The Night Watchman: A Novel

Great writing , wonderful character development , a slice of time . Things I didn’t know about Native American history , and should have . Sly humor and truthfulness .

In the 1950s, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa live on a small reservation in North Dakota. Thomas Wazhashk, who lives there, is a busy man. He’s the titular night watchman, guarding a factory near the reservation to support his family, materially not well-off but full of love. He’s also the chair of the tribe’s advisory committtee to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is supposed to earn a salary but the tribe is so poor he can’t bring himself to take it. But it’s in that capacity that he learns that a Mormon U.S. Senator is proposing a new bill to terminate the tribe’s federal recognition. This is pitched as “freedom” for the tribe from government supervision, but it’s all too obvious that it’s meant to actually free the government from its treaty responsibilities to the tribe. He begins to organize a trip to DC to fight this threat to his home and his people. Meanwhile, his niece, Patrice Parenteau, is a worker at the same factory and on a mission of her own. Her older sister Vera left for the Twin Cities with her boyfriend, but hasn’t been in touch in several months. Patrice, whose quest to shed her childhood nickname of “Pixie” seems doomed to failure, is determined to locate her sister and manages to scrape together the time off and the money to make the trip to try to find her. Her brief experience in the Cities is odd beyond anything she might have imagined. These are the two main plot threads, but there are plenty more side stories. Thomas may or may not be haunted by the ghost of a friend who died of tuberculosis at boarding school. A pair of Mormon missionaries come to the reservation to try to to save souls and things do not quite go according to plan. A young Indian boxer nurtures a crush on Pixie. His older, white boxing coach who works as a teacher on the reservation also nurtures a crush on Pixie, but she does not have any interest in his courtship. An Indian grad student endures real poverty as she tries to complete her studies, and finds to her surprise that her research might actually have some useful purpose. It’s an ambitious novel with a wide scope. As I’ve come to expect from Louise Erdrich, her character work is compelling. Thomas, Patrice, their friends and families feel like actual people and I was emotionally invested in what became of them. There are very heavy themes at play here: the effects of alcoholism on Indian families, sexual abuse of Native American women, the hideous legacy of Indian boarding schools, the injustices perpetuated against Native Americans by the United States government, the prejudices against Native Americans held by white people, economic instability in Indian communities, and more. But Erdrich’s strength as a storyteller, her inventiveness and use of humor, keep it from feeling like the tragedy porn or trite “inspirational” pablum (particularly the story of Thomas, based on Erdrich’s own grandfather) that the material could have in less assured hands. What kept it from being truly great, for me, was the dual narrative structure. There are certainly shared themes and parallels between the parts of the work that deal with Thomas and those that deal with Patrice (and obviously they share a time and a place), but the storylines felt too disconnected to me to really make them feel like they should be told alongside each other in the way they were. That being said, this is still a very good book and one I’d enthusiastically recommend!

Historical fiction from the point of view of a minority: this is a Pulitzer-winning, best-selling novel by a big-house publisher, by an acclaimed author, and "The Night Watchman" lives up to the acclaim. Erdrich captures sensory details, family history, tribal traditions, politics, friends, neighbors, relatives, hardships, deprivations, resourcefulness, despair, and more. It's endless, the list of all that Erdrich does right as a writer. Having survived a few years of fiction workshopping, I can attest that a lot of critics would complain about too many characters, POV (Point of View ) "violations," omniscient narration, some trivial syntax issues (involving commas + and in a series, but I may be the last editor on the planet who cares), perhaps excessive use of sentence frags (at some point, incomplete sentences became trendy and acceptable), but the vast majority of readers do not care how well a novel is written. Do we like the characters? Do we care about them? Thomas is 100% lovable. Patrice ("not Pixie!") is harder to love, but she earns our respect, she who can chop wood and verbally eviscerate men. Wood Mountain, the young boxer, is endearing. Every character is well drawn, authentic, and memorable. The two Mormon missionaries are intriguing, and the real-life Senator Arthur V. Watkins is a despicable, nasty man. We can rejoice that he failed in his mission to de-tribalize the tribes. Reading this story, one wonders how it is that Native Americans continue to get the short end of the stick and the least amount of media attention. E.g., the hashtag "Native Lives Matter" came before the #BLM hashtag, and two women actually protested in public that Natives had started usurping "their" hashtag. No, ladies, they had the hashtag first, but you never bothered to learn that, or learn why they saw a need to say their lives matter. The sex trafficking, the men who pay money to watch women perform (mermaid or blue ox costume in a tank of water, it's too ridiculous to fathom), the poverty, the drug addicts in the city, the exploitation: Erdrich covers just about every issue of the day. This is a heartbreaking read, but engaging, and ultimately uplifting. This is one of the few novels that make my #MustRead list, one I'd buy for friends and beg them to read.

Poetic, beautiful, dramatic and compelling. It won the Pulitzer for a reason.

I was drawn to this book as it was selling for a special price and because it was a Pulitzer Prize winning book. I wanted to like this a bit more for that reason. The book is basically vignettes with numerous characters wrapped into a larger story. There are two main storylines which I think could have been separated and told on their own-a story based on historical fiction regarding laws which Congress was trying to pass in the 1950s regarding Native American tribes and forced assimilation. The other was a story about a young woman who disappeared and her sister's quest to look for her. That storyline ended somewhat abruptly, and the sister eventually comes back home by just showing up. We never really found out what happened to her or why she was in that situation. I really liked Patrice, and she was a compelling character. I also liked that Louise had a component of spirituality to the book because it is an integral part of Native American life. I even appreciated the addition of some minor characters such as the Mormon missionaries, because it represented unwanted individuals entering their land and trying to interfere with their longstanding culture. Although, there was an additional storyline on them, which is where the book somewhat lost me. I did not think it was important to look into their lives, nor did I find it necessary to have storylines for minor characters. I suppose this is what Louise was going for-a comprehensive look into the lives of a Native American community. However, I think the choice to tell one or two specific stories in depth were missed here. Also, although we learned the endings for the characters, it really wasn't a satisfying conclusion. I realize that sometimes in life, there are not happy endings but one character in particular did not really have the fate that you would have wanted. The stories were completed, which I appreciate, and we were not left hanging. So, that was good. I just think a lot of the action happened at the end and the book was filled with so many unnecessary stories. Louise Erdrich is a good storyteller but I wasn't in love with this book.

