Before Morgan Talty’s novel begins, he opens with a brief letter to the reader in which he describes how he and friends, as kids, talked about “how much” Penobscot they were. “Blood quantum is a colonial tool that many federally recognized tribes use to keep track of citizenship,” Talty writes. “This was before we knew these men, the so-called white Fathers, had plans intended for us to eat each other’s spirit piece by piece.
” The chafing speck at the center of that precipitates the story is indeed about blood quantum—for the protagonist Charlie’s daughter doesn’t know she is biologically his. If he were on his daughter’s birth certificate, her “percentage” would be too low for her to claim tribal rights, as Charlie is white. “This is for the baby, you have to understand that,” his Penobscot girlfriend tells him as she leaves him.
But that’s all in the past. Now we’re in a present in which his daughter is an adult, raised by his ex-girlfriend and a man from the tribe who has been a loving parent. Charlie knows—he has watched their home for years from his house just outside the reservation, where he was forced to leave at the age of 18, having no blood rights to stay.
Charlie’s primary focus in the novel is to reveal, finally, to daughter Elizabeth that he is her biological father. Charlie was raised by his white mother Louise and Penobscot stepfather, Frederick, whom he felt was his own. At one point Charlie states, “It was Frederick�.
