Amanda Peters' "Waiting for the Long Night Moon" (Review)
Savannah Brooks
In 2021, archeologists in Saskatchewan uncovered a 200-person mass grave outside of an Indian boarding school that had been in operation until 1998. It was an unusual discovery in the sense of size, but finding disappeared children at these institutions wasn’t in itself unusual — a brutal fact that shapes much of Amanda Peters’ Waiting for the Long Night Moon, published by Catapult in February 2025.
Interrogating the role Christianity played and still plays in Canadian First Nations oppression is a motif throughout this short story collection, culminating in “In the Name of God,” which delivers one of the most critical lines: “It’d been two days since food passed through our lips. My mother had lost her job cleaning the diner at night because she took three pieces of apple pie, stale and destined for the trash but still sweet. They told her she was stealing. If she’d just waited until they threw it in the trash, it would have been okay.”
Focusing on the tension inherent in weaponized religion allows Peters to explore a much larger theme: that of supposed holy conformism. The colonizer’s Jesus was not an empathetic character, judging sin and poverty equally, only offering sanctuary to those he deemed obedient enough. As the young narrator of “The Golden Cross” explains, “[My mother] doesn’t want to hurt me, but Brother Anthony says it’s necessary to make me good.”
Though this collection also interrogates land rights, genocide, and control via addiction, among other issues, it isn’t a litany of grievances. Peters, a writer of both Mi’kmaq and settler descent, mines all of this conflict, revealing the strength that allows her characters to overcome. Her stories are undoubtedly political, but they’re also internal, showing the true nature of growth. “The Birthing Tree,” for instance, ends on a scene of tribe members gathered around the titular spot, welcoming a new life. The land is steeped in tragedy, yes — women and babies have died there — but all that blood and amniotic fluid enriches the earth too, feeding the roots that guide the next generation into the world.
Over and over, Peters reminds us: There is a give, and there is a take, and that is the natural cycle of things. She uses the best and the worst of humanity to show how pain catalyzes love, a theme most potent in the opening story, “Tiny Birds and Terrorists,” which follows a young woman who’s just lost her baby girl and who finds hope and community in protesting the implementation of an oil pipeline: “My crutches under my arms, Evan ready to catch me if I fall and Mala with her new baby on her back, we smile as I lift [my] injured leg and use the crutches to propel myself to the front of the line.”
Again, the reader sees: The longest nights can also boast the brightest moons. From “The Story of a Crow” to “Ashes” to “A Strong Seed,” character after character chooses the brave, honorable, and collective-but-not-conformist road, reminding us what it really takes to be good.
