The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

He had been night watchman for seven months. In the beginning, his post as chairman of the Turtle Mountain Advisory Committee could be dealt with in the late afternoons and evenings. He'd been able to sleep most mornings after his shift. When lucky, like tonight, he even grabbed an additional catnap before driving to work. But every so often the government remembered the Indians. And when they did, they always tried to solve Indians, thought Thomas. They solve us by getting rid of us. And do they tell us when they plan to get rid of us? Ha and ha. He had received no word from the government. By reading the Minot Daily News, he'd found out something was up. Then Moses had to pry the papers out of his contact down in Aberdeen. It had taken precious time to even get confirmation, or see the actual House Resolution stating, as its author said, that the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa was targeted by the United States Congress for emancipation. E-man-ci-pation. Eman-cipaton. The word would not stop banging around in his head. Emancipated. But they were not enslaved. Freed from being Indians was the idea. Emancipated from their land. Freed from the treaties that Thomas's father and grandfather had signed and that were promised to last forever. So as usual, by getting rid of us, the Indian problem would be solved.

Overnight the tribal chairman job had turned into a struggle to remain a problem. To not be solved.

Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at a jewel bearing plant on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. His name means muskrat, the humble creature who, in Ojibwe myth, descended to the bottom of the waters that covered the world at its birth and retrieved a bit of earth when no other animal could. As night watchman, and as the reservation's part-time chairman--a thankless and unpaid role--Thomas is like his namesake, doing the unseen work that maintains the reservation and its residents. Thomas is about to face his, and the reservation's, greatest challenge in decades: termination.

In his history book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer describes the Termination era as one of the epochs of Indian history after the Wounded Knee Massacre. It comes after the boarding school era, in which Indian children were forced to attend assimilationist schools that would expunge the Indian from them, and termination, too, is a kind of erasure: it would dissolve the reservation completely, forfeiting the responsibility for the land and its people to the state rather than the federal government, and relocating many of its impoverished residents to large cities. Termination, like so much shitty conservative policy today, was justified by arguments about self-reliance. "You learn to walk by walking," a pro-termination Senator tells Thomas on the Senate floor. Thomas thinks: "We didn't get to the Turtle Mountains by riding in a covered wagon." The hard work of countering termination--persuading the residents it's a bad idea, making petitions, commissioning studies--is Thomas' version of descending to the bottom of the waters of the world.

Though he's the title character, Thomas' story is often overshadowed by that of Patrice "Pixie" Paranteau, his niece and an employee at the jewel bearing plant. Patrice, dogged and determined, is worried about her sister Vera, who has disappeared into Minneapolis among pimps and addicts. On a trip to find her, it looks for a moment as if Patrice may follow into her footsteps, impulsively taking a job as an erotic dancer in a lumberjack-themed bar, where she's dressed as Babe the Blue Ox. (It's weird.) Vera's disappearance, and the threat to Patrice, are like sirens warning against what might happen if termination is allowed to go through: forced relocation to the city, to addiction, to crime, to dissolution. Returning home, Patrice's story becomes about her difficulty managing several suitors, including a charismatic Ojibwe boxer and a clueless white math teacher--but I didn't think these storylines had nearly as much energy or cleverness as her odyssey in the city, which ends, I felt, much too soon.

It's touching to know that Thomas is based on Erdrich's grandfather, who really was the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, and who really did spearhead the campaign--a successful campaign--to save Turtle Mountain from termination. But it's Patrice who interests Erdrich most, I think, the headstrong young woman who is on the precipice of deciding who she is and what she wants. How could someone like Patrice do something like that, torn from the community in which she was born, where she knows the names and uses of the plants, where she lives with her mother by the "old ways," where she can sleep in a cave alongside a hibernating bear, where she can see the spirits of her ancestors as the Northern Lights in the sky? Thomas might be the novel's heart, but Patrice represents its stakes.

Erdrich's early novels and stories are interconnected, featuring a huge cast that appears and reappears from different angles in a way that make you feel as if you are deepening your understanding of them the more books you read. Her later work, like this novel and the two before it, LaRose and The Future Home of the Living God, seem like attempts to reproduce the breadth of those early books with fresh faces. Though it doesn't always work, and never as persuasively as in Tracks or The Bingo Palace, The Night Watchman is probably the most successful of these attempts. I hope she'll consider writing more about Patrice and Thomas, the humble muskrat.