Louise Erdrich Based Her Monumental New Novel on Her Grandfather's Story
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Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman is a singular achievement even for this accomplished writer. It centers, in part, on Thomas, a security guard in a North Dakota factory and Chippewa elder who uses what he was taught in boarding school to plead his tribe’s case to white authorities; he’s a kind of double agent who presents himself as willing to compromise while maintaining his primary allegiance to his Chippewa forebears. Thomas is closely based upon Erdrich’s grandfather Patrick Gourneau, who led a heroic campaign in the early 1950s to protect Native Americans from losing the benefits guaranteed them in treaties with the federal government.
Thomas’s surname, Wazhashk, is derived from the Chippewa word for muskrat, that “lowly, hard-working, water-loving rodent,” which, in myth and legend, “helped remake the earth” after the great flood. He takes seriously his responsibility to protect the Turtle Mountain Chippewa community. He’s indefatigable in his advocacy for his people—preventing them from being “emancipated” by a congressional act that would eventually allow the government to dismantle entire reservations.
But while Thomas’s activism is the core of the novel, the story is populated with a diversity of quirky individuals, including the naïvely trusting 19-year-old Pixie, a relative of Thomas’s who works at the factory to support her family; white math teacher Lloyd Barnes, who’s in love with Pixie; and Wood Mountain, the amateur boxer Pixie is drawn to. Much of the plot involves Pixie’s search for her sister Vera, who was abducted in Minneapolis, leaving her baby behind in a drug-infested townhouse.
Erdrich, like her grandfather, is a defender and raconteur of the lives of her people. Her intimate knowledge of the Native American world in collision with the white world has allowed her, over more than a dozen books, to create a brilliantly realized alternate history as rich as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. The Night Watchman arrives in the midst of an impassioned debate over how American citizenship should be defined. As the author writes in an afterword: “If you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.”
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