7/6/20

The Night Watchman Offers Insight into Chippewa Struggle for Justice


The Night Watchman (2020)
By Louise Erdrich
HarperCollins, 397 pages
★★★★★

We can add Native Americans to the list of people Donald Trump doesn’t care about. He’s trying to end tribal recognition (on a technicality) for the Wampanoag tribe—the same folks who helped the Pilgrims and are part of the First Thanksgiving story. It seems their 381 acres of Massachusetts land stands too close to Trumpian Rhode Island allies who want to build a casino and halt one being built by the Wampanoags. The only way to do that is to remove their tribal status.

Coincidentally, Louise Erdrich’s new novel showed up in my library queue as Trump’s latest outrage was unfolding. The link? The Night Watchman is Erdrich’s semi-biographical novel about the federal government’s attempt to dismember the Turtle Band of Chippewas back in 1953. Erdrich, an enrolled Chippewa* tribal member, has produced a work of historical fiction rooted in fact. The character of Thomas Wazhashk (“muskrat”) is based upon her grandfather (Patrick Gourneau), who spearheaded the struggle to stave off “termination” of the Chippewas’ tribal status in North Dakota. It was then, as now, a blatant attempt to seize Indian land–all under the paternalistic rubric of making Indians more “American” and allowing them to fend for themselves because they were allegedly self-sufficient.

Thomas is the book’s namesake character. He guards the jewel factory that makes precision parts for watches and is one of the few employers of the reservation. The jewel factory is real, as was Arthur V. Watkins, a U.S. Senator from Utah known for being racist toward Indians. He sponsored the Congressional bill that eventually terminated 113 tribes. Watkins was also a Mormon, a sect which comes off badly in The Night Watchman.  

Erdrich, a leading voice in Native American literature, paints a rich culture that co-exists with crushing poverty and lack of opportunity. This is a land of outhouses, substandard housing, rampant alcoholism, hunting-gathering, horses, no electricity, and patched up automobiles. Boxing brings status to some of the young men, but lard on bread is sometimes a meal. For all of this, it is also a close-knit community in which people look out for each other and help in any way they can.

Edrich populates her novel with memorable characters. Thomas and his wife Rose are blood kin to the Paranteau family held together by Zhaanat and her daughter Patrice, as Zhaanat’s husband is a violent drunk and another daughter, Vera, has gone to missing in Minneapolis. Patrice is serious, smart, innocent, and beautiful. Men desire her, including Lloyd Barnes, a Caucasian boxing coach, and Wood Mountain, one of Barnes’ most promising boxers. The reservation is filled with colorful individuals, including Wood Mountain and his mother, Juggie Blue; tribal judge Moses Montrose; Thomas’ father Bibbon; the Pipestone family, and more.
Women are powerful figures in The Night Watchman–few more so than Patrice. She might not know about the birds and the bees, but she is determined and is nobody’s patsy. Another character, Millie Cloud, is equally determined. She’s an introverted Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota, but she has the data to refute the nonsense that the Chippewa were prosperous enough to survive without government largesse. One might accuse Erdrich of trying a bit too hard to impose feminism into her tale as the Chippewa are not matriarchal and the report attributed to Millie in the story was, in real life, mostly authored by a man (Dr. David Delorme). I shan’t nitpick, though, as I found Erdrich’s focus on women refreshing. I also reveled in how those you least expect have proverbial hearts of gold.

The Night Watchman is a sprawling tale with numerous dark turns. Not much good happens to Indians who end up in cities, be it Fargo or Minneapolis. Erdrich also explores exoticism, an often-veiled aspect of racism, which she explores through the various ways in which whites simultaneously revile natives yet find them alluring. One plot device involves the criminal sex trade, another a barely legal underwater act. At heart, though, The Night Watchman is an inspirational David versus Goliath tale of plucky survival. The reservation is also populated by ghosts. Native cosmology is sometimes described as “thin,” meaning that the barriers between the natural and the supernatural worlds are porous.** This has the potential to reinforce community, a factor Senator Watkins hadn’t anticipated.

The Night Watchman is an engrossing read filled with memorable characters, humanity, and determiation. This will probably be shortlisted for numerous literary awards and, no matter what it wins or doesn’t, it is surely a highlight of the 2020 fiction season. It is also a wakeup call. Indians are too often marginalized in discussions of American racism. Perhaps it’s time for a Red Lives Matter movement.

Rob Weir

 * The Chippewa are Anishinaabe peoples and are sometimes referenced that way. They are also called Ojibwe or Saulteaux, depending upon where they live.
** This often remains the case even when Natives are nominally Christian. Through a process known as syncretism, Christian theology is sometimes grafted onto indigenous beliefs.    


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