The Night Watchman - Estimated Read Time = 9 hours
This Article - Estimated Read Time = 10 minutes
Time This Article Saves You = 8 hours and 50 minutes
*Most books need to be read twice before they can really be understood. This article saves you time & effort by helping you reach a solid understanding with just one read.
The Night Watchman - Podcast Episode
“To most of their neighbors, Indians were people who suffered and hid away in shabby dwellings or roamed the streets in flagrant drunkenness and shame. Except the good ones. There was always a “good Indian” that someone knew. But they were not a people who had champion fighters.”
Erdrich has long been an important author, ever since her debut novel, Love Medicine, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984. One fascinating feature of her novels is how many of them are interconnected, being set within the same land, even including many of the same characters. In that regard, her achievement in literature has been regarded as similar to that of Faulkner’s in his creation of Yoknapatawpha County.
The Night Watchman, however, is a standalone novel, that doesn’t contribute in the same way to that broader creation, but it does happen to be her first Pulitzer Prize winner.
In this novel, she traces the stories of two people, through an especially pressing season of their lives.
First, Thomas Waszashk—farmer by day, night watchman by night.
Second, Patrice—a young Chippewa woman trying to locate her missing sister.
Through their stories, Erdrich displays the longstanding urge that has existed in the U.S. to end Native ways of life, and the several masks that urge has donned across the past century. Namely, Termination, Relocation, and Assimilation. The narrative displays the consequences of each, though Termination bears the primary spotlight.
However, Erdrich’s aim isn’t solely focused on retrieving the memory of certain strategic initiatives, but also in recounting the sacrifices made and the heroism displayed by many in order to preserve Native life and land for future generations.
Her aim, I believe, is to illuminate the lives of the champion fighters who have already come before, perhaps in the hope of fostering more to come. It’s a story about heroes.
Story Recap . Spoiler Alert
The plot surrounds the creation a certain bill, whose aim was to eradicate the nation to nation treaties made between the United States and various Native American tribes. In the language of these treaties, they’re intended to last, “as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow.” This bill, however (which is an actual historical reality) is created with the aim of terminating these eternal treaties.
This bill is the story’s catalyst, because it possesses the ability to strip all tribes within the U.S. of any remaining land and governmental support, leaving many in a state of hopeless poverty.
So, Thomas leads the fight against it.
He learns of the bill early in the story, and throughout the book, he organizes the tribe’s resistance efforts. During the day, when he’s not farming, he organizes meetings, forming a coalescence. At night, he drafts letters to the same end, during his night watchman shifts at the plant, burning the candle at both ends.
The tribe’s resistance efforts culminate in their sending a delegation from North Dakota to Washington D.C., to present their case against the bill to Congress. On the return trip, the lack of sleep and the excessive weight of stress finally catch up with Thomas, and he suffers a stroke.
In the book’s closing, it shares that due to their efforts, the Turtle Mountain Band did not suffer termination; primarily because of the heroic efforts of Thomas, and others. However, 117 other tribes did suffer termination, the effects which were devastating.
That’s a recap of Thomas’s storyline, but since the novel has two protagonists, two primary plots exist—the other belonging to Patrice.
Patrice’s narrative intertwines with Thomas’s. Her story highlights something called Relocation, and the dangers it presented specifically for Native women made vulnerable by it.
When the story opens, her sister Vera has been missing for several months. Vera had developed a romantic relationship with a man from “the Cities,” Minneapolis & St. Paul, and went to marry and live with him there.
However, something went wrong.
Patrice eventually travels to the Cities, attempting to find her sister. She returns unsuccessfully, but learns later that her sister fell into a trafficking ring that preyed upon Native women. The strategy, which is historically based, involved men going to reservations to meet young women, promising to marry them, bringing them to the Cities, and then trafficking them. This is Vera’s story.
Eventually, those using her body leave her for dead. She is picked up by an old army medic, who tends her back to health and returns her to her home.
The Muskrat’s Model - An Interpretation
Thomas and Patrice are the two protagonists. The meaning of the novel surrounds their stories. Of the two, Thomas is arguably primary.
In the first chapter, the meaning of his name is introduced, and is a significant theme. His full name is Thomas Washashk, his last name meaning, muskrat. Muskrats are small, playful animals who love to eat, and they also happen to play an important role in a Chippewa Creation story. Muskrats helped remake the earth.
In the story, the world was covered by one giant ocean. So, the Creator gathered the water animals, to see if one could dive down to the bottom of the ocean and return with some mud, with which the Creator would make land. Several animals tried and failed, until the muskrat went. He was gone a long time, until finally, his limp body floated to the surface. He had drowned. But inside his clenched fist, there was mud. From this, the Creator made land.
