Amanda Peters’ bestselling debut novel, The Berry Pickers (2023), which received the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, is a story of significant tragedy, about Indigenous family separation in Nova Scotia. Similar abuses appear throughout Peters’ book of short stories, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, which opens with a dedication “to all those who have shared their stories and planted the seed of imagination.”
The 17 stories that follow are, for the most part, seeds. Many were practice exercises while Peters was working toward The Berry Pickers, and she had no intention of collecting them into a book. Because of their origins, some are little more than fables to be told around a fire, with guidance passed down from matriarchs, and simple axioms like town is a bad place, forest is good. Other stories explore plot elements, like how to deliver a shock of horror: a water cannon used by American government forces to assault the bodies of Standing Rock protesters; a girl’s tongue pierced with a steel pin at a Christian residential school; women jumping to their deaths or being murdered in the woods.
All of Peters’ first-person narrators speak similarly, as if each voice—no matter the age, era or gender—were the same storyteller. But despite this, it’s easy to appreciate her characters’ pain and hope, and in particular, their profound love for the natural world. Read individually, a few stories stand on their own. “The Virgin and the Bear” is a stunning piece about a woman learning her grandmother’s tragic history while placing it within the context of other genocides. The titular story is tender, lyrical and lovely, with forest scenes so lush that you can feel the earth underfoot, and the sharp pain of memory as an older man recalls his late sister. And the Dakota Access Pipeline story, “Tiny Birds and Terrorists,” is the freshest premise in the collection, following a young woman who heals her grief through resistance.
When it comes to contemporary Native fiction, the majority of readers—and likewise, the publishing industry—still focus on stories that whittle down the history and present life of American Indigenous people to colonization and trauma. As Terria Smith, editor of Heyday’s News From Native California, wrote in Publishers Weekly in 2023, “There is a real possibility that a lot of our own literature is unwittingly perpetuating the narrative that tribal people are tragic, but there is much more to us than this.” Peters’ best stories probe the possibility of venturing beyond those tropes.
