Morgan Talty on How Much Native Blood It Takes to Be Native American

Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, is a poignant meditation on belonging, identity and family. The story follows Charles Lamosway, who lives across Maine’s Penobscot Reservation where he was raised by his mother, Louise, and stepfather, Frederick. While his mother could stay on the reservation because she married a Native man, Charles couldn’t. Despite not being Native, and not being granted access to the reservation after he comes of age, Charles still feels very much connected to the Native American experience, bound to it by the loving relationship he shares with his stepfather. Through this, Talty explores what it means to belong to a place, and to relationships not bound by blood.

The primary pulse of the book is Charles’s secret: he has a daughter, Elisabeth, who currently lives on the reservation. A daughter he has been watching grow up from across the river. A daughter who, by the fact of being his—is technically not native because to be native, blood percentages matter. As Charles contends with his desire to share this truth with Elisabeth, now a grown woman, he is also forced to grapple with the grief around his stepfather’s passing, and the relationship he has shared with his mother, whose dementia-induced episodes raise questions about his own history. Deeply moving and utterly gut wrenching, the novel reflects Talty’s commitment to placing emotion at the crux of his storytelling.

Morgan Talty, a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation, is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, Night of the Living Rez. His writing has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Over Zoom, we talk about blood quantum, colonization and the manipulation of stories, bodies as containers of legacy and trauma, and much more.

Bareerah Ghani: I wanted to start with a central through line of the novel—lineage. Charles tells Elizabeth the truth because he thinks it’s important that she knows her history. And when Charles’s mother’s memory starts to falter, he starts to question how much he knows about his own history. In the absence of oral history or an archive, how do you think we can discover and reclaim parts of our heritage?

Morgan Talty: Let’s say colonizers wipe out languages, stories, everything that makes a culture, a culture, yet still politically treat it as an entity. Something like what happened with the use of blood quantum where, if you dilute the blood enough, your Native Americans no longer exist yet you’re kind of born from a Native person. It’s like, we die but we don’t die. We’re still here. This random percentage has taken away our status as indigenous people. How do we reclaim our identity then? 

If, on paper, what makes and shapes us, is gone, it’s gone. I think we need to look toward the future, toward rebuilding new stories. That’s what I try to do, at least, as a writer. The stories I don’t know or I know only pieces of, I’ll invent or reinvent them in my own way.

I think about traditional stories, like, of Glooscap, or Gluskabe, the Wabanaki cultural hero who had multiple attempts at creating human life. One of his failed attempts was where he tried building people out of rocks, and it didn’t work because he found that the rocks are cold. They had no hearts and the very short version is that he set out to destroy them but some escaped, and well, that’s one way to explain why some people today are cold hearted, or, you know, rotten and evil because they’re descendants of stone people. So I wrote about that in The Night of The Living Rez but I expanded it in a way that I didn’t know had been really told. And I think that’s the point with oral storytelling, too—there are certain things that can’t change, the rest you can, you know, build around, and every storyteller tells a story differently. And so going back to the idea of ‘when we have nothing, we reinvent’—if we have the DNA, we’re good to go. If we can’t remember how so and so told it 200 years ago but we know that these are the elements of it, that’s enough to reclaim those types of traditional oral stories.

BG: Following from this, I am wondering about how the novel at different points presents this idea of the body as a container of blood and legacy. Charles insists that our bodies retain memories that we may not be aware of. And I find that idea really fascinating, because that posits bodies as separate entities of themselves. I’m just curious about your thoughts on this. How do you contend with the possibility of not knowing something integral about yourself?

MT: I have been thinking a lot about this idea, especially with children who are adopted into families that they’re not actually related to. In South America between the ’70s and ’90s, a lot of babies were basically stolen for white people to adopt in the U.S. This one individual I know who grew up with their white family, they ended up teaching themselves Spanish to reconnect, and now they’ve gone back to their home country. They love their parents, and yet they find this strong pull to go back and reconnect. So I think our bodies hold memories that aren’t even ours, that don’t even belong to us. 

There’s this experiment where scientists had taken adult mice and put them in a cage, and sprayed a specific scent the mice liked. They would wait a second or two after the mice had enjoyed it, and then the floor would deliver little electric shocks to their feet. They kept doing it, and eventually, when they would spray the scent, the mice would begin to jump because they knew they were going to get electrocuted. Then, they had those mice have babies which were placed in their own cage. Now the babies had never experienced what their parents experienced. Yet, when they sprayed that smell, the babies automatically jumped. Their bodies remembered what their parents had endured, and had adapted to make sure they wouldn’t get hurt. Their body had created a defense mechanism, which I find fascinating. And I wonder what our defense mechanisms are against intergenerational trauma, if they exist. 

