The Missing Morningstar: And Other Stories by Stacie Shannon Denetsosie
Torrey House Press, 2023
Review by Zak Gregory
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Stacie Shannon Denetsosie’s impressive debut short story collection, The Missing Morningstar, expresses the reality of the contemporary Diné experience with engrossing stories that are at once heartbreaking and triumphant, set on and near the Navajo nation. Denetsosie’s characters experience confusion and anger as they navigate settler colonial culture, struggle with family relationships, witness the kidnappings of rodeo queens, and are forced “to forget the taste of [their] own language.” Each story lays across the other to weave together a rug of Navajo lived experiences, taking the air from settler colonial narratives that attempt to fix native people in the past.
A striking aspect of the Morningstar stories is how they mix opposing ideas and images, illustrating the complexity of modern life on the reservations. The first story, “Dormant,” begins with the image of a young Diné woman, Bernadine, dumping trash into a gorge. As she dumps trash, Bernadine narrates, “I was taught from a young age that the earth was sacred. Yet, every two weeks, I’d back my little truck up to the edge of the Divergent Dam and throw our garbage into the gorge below.” Bernadine’s mother refuses to pay to get rid of their trash at the “transfer station” in Kayenta, Arizona, because “who the fuck pays to get rid of trash?” In the scene, the earth is both sacred and a trash pit, illustrating how traditional Navajo beliefs about the land are forced to compete with the contemporary mundanity of trash disposal. The juxtapositions within Morningstar speak to the space the Diné inhabit under settler colonialism. Denetsosie’s stories illustrate how Indigenous people survive and create meaning by holding many truths together simultaneously. The traditional is held against the contemporary, the spiritual against the material, and the sacred against the mundane. The lines between these perceived opposites start to erode as characters mix pre-colonial ways of knowing, modern savvy, and their intuitions to create new ceremonies of mourning and healing.
Morningstar showcases Denetsosie’s keen ability to write descriptive images and prose loaded with complex meaning. The story “The Casket in the Backseat” includes a striking paragraph where the spirit of a Navajo man describes the moment he died, vividly detailing death and the memories that crossed his mind:
At first just my fingertips and toes felt cold. From there the sensation bloomed, prickling up
my legs and thighs, chilling my extremities… the pressure and pain pushing me into my own
agony, oceanic in depth, until I’d been swallowed whole. Disoriented, I recalled the red brick
of the California boarding school where I’d spent a year learning alphabets and fractions from
teachers the color of fish bellies, and the sound of the ocean crashing against the shore in the
distance, drowning tedium of graphite against scratch paper. Perhaps Indian boarding schools
were Indian purgatory because no one knows how to make a better hell for Indians than
Christians teaching us about their God.
The arrangement of images in the paragraph adds a complex knot of meaning. Death is likened to being swallowed by an ocean of agony, which then conjures images of the ocean-side Indian boarding school with “teachers the color of fish bellies.” Denetsosie ties the character’s literal death with a spiritual death suffered in the Indian boarding school. This paragraph is one of many that illustrates how Denetsosie entangles rich images and deep meaning into her prose that will leave a mark on readers.
Throughout her short stories, Denetsosie shares knowledge with outsiders and validates the experiences of her Native readers by incorporating traditional and contemporary Diné beliefs. One particularly powerful motif in many of the stories is the umbilical cord, loaded with meaning for Navajo people. In the story “Conception,” Denetsosie explains the Diné tradition of burying the umbilical cord. When Navajo children are born, the umbilical cord is buried near their homes to “remind [them] of their original mother, mother earth…the cord also draws [them] home and back into the protection of [their] four sacred mountains.” This powerful image is again used in the wonderfully odd story “Snow Bath Season.” This story is about a young girl who is visited by her mother’s spirit embodied in an Amazon Alexa speaker. The girl is directed to take her mother, the Alexa speaker, up the canyon for a standard Native “Snow Bath.” While the girl rolls in the snow, her mother “sings until the power drains from her body,” and the girl feels “the fresh burn, the chafe of memory, and umbilical cord kind of love.” The motif of the umbilical cord continuously reemerges in the text, expressing how the Diné are not on the land but part of the land, just as their Dine children do not come from their mothers but are “conduits” of the mother’s body.
The story “Under the Porchway” also includes an image of the umbilical cord that is less heartwarming but no less powerful. The story starts with the sentence, “I was born in Tuba City, Arizona, at 4:45 a.m. with a rope around my neck.” Here, the umbilical cord is changed from a nourishing connection to mother and land into a tightening noose. The main character of this story feels responsible for their mother’s suicide, having been born after a white man raped his Native mother. In a heartbreaking passage, he explains, “I think I killed her. I think I was a stowaway in my momma’s womb… her death could be considered a homicide, and I was guilty since day one.” Denetsosie uses the image of the umbilical cord to speak to the terrible reality that Native women are sexually assaulted far more than other groups, leaving marks on their lives and those in their community. The symbol of the umbilical cord in this story carries multiple meanings for Native people. By representing a nourishing umbilical cord as a noose threatening to choke, this story gives a voice to those who feel that they are born with “ropes around [their] necks.” They are tied to a homeland that has been isolated, robbed, and reduced by white settlers – yet that same connection to the land and its people is vital to their existence and way of life. Thus, the motif carries dual meanings, simultaneously communicating the culture and land that sustains but is also choked off from opportunity and resources by settler colonialism.
Denetsosie’s all voice, containing the joyous and the sorrowful, is a vital testament that the Diné will continue to survive and flourish. The stories in Morningstar show the Native struggle against colonial efforts that threaten to erase Native traditions and culture. Some characters in the book are morally ambiguous and, in some cases, condemnable. In writing these characters, Denetsosie provides an honest look at life on the reservation while reserving judgment and illustrating the effects of the injustice of Euro-American settler hegemony. At the same time, Morningstar presents resilient, loving characters who find ways to create “all the ceremony” needed to thrive. Like the Navajo language itself, Denetsosie’s Morningstar is “a gift given from one being to another.” With any luck, this will be the first of many works to come. I am thankful for her words.
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Stacie Shannon Denetsosie (Diné) is Todích’íí’nii (Bitterwater Clan), born for Naakaii (Mexican Clan). She is a fiction writer and poet. Stacie is from Kayenta, Arizona, but currently resides in Northern Utah with her husband. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts and her Master of Arts from Utah State University. Her work has appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, Phoebe Magazine, and Cut Bank, among other publications. She is a recipient of the UCROSS Native American Fellowship and the Prague Summer Program Poetry Fellowship. Torrey House Press released her debut short story collection, The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories, on Sept. 12, 2023. Her book The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories earned a Kirkus star, was named a 2024 Southwest Book of the Year, and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize.
Zackary Gregory is a Lecturer in the English department at Utah State University, where he teaches composition and literature at Utah State University’s satellite campus in Blanding, Utah. Located in southeastern Utah, Zack is fortunate to spend a lot of time outdoors in and around land held sacred to many Native nations, including the Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Hopi, Pueblo Zuni, and Ute Indian Tribe of Utah.
ID: Cover of The Missing Morningstar by Stacie Shannon Denetsosie.
Psaltery & Lyre 