Many thanks to the contributors who sent the below responses. Never Whistle at Night, a haunting new anthology of dark fiction crafted by Native writers and edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst, is now available from Vintage Books.
Tiffany Morris: Haunting is history that shows up in the present- stories that are unsettled, refused, and disruptive. The histories of houses and the cities in which they’re built speak to the memory of land and how that land can be exploited. In the city where I live, Kjipuktuk (Halifax) the name translates to “The Great Harbour”. This place has been significant to my people as a gathering place for centuries. In the downtown core, by the harbour itself, pauper graves from centuries ago are buried under a now-closed public library. The library is across the street from where the Burying the Hatchet ceremony took place – a promise to end war between L’nu’k and the Crown. In one small area there is the history of war, of poverty, of uneasy peace, and all their echoes in the present. A graveyard becomes a library becomes a shut-down building – and the city itself becomes a ghost story. It was important for me to have “Night In the Chrysalis” contend with that. I also wanted to explore this idea in microcosm- in the haunted dollhouse. The dollhouse itself became a symbol of how colonial powers try to dictate how Indigenous people move through the world—and how they try to limit us to the possibilities of the colonial imagination. We can resist that in our own narratives, which are environment and imagination coming together in an expression of what is present and continuous—the opposite of a haunting.
Ted Van Alst: As one of the editors, it was important that we call for “dark fiction” rather than shooting for a pure horror collection. Shane and I knew that doing so would widen the story range; that horror and all kinds of crimes hold hands in the world every day, and the collection bears this out. As one of the writers, I was excited to think of the possibilities that call would enable. For this collection, I wanted to write a monster story, but as always, I wanted to explore how we get to calling someone a monster, what the rights and responsibilities for everyone involved might be, and what those consequences are. “Who makes who?” is the central question of the piece. And I had a lot of fun trying to answer it.
Mathilda Zeller: My daughter works at a bookstore. The first time she read “Kushtuka,” my story in Never Whistle at Night, it was when her bookstore received a shipment of the anthology and she had a few free minutes on break.
She called me on her way home from work, full of indignation.
“You didn’t make this up, Mom,” she said. “It’s fiction, you’re supposed to make stuff up.”
I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. I have written a story where Goddesses and mythological monsters are real, where everyday microaggression and racism collide with unspeakable violence. And she’s right; I didn’t really have to make it up.
The heroes and monsters are real. A young white man truly did shoot several elders in the tundra in 1970. My great grandfather insisted on driving my great grandmother to Fairbanks to marry her, despite common law marriage being the default. A white baby daddy, returning to his home in Pennsylvania, quietly paid my great grandmother for decades to raise their child alone, a child he never told his wife and other children about. The mines are dangerous. Bad things happen.
Horror is not something indigenous people have to invent for catharsis. It’s something that shapes our path from the past to the present.
Andrea L. Rogers: My first year in grad school, I had a lot to read. With so little time to sit and appointments to keep, I would often listen to the books and articles in the car. A male Native professor sent me an article to read. It opened with an accurate historic account of the rapes and kidnappings of the Taíno women and girls Columbus and his men abused. When the people organized to deal with the rapists, they, too, were slaughtered. I pulled over to the side of the road and wept. History is a home invasion. It is dark. It is not fiction.
From the time we get up in the morning until we go to sleep, we tell ourselves stories. Some nights, I dream, that subconscious storytelling my brain’s way of trying to create new stories out of old. That is what we are doing in this collection. We are telling new stories. Sometimes we are time travelers, making sense of old crimes, giving it better endings, spending time with relatives we never knew, honoring old ways and ancestors. In these stories, Indians are not the outsiders. When you seize the means of creation, you cease to be a ghost. These stories are dark. These stories are Indigenous. And they may or may not be fiction.
Richard Van Camp: Great horror steals something from you forever. Whether it’s the mucus spraying head pushing out finale of Lars Von Trier’s Hospital TV series or the splatter spray scene of God Killing Himself in Begotten or the mewling cries of the grey children in Silent Hill or the telephone pole scene in Hereditary, great horror crosses body, spiritual and cultural lines in the creator and in the participant.
