Historical ‘Night Watchman’ feels especially relevant today
Author’s grandfather serves as inspiration for novel of hope
Louise Erdrich found herself stuck in the present feeling bad about the past.
Erdrich had been writing fiction for more than 35 years. But she was in a funk and unable to move forward from it. So she looked to the 1950s, a period romanticized by Americans, for obvious reasons: Those doing well in the 1950s would view it as idyllic. Her family, though, didn’t quite have the same clear pane through which it could view that era. Erdrich’s grandfather was the chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, at a time when termination — a governmental assimilation process — was in full force.
The termination policy started in the 1940s and ran across three decades.
Erdrich, via email, says it “hasn’t been revisited in all of its abysmal morality — largely ignored in the history books. When tribes were terminated, there was enormous suffering.”
She used this nasty period of history as her way out of that writing funk, focusing on her grandfather. She read his letters, and she drew on memories of him. She delved into a history she hadn’t probed previously.
“I always knew that my grandfather and his colleagues on the tribal council fought termination,” she says, “but I didn’t know how remarkable their achievement was until I began thinking and reading about it. This book was so important to write, not only because of my personal memories of my grandfather but because it gave me hope in regard to what a determined soul can do to confront disastrous government policies. To me, this is especially relevant at this time.”
Patrick Gourneau, her grandfather, became the inspiration for “The Night Watchman,” Erdrich’s new novel. Erdrich read letters he wrote to her parents, which she refers to as composing “a portrait of a deeply humane intelligence as well as a profoundly religious patriot and family man.”
Erdrich’s afterword explains more about her grandfather, and the history is fascinating and beautiful from an emotional, familial standpoint.
It’s also damning. Her deep dive into family poured directly into the opening. Erdrich retreated into her memories to reconstruct the life of her grandfather.
“This did take me a long time to write,” she says. “I gathered details, remembered how my grandfather dressed, his Sears shirts, hat, work jacket, the lunchbox he carried. My grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, cherished this job. The key ring and company flashlight are emblems of his task, and I think that although with his other duties this job became increasingly difficult, he was proud of his position and fought to keep it.”
So her book is, as Erdrich says,
“partly about jobs, yes.”
But she also wanted to normalize the idea of Native people working in a 9-to-5 environment.
“I wanted to write about Native people working in a factory because this is a-stereotypical,” she says. “Native people working together in a factory? How uncinematic when people think in terms of feathers and tomahawks. Yet this was a real place and still exists, though under a different name. These jobs sustained Turtle Mountain people during a very difficult time. Also, workplaces are rich in drama. Even lunch can be a drama.”
Erdrich’s book closes as it opens, though its narrative has moved. It speaks to our lives: A series of cycles pushing outward gently. They feel different across years, but on a dayto-day basis, they feel repetitive.
Like the work of a watchman like Gourneau. On one hand, he held down a job built upon repetition and diligence: he’s the night watchman of the title. On the other, he also did profound work that — with the passing of time — also feels diligent and too often unseen.
His granddaughter saw in that life — the simple and the grand — something worthy of a remarkable story.