Speaking of not knowing things, I’m actually working on this memoir about my parents and in a way I envision it as one day, my son or children could read the book and be like, Oh, I feel like I’ve known my grandparents my whole life. And a while ago, I was at this event reading from Fire Exit actually and in the audience was my great aunt. She’s really young compared to my grandparents. She was surprisingly closer in age to my dad. At the end of the reading, she was telling me about how my dad, who had dropped out of Northwestern, and was bad into drugs and all that, had called my grandparents up one night and said he needed to be picked up. So my dad’s dad, my papa, and my papa’s brother went and they also had this little baby with them. And my dad looked over at this baby, and he was like, I’m never gonna get the chance to have a baby. That broke my heart because he loved babies and I never knew that about him. And after the reading that night, I was walking to get food, and I just started crying. I was like, shit. This memoir isn’t just about my son, Charlie. It’s also about what I don’t know. And so now I’m wanting to interview every single person that’s ever come in contact with my mother and father because the more we know, the more it helps us heal in a way. The happiest families I’ve ever seen are the ones who know their histories really well. 

BG: There’s a line you have in the book that speaks to what you’re talking about. “We are made of stories, and if we don’t know them—the ones that make us—how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?”  I love this idea that we are an amalgamation of all that has come before us. We carry all these stories with us. But to me, the notion of stories also includes lies, and half truths and manipulation. How do you reconcile that with ideas about inheritance, legacy and identity?

MT: I think, to some degree we are living a life where stories have been manipulated. I think Indian Country is in that position because indigenous tribes have become internally colonized. We have adopted the ways of the colonizers. Blood quantum is a big thing. Now, it’s just a matter of, Are we going to choose to correct our biases and the racism we’ve inherited? And I’m not saying that tribes in the United States lived in perfect harmony prior to contact, because that’s not true. But some tribes did get pretty close at being right about how best to live. And no culture is ever going to be perfect. But that’s the thing, we’re even far from that imperfect, perfect. We have to confront the fact that we’re contributing to problems, and I don’t just mean indigenous people. I mean, everybody—we’re all in this together regardless of race. It’s just a matter of communities coming to terms with the fact that we need to fix ourselves. We need to fix the way we operate, or else we will disappear.

BG: I understand Blood Quantum is a colonialist construct that usurps identity and rights from Native Americans and yet, it continues to be implemented on grounds of preservation. Can you talk about what preservation means to you as a Native American?

MT: There’s two ways I think about it. One is preserving indigeneity but in the form of the white man’s image. We don’t have to use blood quantum but it’s what’s used by the majority of tribes. We use it to keep track of membership, which is a requirement by the federal government. So in a way we preserve ourselves by following blood quantum. We have the ability to lower the blood quantum and let people in and tribes try to do that when they’re close to extinction. 

But on the other hand, I think, Why do we want to preserve ourselves in this way? I’ll use the example of a commodity because that’s pretty much what Indigenous people have become, and our culture is like a commodity to be consumed—let’s say, we’re something that’s supposed to be frozen after it’s been opened, and what’s happened is that we’ve basically put ourselves in the fridge instead of the freezer. I don’t mean to suggest dehumanization in any way, but if we had an answer to, what does it mean to be Indigenous, we’ve kept that answer in the fridge, and it’s slowly rotting, if not rotted already, when it should have been kept in the freezer. I don’t know if that metaphor makes sense. 

BG: It does. It is this idea that the essence of indigeneity has been distorted over time when it really should have been preserved. 

MT: Yeah, it shouldn’t have gone this way in history but it did because of powerful people who wanted land and they made it so they got the things they wanted, which inadvertently affected us. If there had been an actual mutual attempt to—I’m gonna quote Audrey Lorde here—celebrate difference, we wouldn’t be needing to find the goddamn tools to dismantle the master’s house.

BG: This novel defies certain expectations about indigenous fiction. One of the most fascinating aspects of this novel to me is how it explores this idea of belonging through its protagonist Charles, a white man who he feels like he’s native, or that he has “a stake in their experience.” The novel is brilliant in exploring questions about where we belong, who gets to define and shape that sense of belonging. I would love your thoughts on this, in connection with how the novel came to you.