I haven’t had the chance to read what anyone else has written for Never Whistle At Night, and I can’t wait to. I have a feeling we crossed so many lines within ourselves this collection will be a brutal place of great haunting for you and make no mistake: We cannot wait to haunt you so we can walk with you forever.
You signed up for this.
Now get ready for terror.
David Heska Wanbli Weiden: When I was invited to contribute a short story for Never Whistle at Night, I initially hesitated, as I don’t write in the horror genre. But, when I was told that the anthology was intended to highlight dark fiction, I was all in. And my short story “Sundays” is most certainly dark. It deals with the horrors that Native children had to endure in the residential boarding schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For those who aren’t familiar with these institutions, they were the schools established to “educate” Indigenous children by forbidding them to speak their languages, practice their spirituality, or engage in their cultures. Most children were taken without consent of their parents; state authorities would either abduct the kids or threaten the parents with the deprivation of food rations or other necessities. My own grandmother was a student at three of these institutions, including the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the first and most despised of all of them. Numerous horrors awaited the students at the boarding schools, including physical and sexual abuse, sad to say, and many students died and were buried right there on the grounds.
Although there are no supernatural terrors in my story, there’s a human monster who preyed upon the children at the fictional school I describe, and I do depict some abuse in graphic detail, so I’ll affirm a strong trigger warning for readers. This story was quite difficult to write, but I felt I had a duty to show the atrocities inflicted upon the children, as well as the fear and terror they must have felt. I also touch upon some of the laws that states are currently enacting to shield the schools from lawsuits filed by former students, and how these statutes subvert justice for boarding school survivors. Overall, my goal in writing this tale was to honor the memory of those children who suffered so greatly, and to hopefully raise awareness of this sad chapter in our nation’s history. I hope readers appreciate and enjoy “Sundays” as well as the rest of the stories in the anthology, these tales of ghosts and monsters, hauntings and curses, and the resistance and resilience of Indigenous peoples.
Nick Medina: What makes us who we are? Is it what was taught to us and shared with us as children—the beliefs, values, traditions, and cultural norms of the ethnic group or groups within which we, as individuals, feel most comfortable, secure, and accepted? Or is it the liquid of life running through our veins that dictates who and what we are? I’d read several articles addressing the contentious issue of blood quantum (which, to put it very simply, is the amount of “Indian blood” an individual possesses, used to determine if that individual fits the legal definition of a Native American) within Native communities shortly before hearing about the open call for Never Whistle at Night. The idea of blood—the power it intrinsically possesses coupled with the power we give it (power that bolsters feelings of pride, superiority, and identity) burrowed into my brain and soon I had the germ of an idea that quickly grew roots. My story Quantum tells the tale of a young Native woman with two young sons. One boy’s father is Native, the other’s isn’t. As such, the boy with the non-Native father isn’t officially accepted as a member of his mother’s tribe, which fills his mother with wo rries, regrets, and fears because she doesn’t know how to relate to the boy if he isn’t like the rest of her relatives. Her fear leads her to think terrible thoughts and to do even worse things in an attempt to fix him, failing to see that it’s not the blood that really matters.
Shane Hawk: With my contribution, “Behind Colin’s Eyes,” I wanted to both write a story about my dad and grandpa based on real life and create a psychological horror story surrounding the trope of possession—as Dr. Jones points out in the anthology’s foreword: “Indians are pretty nervous about possession narratives, since those are more or less about a body being colonized…” My story title is purposely a double entendre: Behind (Being) Colin’s Eyes (Colonized).
While I wrote a stressful, mind-bending horror story, it was very important to me to also insert slivers of Native hope, joy, and love. Native representation in the mainstream arts is abysmal, and I don’t think there are enough portrayals of love and joy between a father and son in general. And my story here lets my dad travel back to early-70s Utah where he hunted and fished with my Grandpa Hawk who is no longer in this realm with us. I’d do anything for my dad, and even though my story is pretty f*cked up, I think he can cherish what I tried to do with putting memories to paper.
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