The Night Watchman: Pulitzer Prize Winning Fiction

The Night Watchman, the 2021 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Louise Erdrich is, ostensibly, a fictional account of her grandfather’s efforts in the early 1950s to prevent a Congressional effort to terminate federal support for the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa. The story is so much more.

Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was tribal chairman in 1953 when U.S. Sen. Arthur V. Watkins, R-Utah, introduced legislation to terminate tribal rights as negotiated, as long ago as the 1800s, under treaties between the federal government and Native tribes. Watkins’ view was Indians needed to be assimilated into white society and drop all vestiges of their culture. Removing all federal support and recognition of tribal land and reservations, in his view, would lead to that end.

Thomas Wazhashk is the name Erdrich gives to her grandfather. He works as a night watchman at a jewel-bearing plant on the reservation. He uses the quiet time between rounds of the plant to write correspondence to various public officials and tribal council members to muster support to oppose Watkins’ legislation.

Erdrich develops his character based on stories she was told and letters he left to his children. She puts the reader in the dark office where he spent his nights, walking his rounds, shining his flashlights into dark corners, checking doors, and talking with an abused and long-deceased classmate at the Indian boarding school they were sent to in their youth. His Palmer method penmanship, taught at that school, graces his letters, and his nighttime meals packed by his wife, Rose, are tasted, as well.

From the lunchbox, the reader is taken to his home on reservation land where others are met and sub-stories woven into the tale. The other main character in the book is Pixie, now known as Patrice. Smart, determined, curious, hard working and the once homecoming queen at her high school, her story develops along with Wazhashk’s, an uncle. She works at the same jewel-bearing plant on the reservation but her older sister Vera’s disappearance to the Twin Cities is always on her mind. Some thought Vera died but Patrice and their mother are certain she is still alive. Patrice travels by train in search of her, with Erdrich again creating visuals from her words as Patrice is immediately engulfed in the mean streets of the big city.

Although born and raised on the rural lands of her reservation, she quickly learns street smarts to free herself from the clawing reach of men out to pull her down to their depraved level. The contrast between the everyone-out-for-themselves, survival-by-any-means-necessary life is contrasted with the frequent loyalty, warmth and quest to live of her relatives and fellow Indians on the reservation, to which she returns.

The cultures are separate but the similarities cannot be ignored. Using few words, Erdrich writes of Patrice, who is well aware of how animals procreate, but is uncertain how humans do the same. The brief sex education lesson from a co-worker is hilarious, probably more common than not to teenagers everywhere. Likewise, an encounter with an under-consideration, perhaps, just-maybe boyfriend, in the outdoors on a frigid, snowy day turns steamy as Patrice draws on her friend’s lesson.

There is a brutal attempted sexual assault in which some of Patrice’s former classmates offer her a ride and then one of the boys attacks her while his friends hold her down. Using her wits and resolve she escapes to her uncle, fishing on a lake where she convinced the boys to take her. The horror is not confined to Indian reservations. The writing is picturesque and puts feelings on the pages.

Under Patrice’s uncle’s guidance and cajoling, a delegation from the tribe, including Patrice and a not-completely, but almost-assimilated cousin, who is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, travels on a three-day train trip to Washington, D.C., to testify before Watkins’ committee. Again, the story is about the people and their feelings as much as it is about the intricacies of legislation and blatant disregard for history. Paramount, are the everyday realities of those who live on reservations and so many of those who left in hopes of finding a never-found better life in the Twin Cities and elsewhere.

The realities and the people who live them, set in the early 1950s in the novel, have shadows over events to this day. The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa escaped complete termination but other tribes did not. More recently, the Trump administration sought to terminate the Wampanoag Tribe on Cape Cod, whose people and culture greeted the Pilgrims in 1620 and stretched back thousands of years before that.

The Night Watchman is a novel but it is a window that allows the reader to see accurately the manner in which white colonial settlers and expansionist governments sought to destroy the people who lived on the continent long before their tiny sailing ships landed on eastern shores. In the midst of that reality, the book is a celebration of the life of the Indians who refuse to hide and die in the face of systemic oppression.

Some state government officials, local school boards and schools may find the book too volatile to be taught to impressionable high school students. The Pulitzer Board knew better. The book is literature worthy to be read in any home or classroom.