Chippewas Fighting Congress and Sister Searching

Louise Erdrich organizes The Night Watchman (2020) around two main 1953 plots.

First, in between his duties as night watchman for the jewel bearing plant on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation in North Dakota, middle-aged Thomas Wazhashk (based on Erdrich’s grandfather) finds out about a new bill (House Concurrent Resolution 108) introduced in Congress to “emancipate” several tribes, including his, by terminating all government support for and supervision of them, abrogating all treaties with them, turning them into non-Indians (by dissolving their tribes) so as to open for them a path to American lives equal to the white man, and relocating them to cities of economic opportunity. Seeing the bill as a land grab and a final solution to their part of the Indian problem, Thomas and his tribe set about fighting it.

Second Thomas’ nineteen-year-old niece Patrice (don’t call her Patty or Pixie) Parenteau attempts to find her sister Vera, who’s moved from the reservation to “the cities” (Minneapolis), had a baby, and gone missing.

Into those two plots Erdrich weaves various minor ones involving things like the courtship (?) of Lloyd “Haystack” Barnes (the white reservation math teacher and boxing coach) and Wood Mountain (one of his pupils and boxers) of Patrice, her painstaking work at the plant where her uncle works, her relationship with her best friend Valentine Blue, a boxing rivalry between Wood Mountain and a white boy called Joe “Wobble,” Patrice’s horrible alcoholic father and formidable “old-time” (traditional) mother, a pair of Mormon “elders” (young missionaries) on mission to the reservation, the University of Minnesota “Chippewa scholar” Milly Cloud visiting the reservation to study her people first-hand, the haunting of Thomas by the ghost of a childhood friend, Vera’s ordeal, and so on.

Many supporting point of view characters—including a horse, a dog, and a ghost! Erdrich inhabits anyone or anything and reveals the world through their points of view as she moves her story along.

Many short chapters with enticing titles that are only understood by reading on.

Much fine writing—

vivid:
“The precision of the world took her breath away, the crisp lines of brick, the legibility of signs on doors, the needles of pines standing out sharp against more needles, and the darkly figured black of the trunk.”

numinous:
“Outside there was resounding silence. The black sky was a poem beyond meaning. This world is not conclusion. A species stands beyond, invisible as music but positive as sound.”

grotesque:
“Mr. Walter Vold stepped down the line of women, hands behind his back, lurkishly observing their work.”

painful:
“He was home, snarling, spitting, badgering, weeping, threatening her little brother, Pokey, and begging Pixie for a dollar, no, a quarter, no, a dime.”

or powerful:
“There was a hollow feeling, a thrumming, a sense that his body had become a drum. That anyone could knock on him and get a sound. That the sound, even if defiant, would be meaningless. And that whoever used the drumstick knew this and was pitiless.”

She writes greats similes, like “There were times when Patrice felt like she was stretched across a frame, like a skin tent,” “When Thomas thought of his father, peace stole across his chest and covered him like sunlight,” and “Her body was quivering like an arrow that has just struck its mark.”

She includes interesting Native American (Ojibwa) culture, like the fashioning, use, and significance of cradle boards; high school homecoming on the reservation; contemporary vs. “old-time” things like foods, smells, tastes, medicines, clothes, funerals, and certain dogs; switching between English and Chippewa in conversation; and food like “Zhaanat’s pemmican--deer meat, sweet juneberries, musky Pembina berries, sugared tallow, all these ingredients dried and pounded to a fluff.”

Erdrich is sympathetic to Indian survival, world view, and people, but she also approaches their egregious treatment by white people (including Mormons) objectively, trying to understand the thinking behind such treatment. Her politics are in service to a compelling story.

Her novel features Native American magical realism, whereby characters have dreams that reveal reality, see real ghosts, are visited by owls, accurately feel if absent characters are alive or dead, would-be rapers may be cursed, and so on. Some of these are given possible rational explanations, as with Thomas being half-asleep and half-awake during his night watchman work, but the ghost of his childhood friend Roderick becomes independent of Thomas as the novel progresses.

It also features plenty of female strength, often in the face of awful male behavior like domestic violence and rape and sexual exploitation. At the same time, she loves good men like Thomas and his friends, Wood Mountain, and Lloyd Barnes.

The story is moving, amusing, appalling, and absorbing; beautiful and awful. However, I found the ending too abrupt, partly because SPOILER ALERT after satisfyingly resolving the Vera situation, it abandons the bill crisis! After detailing Thomas and his friends’ efforts to fight the bill (researching, explaining, petitioning, recruiting, fundraising, traveling, and testifying), to end her novel after their testimony in DC without revealing whether or not they were successful is too provocative. Telling us what happened in her Afterword (which she does) isn’t good enough.

Erdrich is a fine audiobook reader of her novel. She doesn't change her voice so much to try to be old or young or male or female or Indian or white, though she does affect a kind of sleazy educated drawl for Jack Malloy, but she knows what each word means and where each pause should come, and she reads clearly and appealingly, and she is the author.

I have only read several of her many novels (Love Medicine, The Round House, and the Birchbark House series), but I have really liked them and recommend this one to people who like her writing or want to find out what it’s like to live on a reservation (in the 1950s). Hey—it won the Pulitzer!

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