Happy New Year! Our Q&A with author Morgan Talty continues. Morgan is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation and author of Night of the Living Rez and Fire Exit. His recent article, “Essential Fiction, Nonfiction, Memoir and Short Stories by Native American and Indigenous Authors to Add to Your List,” appeared in People magazine.
Q: I started reading your short story collection, Night of the Living Rez. Could you tell me about the inspiration for those stories?
A: “Thanks for reading it, and I hope you’re enjoying it! In the beginning, the inspiration for it came from family and memories. But the more I wrote and rewrote and revised it, the more it moved away and became mostly fiction. There are parts that are autofiction, but the book really is fiction. But the emotion, the pain, the happiness, all of it, is true.”
Q: Could you tell me about the inspiration for your debut novel, Fire Exit?
A: “The idea came in 2015. I was taking either professor N. Bruce Duthu’s Law and Lit class or his Federal Indian Law class at the time. It was the former that perhaps planted the seed and then the latter that watered it. I was sipping my Novak coffee in front of Sanborn, calming down after one’s usual encounter with Novak staff, when I thought about Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, which we had read. I thought about how she looked at the law and used it as a means to create an incident, something to set the story in motion. It got me thinking, ‘What incident could I find or use to start a book that came from federal Indian policy?’ And it really was this quick—I was like, ‘Blood quantum is messed up…what if a Penobscot citizen who only has a quarter Penobscot blood in her—the minimum to be considered a member or citizen—what if she had a child with a non-Native man and lied and said the father was Native so her daughter could be enrolled [in the Penobscot nation]. What must that feel like for the father?” I didn’t do anything with it except write it down. A few years later I wrote the first draft.”
Secretary Note: The Native Governance Center describes blood quantum as a controversial concept that “refers to the amount of so-called ‘Indian blood’ that an individual possesses.” It is not an Indigenous concept but derives from white settlers in the 18th-century who imposed it as a way of limiting the rights of Native people. The federal Dawes Act of 1887 broke up communally held Native lands into allotments, which were parceled out based on blood quantum. Today, about 70 percent of federally recognized Native nations in the United States still use it as a metric for citizenship.
Q: What’s the first memory that pops up when you think about Dartmouth?
A: “I found a ditched 30-rack of Keystone Light under the bushes one early morning in front of Sanborn, and the friend I was with took it and I didn’t see him for some time.”
And now for some (really old) class news that missed the July/August issue: Renata Hegyi-Hoeger, Th’18, and her husband Lars-Olaf Hoeger ’14 welcomed a beautiful baby boy in February. Their new family of three is now in Ithaca, New York. To any alumni in the area, please reach out and reconnect!
Bria Grangard and her husband, Dan Giordano, also welcomed a beautiful baby boy, Jack Giordano, in January. Congratulations, and you’re killing it with new parenthood!
—Lynn Huang, 4610 Altha St., Raleigh, NC 27606; lynnshuang94@gmail.com