MT: I think the people who get to define belonging are the people who love one another, genuinely, unconditionally. That’s the whole reason Charles feels a connection to the tribe—because of his relationships with his stepfather, Frederick, who he sees as his true father, and with Gizos, Mary, even Roger, especially when you think about the end and the way they’re just able to sit there in that type of silence. And I know it’s a dramatic moment, but I think love is the thing that defines it. 

As to where the novel came from, Louise Erdrich was actually an inspiration for this book. Her book, The Round House, which won the National Book Award, is told from the point of view of 13-year-old Joe Coutts. The story is that his mother is raped. There’s a high rate of violence, including sexual violence, against Native women. I think it was reported one in three Native women would be bludgeoned and/ or murdered in their lifetime. That’s 33%. That’s a high number. And one of the reasons why is because in 1978 there was a Supreme Court case, Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, where the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that tribes don’t have the inherent power to try non-members who commit crimes on their land. But the Federal Government has the Major Crimes Act, and they’re the ones who are responsible for trying and prosecuting our members. There’s a story of a Cherokee woman who was driven around blindfolded and raped by two or three men, and just dumped somewhere and even though she knew who did it, she couldn’t say where the crime happened, whether it was tribal, state or private land, because you need to know where it happened in order to know who has jurisdiction. And that’s the whole premise of the book—they’re trying to figure out where the crime occurred. So that court case was and is a huge contributing factor as to that high number, and so I was thinking about that. I was like, I wonder what I can look at, in policy or law, and not use it as the plot, really, because blood quantum isn’t the plot of this book. I remember I was at Dartmouth College as an undergrad. I got out of class and a bunch of us were talking about The Round House. I’m just sitting there, smoking a cigarette, and the idea just came to me. I was like, Hmm! What happens if a white guy grew up on the rez his whole life, had a baby with a quarter blood, which would mean, in this instance, the child wouldn’t be an enrolled member, and so the mother lies and says it’s somebody else’s. And I was like, alright cool. I didn’t write it though until a couple of years later. But it was that fast, just looking at it, and that gave me the engine. But it was six rewrites of this book to figure out what it was really about, which is family and belonging. So yeah, I owe it all to Louise Erdrich and her dedication to always have been writing about women. And you know, highlighting the violence that exists. Without her work, this book wouldn’t exist.

BG: It’s not uncommon for writers of color and those from marginalized communities to feel a lingering pressure to write in a certain way or about specific things. I’m wondering if you’ve felt something similar and how you navigated these external pressures and expectations about what indigenous stories should be or how they should be written?

MT: When I started writing, there was Louise Erdrich and a scattering of other voices that I hadn’t yet encountered. And then there was the Native writer, we all know who I’m talking about, that person is obviously no longer in the literary community. But when I started reading, that was the author I knew, that was who I was copying to some degree. I studied that literature, understood how it worked and its relationship to, at least for indigenous people as well as I imagine other marginalized communities, how we’ve had to sell ourselves in order to progress. 

I think about Penobscots baskets. We used to have these utility baskets, meant for lugging stuff. We still use them, going out to camp, that’s what we would pack our stuff in because they can carry so much, and they’re made from pounded ash. When tourism started to come up in the early, I don’t know, 1900s, we started to make baskets that were prettier, looked a certain way. I recognized that kind of performative nature—and you see it all over Indian country with various aspects, to various degrees—in that individual’s writing and I was like, I guess I have to do that to be successful. But my first mentor—who I consider to be the best mentor I’ve ever had and that’s throwing no shade on anybody—told me that that kind of writing is garbage. This isn’t real literature. And he was right. But at the same time, it wasn’t that writer’s fault with how they were writing, at least to some degree. My first mentor taught me what really mattered, and that was emotion, setting, the principles of fiction, and then I could do whatever I wanted. I refused to do the performative stuff, refused to explain things. That’s how I navigated it, I didn’t adhere or conform to what readers thought they wanted, which is what Louis Owens kind of talks about, this comfortable, colorful, easy tour of Indian Country. I was not going to give them that. I was going to give them my experience, which so happened to be in a manner that you can look at it as stereotypes, tropes, things that have been talked about or written about. But I kept going that way, and then Tommy Orange came out and subverted a lot of people’s expectations and since then, I think that’s why we have such a boom in indigenous literature. 

And about my thoughts on expectations about what indigenous stories should be or how they should be written—a story is a story. A story should make you feel, should aim for transcendentalism, it should change something, maybe not for everybody but it should affect at least somebody. It should be in conversation with all other forms of literature out there, despite race and background. It should be written to address the heart of the human condition.

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