In recent years, numerous scholars have suggested that the historical experience of indigenous peoples around the world prefigures what is about to become a generalized predicament in the Anthropocene, as more and more people will face the destruction of the ecological basis on which their form of life rests. Against the background of such arguments, this article turns to Gerald Vizenor’s Dead Voices. Natural Agonies in the New World (1992). The novel’s protagonist Bagese is an Anishinaabe woman who lives in the city of Oakland. She plays an elaborate card game which involves the re-telling of traditional trickster tales, enabling her to sustain her connection both to the non-human city dwellers around her and to her own tribal traditions even in a radically different socio-ecological context. The novel can thus be read as a “compromised resilience narrative” (Susie O’Brien): it is a narrative about indigenous resilience in a situation where one’s way of life has been irretrievably damaged and in which the act of storytelling is not just a means or modelling habits conducive to resilience, but itself a manifestation of successful adaptation to socio-ecological change.