The stories in Joseph Boyden’s first collection, Born with a Tooth, chart the resources, rituals, misgivings, and misfortunes of a cast of characters on a Northern Ontario native reserve. As a series of windows into a culture that has endured heartbreaking sabotage over many years, Boyden’s stories succeed admirably. However, as compelling fiction, the collection is uneven, moving in fits and starts.

Boyden, a transplanted Canadian who teaches in New Orleans, shows himself to be a versatile, sensitive chronicler of altered states, adept at detailing the desperation and single-mindedness of the addict. In stories such as “Painted Tongue” and “Gasoline,” the booze- and gasoline-induced hazes of his characters allow for a useful narrative distance and effective overlapping of memory, vision, and chant. The results are authentic evocations of consciousness that flare satisfyingly into larger insights.

Although several of the stories in Born with a Tooth share an unadorned oral tone whose effect is moving and immediate, others resort to plodding pedantry and unearned emotional climaxes, as in “The Legend of the Sugar Girl,” whose protagonist is felled, predictably, by the white man’s sweets and alcohol. “You Don’t Want to Know What Jenny Two Bears Did,” which describes the unexpected comeback of an aging all-girl punk band, also relies on an easy resolution to push its message.

This is not the case, however, in the final four linked stories, which narrate the same incident involving the aftermath of the suicide of Linda Cheechoo, a young college student. These stories, told from the point-of-view of Linda’s uncle, her brother, the town priest, and her great-grandfather respectively, and culminating in Linda’s funeral, are both emotionally forthright and complex. The repetition of the funeral scene brings heft to the final catharsis wherein a people are able to overcome, albeit fleetingly, a history of eroded self-esteem.