In the title story included in the collection Night of the Living Rez by David Talty, a character named JP adopts the distinctive vocal inflections used by actor Evan Adams in his brilliant portrayal of Thomas Builds-the-Fire in the film Smoke Signals to reference the film with a quote that becomes a recurring motif throughout the story. When JP channels Thomas to assert, “Some days it’s a good day to die,” he launches a brief discussion about watching Smoke Signals in class at school with the narrator and protagonist of these stories, David.
It is learned that the students attending school on the Panawahpskek (Penobscot) Nation reservation in Maine in which these stories are set are treated to the major convenience of spending time in U.S. History class watching Smoke Signals in conjunction with studying the Trail of Tears and then watching the film again later in the year when studying the Settlement Act. This short discussion ends with irony JP goes on to quote Thomas again with his observation that “Nothing says Native better than `Hey, Victor!’”
That this brief scene occurs during the story “Night of the Living Rez” which inspired the title for the entire collection is significant because at least of the year of publication, 2022, the film Smoke Signals remained the foundational pop culture starting point for familiarity with reservation life for many non-indigenous Americans. Just as JP recognizes the irony of calling out a name with etymological roots steeped so deeply in European history it goes all the way back to the Roman Empire as being the single best way to define your Native American ancestry, so there is irony in this purposely connection between the portrait of reservation life in Smoke Signals and the portrait of reservation life in these stories. The film is set mostly in Idaho’s Coeur D'Alene Indian Reservation while the reservation life depicted in the book takes place in Maine. Two completely different Native American tribes living on reservations in two completely different states occupying regions of the country bearing practically no cultural similarity to each other. And yet, as the scene described above makes with clear with its deeply ironic self-awareness, is inevitable that this collection will be compared to other works of literature, films, and television shows dealing with life on Native American reservations as if that subject were a monolithic homogeneous experience.
The stories in Night of the Living Rez deal with many of the same aspects of life on the reservation that post-John Wayne portrayals of Native Americans make clear are experiences shared across the breadth of the country. There is acknowledgement of the inescapable fact that alcoholism is epidemic within these societies. Many of the stories here touch upon the casual drug use that especially common among younger members of the population. And, yes, there is even a character identified as a “medicine man.” But most of the pop culture presentations of reservations are set west of the Mississippi where there is the built-in association with and allusion to past pop culture portrayals of “cowboys and Indians” as a mean of establishing familiarity (usually for the sake of irony) with non-indigenous audiences. Talty faced the challenge of writing a book about the realities of the consequences of the actual historical legacy of “cowboys and Indians” in a place where there were nos cowboys and where many people may not even stop to think there were even any Indians.
At the end of the book, the author offers a short Afterword section titled “A Note on Penobscot Spelling” in which he acknowledges that even his grasp of his tribal language is “rudimentary.” This is due to its being an oral language which only gradually developed an alphabetic system. The point being that even within the tribe itself there is a built-in problem with self-identity. Stories like “The Blessing Tobacco” and “The Name Means Thunder” and “Food for the Common Cold” as well as others in the collection, are all in one way specifically about the effort to define the self-identity of being members of this Native American Nation. Talty does not explicitly address the issue, but in a variety of allusive ways, the stories in this collection all touch upon the topic of being “Native” in America but not being a stereotypical representative of being a “Native American.” The title of the collection is fraught with its undertones of horror of its portrait of reservation life in Maine. It is subtly suggested that the overarching horror of this experience is that in addition to being isolated and alienated within the broader American society, these characters also feel isolated and alienated from the broader Native American society as well. They are outsiders among outsiders.