Louise Erdrich has written another remarkable novel about Native American life that pulses with life, humor, tragedy, fierceness, determination, poetry and love. Like her last few novels, The Night Watchman concerns itself with politics, in this case the attempt by the US Congress to terminate a tribe - the Turtle Mountain Chippewa. The story is told through the intersecting lives of two families struggling to survive the poverty of the reservation and the lack of education. The resilience, strength, and cleverness of Thomas, the night watchman, Patrice his niece, and Millie, their cousin to fight the federal government and save their land is a joy to read. They are surrounded by a large cast of other supporting characters that create the rich world of this tribe. Each is so beautifully sketched in in all their humanity by Erdrich's pinpoint selection of details about each character. She creates a pulsing community watching over each other and they in turn watched over by a spirit world of ancestors that hovers protectively over all. Woven throughout the story is a secondary plot about Patrice's search for her sister Vera who has been abducted into an ugly world of human trafficking - a story of the ever increasing incidences of missing and murdered Naive American women - crimes that go largely ignored by law enforcement. Erdrich is a national treasure. The voice she gives to Native peoples is invaluable. The Night Watchman is one of her finest novels. I highly recommend it.

Having just read the acknowledgements at the end of The Night Watchman, I see how integral this book is to her tribe’s existence. How her community weaves itself together. I did not know the US governments attempt at termination of tribes’ treaties in the 1950s. How dare us, how dare us.

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich is a captivating novel by Louise Erdrich, based on her grandfather Patrick Gourneau’s successful fight to ward off efforts to “emancipate” the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa of North Dakota. At the heart of the story is Thomas Wazhashk, humble night watchman in a jewel bearing plant. Thomas unearths the real intent of federal legislation that would disenfranchise the Turtle Mountain Chippewa from their land and way of life. Another major character is Patrice ‘Pixie’ Paranteau, a young woman just coming of age who works in the same plant as her uncle Thomas and who is the object of the affections of local high school math teacher and coach ‘Hay Stack’ Barnes. It is not Hay Stack who draws Patrice’s affections, though, but Wood Mountain, Hay Stack’s prize protégé and boxer. Barnes persuades Wood Mountain to take part in a grueling fight with the gate receipts going toward paying for a Turtle Mountain delegation who travel to Washington, D.C., to fight the termination bill written by Senator Arthur W. Watkins. Patrice is also driven to learn what happened to her sister Vera who disappeared in Minneapolis, leaving her baby with friends. Through the course of learning what happened to her sister, Patrice experiences life as a ‘waterjack’ in a seedy nightclub. By her own fierce vigilance she fights off the same forces that sent her sister into the arms of human traffickers. Millie Cloud, a graduate sociology student, a secondary character, also plays an important role in the novel. Millie’s research of the Turtle Mountain people is key in the delegation’s presentation to Washington lawmakers. All but completely absorbed into white culture, Millie rediscovers her Chippewa roots and, like her fellow warriors, fights for the rights of her people. Patrice joins the delegation to Washington, only to return to discover that Wood Mountain has found someone else to take her place – someone else very important to her. Erdrich accomplishes many things in this novel. She weaves seemingly disparate strands into a tightly woven rope at the end. She also shows how common people can accomplish great things when they work together. And, perhaps even greater, she shows the resilience of the Chippewa people and their refusal to be daunted. This is a wonderfully inspiring novel by a master storyteller who will draw you in and not let you go until the very end.

This book was so wonderful and sad and exciting and frightening I couldn’t put it down. I bought this in hard copy to keep in my library for my grandchildren to read one day.

El libro llegó en perfectas condiciones y, por lo que llevo leído promete ser muy interesante. La edición estadounidense en pasta dura es estupenda.

Loved the book, and recommend it highly, but I detest Amazon's practice of adding non-title information to their book titles. "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction 2021" is not part of the title, and I do not like it being part of the title in my Library. As a librarian this practice offends me.

A wonderful book , each story a cameo which all together gives us a comprehensive picture of life on Turtle mountain, an idea of Native American life on the reservation and a feeling for their resilience and connection to the landscape and nature all around them. They have not only a connection to nature but also to each other. This mental connection reminded me of the aborigines in Australia. They are still in touch with each other and to themselves. We probably had the same centuries ago but sadly we seem to have lost it. The book ties in with the America of today. America seems intent on destroying itself exploiting the land and its resources. This is a book well worth reading on so many counts.

This is Louise Erdrichs best novel and a very important story about the injustice and discrimination faced by Native Americans in Montana during the 1950s in America. It is based on fact and an attempt by a Mormon US Senator to pass a bill in the 1950s to disenfranchise Native Americans and take their land on reservations in Montana. Great characters good story and an important subject matter that demonstrates the struggles Native Americans have had to endure to hang onto their culture, traditions and land in the US in the post war period. Based on the life of her Grandfather who engaged in this struggle to protect Native American rights and treaties and to keep hold of their land. Easy to read but beautifully written with fully developed and interesting characters. I loved this novel. It was enjoyable , illuminating, educational and very different.