Will Byrnes's Reviews > The Night Watchman

On August 1, 1953, the United States Congress announced House Concurrent Resolution 108, a bill to abrogate nation-to-nation treaties, which had been made with American Indian Nations for “as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow.” The announcement called for the eventual termination of five tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Band of Chipewa.
My grandfather Patrick Gourneau fought against termination as tribal chairman while working as a night watchman. He hardly slept. - from the Author’s Note

The resolution was one of a series of like measures that sought to deny Native American tribes the benefits treaties with the U.S. government had conferred, things like the government providing medical care, schools, and food. More importantly, it made the tribes vulnerable to loss of their land, which was usually the purpose of such laws. In the case of the Turtle Mountain Band, it would mean, ultimately, forcing reservation residents to relocate to “the cities,” a place where sustaining traditional life would be impossible and living conditions were often appalling. The novel offers a payload of information about this legal abomination while keeping track of the watchman of the title on his nightly rounds at the plant, and in his dealings with his Chippewa community on a diversity of matters, personal and official.


Louise Erdrich - image from Citypages

Thomas Wazhushk is the fictional representation of Erdrich’s real-life grandfather. We follow his route, from awareness of the proposal, to seeking advice from more knowledgeable tribe members, to organizing resistance, to recruiting expertise, to appearing before the Senate committee that was considering it.

Patrice (Pixie) Paranteau is 19. She works at the Turtle Mountain Jewel Bearing Plant, (a real-world place) where gems and semi-precious stones are drilled for use in military ordnance, and Bulova watches, and which Thomas guards at night. The novel’s focus alternates between Patrice’s coming of age and Thomas’s representation of the tribe. Patrice faces many challenges. As a primary supporter of her family (pop being mostly an out-of-work alcoholic who steals rather than contributes, whenever he deigns to show up), Patrice must hang onto her job at all costs. Not a simple thing, as she is reliant on others for transportation to and from work, and lacking any sort of union protection, she can be let go on a whim. Asking for days off, for example, can be a fraught thing. But family comes first, and Patrice negotiates some time to go looking for her older sister, Vera, who has gone missing in Minneapolis. Vera’s absence certainly rings bells, given the ongoing travesty of Native American women and girls who continue to go missing year after year.

She is also well aware of the relationship choices facing her. A white teacher (and boxing coach) is puppy-dog smitten with her, or at least with his idealized image of her. And a local young man, Wood Mountain, finds himself interested as well. Patrice seeks some sex-ed from a good, and experienced, friend before even considering pursuing such interests.

She had seen how quickly girls who got married and had children were worn down before the age of twenty. Nothing happened to them but toil. Great things happened to other people. The married girls were lost…That wasn’t going to be her life.

Speaking of things sexual, the atmosphere at the plant is challenging for some of the women, but defenses are craftily erected, and major misery is mostly avoided. Unrelated to the plant, Patrice faces an attempted assault, barely escaping. Erdrich offers a look at a very dark side of Minneapolis, where exploitation, the worst of which occurs offstage, is extreme, and very disturbing.

The desire to experience the wider world comes in for a look. Patrice wants to see more of life than is possible on the rez, but has limited possibilities. Wood Mountain, on the other hand, feels deeply wedded to the land and would be more than happy to spend the rest of his days there.

Sometimes he found small ocean shells while working in the fields. Some were whorled, others were tiny grooved scallops…
“Barnes was saying there used to be an ocean here,” he said to Thomas.
“From the endless way-back times.”
“Think of it. [the] baby will be playing with these little things from the bottom of the sea that was here. Who could have known?”
“We are connected to the way-back people, here, in so many ways. Maybe a way-back person touched these shells, Maybe the little creatures in them disintegrated into the dirt. Maybe some tiny piece from that creature is inside us now. We can’t know these things.”
…”Sometimes when I‘m out and around,” said Wood Mountain, “I feel like they’re with me, these way-back people. I never talk about it, but they’re all around us. I could never leave this place.”

Vera and Patrice’s experience with “the cities” would hardly seem an inducement, but another young native woman, a grad student, who was raised in the city, which was not a horrifying experience, has to study, on-site, the rez, a somewhat alien place to her, to get a fuller appreciation of her own roots.

