The high cost of freedom

With The Night Watchman, Erdrich rediscovers her narrative genius

The Night Watchman

Louise Erdrich Harper

RON CHARLES

Two years ago, Louise Erdrich thought she would never write again. The National Book Award-winning author of The Round House and more than a dozen other treasured novels had abandoned several manuscripts and given up. She was certain her “impetus had disintegrated.”

Fortunately for us, she was wrong.

One day, she woke from her depressed slumber impelled to read a cache of letters written in the middle of the 20th century by her grandfather Patrick Gourneau. He had been chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Advisory Committee during the tribe’s modern-day fight for survival. The threat at that time was legal but as potentially disastrous as earlier assaults: In 1953, the U.S. House passed a resolution declaring that a number of tribes should be rapidly “freed from federal supervision.”

Ah, blessed freedom!

Beneath that glorious promise of emancipation lurked the government’s true plan: the unilateral abrogation of treaties, the wholesale termination of tribes’ rights and the abandonment of Native Americans already impoverished by centuries of genocidal policies.

Reminded of that dark era and her grandfather’s heroic role in saving the Turtle Mountain reservation in North Dakota, Erdrich knew she had found the inspiration for her next book.

The Night Watchman is political — it even includes a trip to Washington, D.C. — but it’s a political novel reconceived as only Erdrich could. Although the legislative history and the congressional battles of Indian termination rumble over the horizon, the story stays focused on folks living on the Turtle Mountain reservation. For most of them, the immediate concerns of making a living, holding a family together and finding someone to love feel more pressing than the latest attack from a collection of white congressmen 1,500 miles away.

But Thomas Wazhashk, the tribal leader at the centre of this novel, understands the legislative danger early and fully. Thomas, a character based on Erdrich’s grandfather, works as a night watchman in a jewel bearing factory, the first manufacturing plant on the reservation. The hours are long, always lonely, sometimes spooky.

Between making his rounds and contending with a ghost from his old boarding school days, Thomas struggles to stay awake so that he can write letters to local and national politicians, business leaders, scholars — anyone who might help him mount an effective defence against Congress’s plans to terminate his tribe.

As Thomas toils away, drifting between lobbying and dreaming, the novel moves out into the community, capturing the lives of his friends and relatives. This tapestry of stories is a signature of Erdrich’s literary craft, but she does it so beautifully that it’s tempting to forget how remarkable it is. Chapter by chapter, we encounter characters interrelated but travelling along their own paths.

There is some suspense in this story, but the novel is not interested in merely exploiting that.

This narrator’s vision is more capacious, reaching out across a whole community in tender conversation with itself.

The Washington Post