In the opening story of Amanda Peters’ new collection, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, a child watches at a distance as strange people arrive on the shore. The child’s father recognizes these “pale ones.” He promises his child, “They have come before, and they will leave again.” The child isn’t so sure.
Waiting for the Long Night Moon comprises vignettes and short stories told mostly from the first-person perspectives of Indigenous people from the Northern Atlantic coast of Canada and the United States. The stories span the arrival of the first European settlers in the 1600s to the forced removal of Indigenous children from their homes in the late 1800s and present-day climate protests. It’s an ambitious scope for a slim collection that often packs weighty themes of generational grief and resistance to cultural erasure into stories the length of just a few pages.
Peters, a descendant of the Mi’kmaq people, has dedicated much of her literary career to honoring traditional Indigenous storytelling through her prose. In her bestselling debut novel, The Berry Pickers, Mi’kmaq characters are often found sitting together around a firepit, sharing family stories. Waiting for the Long Night Moon reads like a companion to that novel, building and expanding on its narrative universe. Readers will recognize people and places on the periphery of The Berry Pickers in the pages of this new collection: the tree where Mi’kmaq women give birth, young people fighting to save the natural world from industrialization, negligent and corrupt police officers who give no thought to “another dead Indian.” It’s fitting that all of the stories in this collection are short enough to be told aloud around a fire.
At times, Peters’ economical approach leaves her characters lacking in specificity, and instead serving as archetypes. A young woman loses herself in the big city. Someone overhears three ignorant drunks at a bar and tells them off.
Occasionally, in what feels like a rush to underscore a story’s lesson, Peters’ dialogue can feel heavy-handed, as when an Indigenous protest is repeatedly described as “holding up progress,” or a young person wonders why all the reservations are so far from “civilization” and adds, “Stupid question…They wanted to hide us away.”
More often, though, Peters’ brevity works to her advantage. As the stories flow into one another across time and place, a kind of intergenerational dialogue takes shape among seemingly unlinked characters. Children are ripped from their families and put in abusive government-sponsored Christian boarding schools—whose real-life mission was to “kill the Indian in the child”—and long to return home. Elder Indigenous characters guide the children back to themselves by visiting them in animal form, speaking to them in their dreams, and communicating through expressions and embraces when they no longer share a language.
Several of the book’s characters are mourning missing or murdered loved ones, mirroring the ongoing crisis in Canada and the United States of Indigenous people, particularly women, being abducted and murdered at alarmingly high rates. These family members live out their days instinctively searching the faces of strangers in a crowd for the one that resembles their own.
What works best about Waiting for the Long Night Moon is how Peters subtly drafts readers into this search party. She leaves breadcrumbs—such as repeat phrases and familiar backstories—to suggest intimate connections between characters in separate narratives. In one story, a grandmother flings herself into a river, and in the next, a grieving granddaughter struggles to feel at home without her guardian. A grown man remembers his sister, who was brainwashed at a Christian school; a later story centers on a brother and sister entering one such school.
Sometimes, Peters gives her readers just enough information to confirm that our hunch is wrong—these people don’t know each other after all. And sometimes, she leaves us hanging, like all those families with an empty chair at the table, waiting for answers that will never come.
FICTION
Waiting for the Long Night Moon
By Amanda Peters
Catapult
Published February 11, 2025
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