Overall, The Night Watchman offers a portrait of a community struggling to survive despite the onslaughts by forces official, religious and economic. Along the way, Erdrich offers a very deep and powerful look at life on the reservation, how Native Americans relate to each other, (living and dead) and interact with the wider non-native world beyond. The borders, however, are quite permeable. Many native women work at the Jewel Bearing Plant. The white world enters the reservation in person of Lloyd Barnes, a teacher and boxing coach. Two young Mormon missionaries stumble through the landscape as well. They are mostly there for comic relief.

Mormonism comes in for a look beyond the two young men, as Thomas studies Mormon teaching as a way to better understand the Senator behind the House resolution, and has a vision that is very resonant with Mormon lore. Erdrich often shows in her books connections between religions, usually between native beliefs and Catholic or Protestant Christianity. This is of a cloth with that.

She also devotes considerable attention to dark circumstances in native life. Her characters must often contend with poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, and domestic violence. There is plenty of that to go around here as well. But, while they are significant elements in the stories being told, they are not the focus. Thomas’s battle to save the community and Patrice’s growth toward finding her best road ahead are the lead narrative elements.

Erdrich employs a rich palette of magical realism in most of her books, and this one is no exception. The lines between living and not-living are blurry. A member of the tribe allows himself to be occupied by a spirit to facilitate an out-of-body search for a missing person. Thomas sees the spirit of a young man at the plant during his nightly rounds, and sees beings of light descend from on high, as well. A golden beetle emerges from the husk of a nut. Someone has a conversation with a dog. An evil-doer is cursed with a physical deformity. One character is changed after sleeping near a hibernating bear. Where living ends and the spiritual begins, where the past ends and the present and even future emerges are more curtain-like crossings than hard barriers. This is always a wonderful feature in Erdrich’s books.

One of my favorite elements of the novel was the transcendental experiences felt by some as they viscerally connect with the world in which they live. In one passage, Patrice is returning home, walking through woods when it begins to rain.

Her hair, shoulders, and back grew damp. But moving kept her warm. She slowed to pick her way through places where water was seeping up through the mats of dying grass. Rain tapping through the brilliant leaves the only sound. She stopped. The sense of something there, with her, all around her, swirling and seething with energy. How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included. Patrice closed her eyes and felt a tug. Her spirit poured into the air like song.

In another,

She could hear the humming rush of the tree drinking from the earth. She closed her eyes, went through the bark like water, and was sucked up off the bud tips into a cloud.

We learn what happens with the Resolution, decisions are made about paths forward, characters find themselves, so there is much satisfaction to be had in the wrap up. And along the way we have picked up a payload of learning about native culture, about the relationship of the tribes to the government, a nugget or two about Mormonism, and been led on this journey by warm, relatable characters who are very easy to care about, through a landscape both harsh and ecstatic, to see realities pedestrian, brutal, and magical. What more could any reader want?

Review posted – February 14, 2020

Publication date
----------March 3, 2020 (hardcover)
----------March 23, 2021 (trade paperback)

June 11, 2021 - The Night Watchman wins the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Well deserved.

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal and FB pages. Erdrich's personal site redirects to the site Birchbark Books. She owns the store.

This is Erdrich’s sixteenth novel, among many other works. She has won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, among many other recognitions. Her familiarity with cultural mixing is personal, her mother being an Ojibwe tribal leader and her father being a German-American. Familiarity with both native spirituality and western religion also stems from her upbringing. She was raised Catholic.

Other Louise Erdrich novels I have reviewed
-----2017 - Future Home of the Living God
-----2021 - The Sentence
-----2017 - Future Home of the Living God
-----2016 - LaRose
-----2010 - Shadow Tag
-----2012 - The Round House
-----2008 - The Plague of Doves
-----2005 - The Painted Drum

Items of Interest
-----Yump - ”In the Old Language”: A Glossary of Ojibwe Words, Phrases, and Sentences in Louise Erdrich’s Novels - by Peter G. Beidler
-----Ojibwe People’s Dictionary
-----Wiki on Lamanites
-----Timeline.com - Upset with mistreatment, Puerto Rican radicals stormed the Capitol and started shooting in 1954
-----NY Times – December 25, 2019 - In Indian Country, a Crisis of Missing Women. And a New One When They’re Found. - By Jack Healy
-----Emily Dickinson’s Success is counted sweetest - Patrice quotes from this

Songs
-----El Negro Zumbon
-----Bill Haley and the Comets - Crazy, Man, Crazy
-----Slim Whitman - My Heart is Broken in Three