This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Sterling Holy White Mountain read his

story False Star from the March 20th, 2023 issue of the magazine.

Holy White Mountain is a former Stegner Fellow and current Jones Lecturer at Stanford University,

and an unrecognized citizen of the Black Feet Nation.

He's at work on a novel.

Now here's Sterling Holy White Mountain.

False Star

As we know, there is a long and storied history of a certain kind of dealing on the part

of Uncle Sam with his Indians, and so there have also been times when America wakes up

after a long weekend of terror, only to re-discover its morals and decide a renewed effort

as an order, and though I would not go so far as to say these efforts have been particularly

genuine.

What did come from one such gesture was this thing people in my part of Indian country,

which is, indisputably, the best and most beautiful part, the Black Feet Reservation,

called the Claim Check, which in the end was money you might get when you turned 18.

The check came from a land claim settled with the Fed's decades before I was born, as

far back as I could remember I had heard discussion of Claim checks.

There's something elemental about it, the talk circled around in a seasonal way.

People joked about being Claim Check rich, and then later laughed about being Claim Check

broke.

...