54 pages • 1-hour read
Stolen Tongues
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Background
Content Warning: This section discusses anti-Indigenous racism.
Cultural Context: r/nosleep
Stolen Tongues began as a story posted in a Reddit community dedicated to horror, a subreddit called r/nosleep. In these subreddits, members can share content and interact with others’ content, offering feedback or simply discussing whatever topic unites them. These communities are created and maintained by members, who set the group’s rules. In r/nosleep, users post their own short horror stories, which must be written as though they were true; this is, in fact, the community’s main rule. The r/nosleep subreddit has even inspired a popular podcast called The NoSleep Podcast.
According to the subreddit’s current rules, “all stories on r/nosleep must be framed as scary personal experiences where something scary happened to your Main Character. They all must be in first person point-of-view and be in either past or present tense” (“Revised Guidelines for nosleep Effective January 17, 2025.” Reddit). True to the r/nosleep rules, Stolen Tongues is a first-person encounter, and the main character and narrator’s name is Felix Blackwell. The fact that “Felix Blackwell” is also the author’s name adds to the impression that the story is true, heightening its realism and boosting its fear factor.
In addition, main characters cannot be “dead or in a coma or incapacitated/incarcerated by the end of the post/story,” nor can the main character be an animal, an inanimate object, or posting from the past or future (“Revised Guidelines for nosleep Effective January 17, 2025”). The story has to sound like a “personal” one—and not be generated as a result of, say, found media—and the event it chronicles “can have happened in the past OR be happening in the present, but [one’s] character [must post] to NoSleep in the present” (“Revised Guidelines for nosleep Effective January 17, 2025”).
Thus, Stolen Tongues’ plot and main character adhere to the subreddit rules, having since grown from a short story in that forum to a full-length work. Other full-length works that have emerged from the subreddit include Penpal (2012) by Dathan Auerbach and Exercises in Futility (2016) by Seamus Coffey.
Geographical Context: The Colorado Rockies and Indigenous Peoples
In Stolen Tongues, Tíwé tells Felix about the Pozi and Ineho communities, among others, as they were especially affected by the movement and intrusion of white colonizers in the area, leading to the appearance of the Impostors in the novel. Though both groups are fictional, Tíwé’s descriptions do allude to real people and conflicts that occurred on this land. The Colorado Rockies have been home to many Indigenous groups. According to the National Park Service,
The Nuuchiu* (Ute) people are the oldest continuous residents of Colorado and Rocky Mountain National Park […]. Hinono’ei (Arapaho) and Tsistsistas (Cheyenne) bands were also seasonal residents of the Rocky Mountains […]. Areas in and around the park made up parts of the extended territories of other tribes, including the Nakona, Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota (Assiniboine and Sioux), the Newe (Eastern Shoshone), the Numunuu (Comanche), and the Cauigu (Kiowa).” (“Tribal Partners.” National Park Service)
Tíwé describes the way communities would come and go with the seasons, or following animal groups, in what appears to be a realistic way.
However, as Tíwé says, everything changed when gold was discovered in the region in 1858. At that time, “Thousands of [white] prospectors and miners entered the region quickly, causing a massive disturbance to the tribes […] [M]any treaties were rapidly made and broken between the U.S. government and the Ute and Arapaho tribes […] defin[ing] and reduc[ing] the tribes’ territories by confining them to reservations” (“Rocky Mountain National Park: An Indigenous History.” Rocky Mountain Conservancy. 18 May 2022). Tíwé describes the way Indigenous peoples were driven off their ancestral land and even pitted against one another by incoming whites.
Ultimately, the groups and details of Tíwé’s stories are fictionalized, but are based on aspects of the region’s history. Felix’s acknowledgement of the Western stereotyping of Indigenous groups for commercial gain in the region’s tourism industry also has roots in truth. Now, local artists like Gregg Deal, a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe, uses “his craft to honor Indigenous experiences, challenge stereotypes, and push for accurate representations of Indigenous people,” drawing attention to just how prevalent such cultural inaccuracies still are (Carodine, Victoria and Brian Willie. “Artist Gregg Deal Is Disrupting Western Stereotypes of Indigenous Culture.” PBS, 6 Oct. 2021).
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