The muskrat sacrificed himself, so that land could be created, and life could be lived upon it. Thomas fulfills the same role in this story. For months on end, he sleeps a few hours a day, struggling to provide for his family and mount a resistance against this bill. In the end, he is successful, and the victory amounts to the preservation of their land, and the life they live upon it—the same success of the muskrat.
Unfortunately, it comes at nearly the same cost.
Thomas’s stroke on the return from Washington is described using the same language as the muskrat’s sacrificial drowning. This overlapping language is what conveys the meaning of Thomas’s sacrifice. Namely, that the creation story isn’t just a story, but it provides a model for Native heroism—sacrifice, for the life and land of others.
Thomas is a champion fighter, after the model of the muskrat.
For Patrice, three loose threads connect in order to bring about the meaning of her story.
First, she is described as someone who “did things perfectly when enraged.”
Second, in being the only financial provider in her family, she comments that she feels like a skin tent, stretched thin, barely holding things together.
Lastly, almost everyone else in the book calls her Pixie, a nickname given in reference to her pretty appearance, rather than Patrice, the name she insists upon.
The primary meaning of Patrice’s story is woven between these three threads.
Her anger functions in a couple of different ways. The anger stems originally from a sexually abusive experience. One day, she he thought she was accepting a free car ride from some boys who were friends, until they attempted to rape her. Her anger as a person began there, but experiences like this—attempts of males to abuse her, or even just to see her in purely sexual terms—occur continually throughout the story.
So, her anger sheds light upon the vulnerability of Native women, in that they are often treated as mere sexual objects. Even the boxing coach Barnes admits in his own internal dialogue that his attraction to Patrice is based on her being “exotic.”
The theme of her two names plays upon this as well, as most refer to her as Pixie, because their understanding of her relates more to her beauty, than her personhood. In worst-case scenarios, this reality could lead to her rape and trafficking. In the best-case, it would lead her to marriage and motherhood, and a life spent in poverty on the reservation—a life she describes as toil, and desperately wants to avoid.
This desire is why she resists her attractions to Wood Mountain for so long, because she doesn’t want to settle for the same toilsome life as her friends.
However, avoiding these two fates is nearly impossible, as she admits her circumstances have her stretched thin like a skin tent. Patrice has almost no hope whatsoever of avoiding these, especially when factoring in her father’s absence due to alcoholism.
Thankfully, because Patrice is the type of person who “did things perfectly when enraged,” her anger saves her. Perfection is what’s needed in order to avoid the pitfalls that surround her. Throughout the story, she is perfect, and the book closes with her entertaining dreams of pursuing a college education.
Patrice is lifted up as a hero, a champion fighter. Her story retrieves the difficulties that generations of Native women have endured, in order to bring about an appreciation for the triumphs they have won.
Her story is also a plea for these realities to change. Perfection should not be the requirement for any person to succeed in life. Her story is written so that the same perfection she exemplifies would not be necessary for others following after.
Therefore, The Night Watchman tells the stories of two champion fighters, as models of endurance and sacrifice. In doing so, it’s a plea that the realities creating the necessity for such heroes would cease to endure. In this way, The Night Watchman is a plea for Native life, land, and heroes.
Heroic Echoes
In interviews, Erdrich has shared that Thomas is based on a real person—her own grandfather. In fact, her research involved reading many of the letters he wrote, mounting a resistance against the termination bill, all while working as a night watchman himself.
Part of Erdrich’s motivation in writing his story in particular was her discovery that the memory of termination, and her family’s battle against it, was being forgotten. So she wrote to preserve the memory of her grandfather and his heroics.
Which is a notion I find inspiring, the intentional act of remembering someone who made sacrifices for the benefit of those down the line. Because when we do the same, when we look to our own lives and to those who came before us, we often stumble upon the presence of far more heroes than we might’ve first expected.
Sure, we may have no one in our families who was perfect. Skeletons in the closet and flaws of character abound, in every family. But just as well, it’s impossible to examine our lives and not see that everything we’ve enjoyed has in some way been contributed to by those who came before us.
When we pause to remember, to even rehearse their stories, we’re reminded that more rides on today than we realize. That our own lives impact far more than what’s right before us. That the decisions we make today will ring out for generations, perhaps even echoing into eternity.
Your life matters. Significantly. It will have an impact on generations to come (whether you have children, or not; whether your children have children, or not). Someone, decades from now, will be living a life shaped to a drastic degree by the choices you made.
So, choose to honor those who’ve come before you. Choose to sacrifice for the good of those around you. And choose to endure whatever difficulties plague you in this life. So that one day, decades down the road, that person can look back in gratitude at the life you lived for them.