becomes depressed; she even stops smoking cigarettes while the child is in her house. David’s mother actively tries to work against the cycles of trauma that she’s part of, and she does what she can to help the people in her life do the same.

Paige, David’s older sister, is one of the collection’s most tragic figures. Paige’s life is punctuated by multiple traumas: a miscarriage in “In a Jar,” an attempted rape in “Night of the Living Rez,” and, finally, the loss of her child in “The Name Means Thunder.” Like her brother, Paige gets trapped in cycles of addiction, going in and out of rehab throughout the collection. Paige is more active than David, though, in trying to find work for herself and define the terms of her own life. She doesn’t live with her mother for nearly as much time as David/Dee does, and she finds work off the reservation in an attempt to create financial freedom.

In “Smokes Last,” when David’s mother finds out that David has been stealing her cigarettes, it’s Paige who suggests that she give David a pack and tell him to make it last. This response suggests that Paige has a more practical—or, perhaps, more resigned—outlook on cyclical trauma than David’s mother does. Paige’s approach speaks to the idea that there’s an inevitability to the cycles of addiction in her family and that not making a move to acknowledge the problem is not an effective solution. Chronologically, Paige’s last appearance in the collection comes in “Safe Harbor,” when Dee’s mother asks about her, suggesting that Paige is still alive in the Dee-narrated stories but no longer lives at home.