Celebrate American Indian Heritage Month with an Excerpt from “Waiting for the Long Night Moon” (Exclusive)

'Waiting for the Long Night Moon' by Amanda Peters explores many facets of the Native American and Indigenous way of life, from first contact to the present day

If you loved The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters, her new short story collection is a must-read.

Waiting for the Long Night Moon, out Feb. 11, 2025, from Catapult, Peters' debut story collection "describes the Indigenous experience from an astonishingly wide spectrum in time and place," according to the publisher. It explores contact with the first European settlers, to the forced removal of Indigenous children, to the present-day fight for clean water.

In what Catapult calls "beautiful, spare prose," Peters "describes the dignity of the traditional way of life, the humiliations of systemic racism and the resilient power to endure."

Below, read an exclusive excerpt from Waiting for the Long Night Moon, in celebration of National American Indian Heritage Month.

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Mother’s feet sink into the mud, the difference between flesh and earth nearly impossible to distinguish. The mud hugs her as if welcoming a long-lost sister. I bend and trace a circle around her ankle where the mud and my mother meet. My dress is muddied and Mother’s soft hand rests on my head.

“Epit’jij, pay attention to your grandmother. Come, my girl.”

I look over as she puts her hand in the water, grabbing the bottom of the stalk, using the flint blade, gifted by Naku’set but shaped by my father, to cut the stalks from the earth.

The sun is just coming up over the water; the water fairies are dancing, welcoming the sunrise. The clouds are the color of cold hands turning warm again. It’s too early even for the birds. Grandmother and Mother hum in unison, soft and quiet. It’s a song I don’t know, but Mother assures me that it’s simply hiding away in my heart, waiting for the right time.

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We travelled yesterday from the camp, leaving my father behind with the four younger children. They waved as we ducked into the woods, finding the river and following it to the ocean. We stayed awake praying to the full moon, our fingers, toes and bellies full of the water she gave us. Only when the sun began to sneak above the line where water meets the sky did Grandmother open her eyes and gesture for us to collect our gathering tools and follow her.

Grandmother knows the best places to pick sweetgrass. “Where the water that tastes like tears meets the water that tastes like the river. This is where Kisu’lkw placed the most fragrant and sweetest,” she whispers.

I think she knows that if we speak too loudly, the pink of the sky will shatter. Mother often says that I am like my grandmother.

Mother moves forward, her feet sinking gently into the earth again. I follow and enjoy the cool, soft mud. I stop to wiggle my toes, the little beads of mud sputtering away to rejoin the rest of the wet earth. Mother uses her hand to push the tall grass to the side, allowing us to move effortlessly until she stops, holding the grass away from me in the direction of the sun. She moves her hand up the green stalks as they fall away until only the greenest remain, glowing in the early morning light. The sweet smell reaches my nose and I breathe in.

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“This is how you know it’s the hair of the great mother, epit’jij. It will glow.”

Grandmother moves off, collecting more in the silence of the dawn, while Mother shows me how to cut the grass. Later, when it’s dried and we are home among our family, we will braid it as we do our own hair. As I reach beneath the cool water of morning and grasp my first stalk, I begin to hum softly.

Excerpted from WAITING FOR THE LONG NIGHT MOON by Amanda Peters. Published with permission of Catapult. Copyright © 2025 by Amanda Peters.

Waiting for the Long Night Moon by Amanda Peters comes out Feb. 11, 2025, and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.