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Lastly, 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.
Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman
Imagine a heat map of the concentration of wisdom as we understand it today across the past several centuries in the United States and Canada. Assuming such a map were possible, it is highly likely that many changes in the higher concentrations of wisdom would mirror the forced displacements of indigenous peoples and their increasing concentration on ever smaller (and economically less desirable) plots of land. Almost invariably, the wisdom of Indigenous North Americans stresses the need to live in harmony with nature, rather than attempting to dominate it, and the benefit of that harmony for the harmony of human communities and the realization of social justice. A prominent activist for Native American rights in the Progressive Era, Lakota Chief Luther Standing Bear once wrote:
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. So he kept his youth close to its softening influence. (McLuhan 6)
Yet Indigenous American wisdom has been rarely heard on this continent—and this for two principal reasons beyond the obvious economic and imperial ones. First, indigenous wisdom tends to speak simply, in softer, more humble voices. In his 1911 essay The Soul of an Indian, the Dakota Sioux physician and social activist Ohiyesa wrote, in collaboration with his wife, Elaine Goodale Eastman: “We first Americans mingle with our pride an exceptional humility. Spiritual arrogance is foreign to our nature and teaching” (Nerburn 87). Contrast this prideful humility, of course, with the “humility”—or more precisely, the humiliation—that the Sauk warrior Black Hawk said that “the power of the American government has reduced [indigenous peoples] to” (McLuhan 143).
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The second reason for white North American deafness to indigenous wisdom is that it flies in the face of the very conception of progress that Slaughterhouse problematizes. In his introduction to The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, anthropologist Wade Davis characterizes the wisdom of indigenous peoples as a rebuke to the modern West’s concept of a “progression in the affairs of human beings, a ladder of success that rose from the primitive to the civilized, from the tribal village of Africa to London and the splendour of the Strand” (11). Ohiyesa captures the profound irony of the Western cult of material progress when he marvels at the prospect of his becoming “civilized” and, in the process, learning to “worship with the white man before a painted landscape whose value is estimated in dollars” while “natural rocks are ground to powder and made into artificial blocks which may be built into the walls of modern society” (McLuhan 110). In its respect for nature and its “softening influence,” its commitment to ensuring healthy communities, its simplicity and essential humility, and its skepticism around the cult of material progress, indigenous wisdom is fundamentally human in scale and, as such, a model to be emulated. Or as Vine Deloria Jr., a leader in the American Indian Renaissance, wrote in 1971: “We Indians have a more human philosophy of life. We Indians will show this country how to act human” (McLuhan 159).
The daughter of a German American father and an Ojibwe/French mother, both teachers at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Wahpeton, North Dakota, Louise Erdrich is the author to date of some 19 novels, many of them centered around the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, of which she is an enrolled member. Erdrich’s 17th novel, The Night Watchman, draws heavily on the life and letters of her maternal grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, who (like the novel’s Thomas Wazhashk) worked as a night watchman at a local jewel bearing plant and served for many years as a tribal chairman. And like Thomas, Patrick Gourneau led the Turtle Mountain band’s fight against House Concurrent Resolution 108, which sought to nullify previously negotiated federal obligations to five American Indian tribes through a process known as “termination”. The novel is set in the mid-1950s, “supposedly the golden age for America,” Erdrich writes,
but in reality a time when Jim Crow reigned and American Indians were at the nadir of power—our traditional languages outlawed, our land base continually and illegally seized (even as now) by resource extraction companies, our languages weakened by government boarding schools. (445)
In 2021, a year after she published The Night Watchman, the then 67 year-old Erdrich said this in an interview with AARP:
The Ojibwa people call old people wisdom keepers. They are treasures. They’re also the funniest people in the community. Elders have the freedom to tease anybody. Now I’m at the age when I should be an elder, but I don’t feel like it. I’m just not that wise. (Delehanty)
I will argue that The Night Watchman shows otherwise, in a way entirely consistent with the Socratic paradox that Erdrich articulated so well in her very first novel, Love Medicine: “The greatest wisdom doesn’t know itself” (75).
The Night Watchman exemplifies many traits common to the novels I have analyzed thus far. It is both multilingual and highly perspectival. One short chapter, “Prayer for 1954,” centers the thoughts and actions of a dozen, unnamed but easily recognizable characters; another, “Two Months,” gives us the perspectives of nine separate, named figures. Consistent with the humor that Erdrich says is typical of Ojibwe (a.k.a. Chippewa) wisdom keepers, a chapter that immediately follows a scene of sexual tension between two prospective lovers and that begins “After the sex was over, they were bored and irritated” turns out to be narrated from the perspective of a post-coital horse (240). A deeply troubling scene detailing the effects of sexual trafficking is largely told from the perspective of a “psychic dog” (298ff.). The overall effect is to create what reviewer Ron Charles has called a “tapestry of stories [that] is a signature of Erdrich’s craft.”
No less significant is the richness of Erdrich’s characterization, with a particular focus on two characters—Thomas Wazhashk and Patrice Paranteau—who together (as we will see) represent two of the principal forms of dispossession to which Indigenous Americans have long been subject. Thomas, based on Erdrich’s “deeply humane” grandfather, spends his shift as night watchman for a local jewel bearing factory writing letters to a variety of politicians and government officials on behalf of his community with his “meticulous, boarding-school penmanship” (446). In the novel’s first chapter, Erdrich tells us that she has named Thomas after the humble, hardworking muskrat—wazhashk in Chippewa—who, in Ojibwe legend, gave his life in diving down to the bottom of the sea that covered the world to retrieve a “grip of dirt” from which “the Creator made the whole earth” (4, 172). Speaking of Thomas, Erdrich has said: “His character really imbued the book with a sense of acceptance, or at least not the usual crazy, crazy villainy that I love to write” (Vick).
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Patrice Paranteau, who for most of the novel is desperate to lose the nickname Pixie, is a strong-minded and self-assertive 19 year-old woman with a “white-people job” at the jewel bearing factory and who, we are told, does “things perfectly when enraged” (13, 4). Concerned about the potential ravages of childbearing and traumatized by an earlier sexual assault, Patrice is constantly fending off suitors while remaining, until late in the novel, sexually naïve. Erdrich tells us up front that “Pixie, or—excuse me—Patrice, is completely fictional” though she bears a name that, in English, is the feminine counterpart of Erdrich’s grandfather’s and, to Patrick’s French ancestors, would have been one and the same (1). To underscore Patrice’s centrality, Erdrich makes Patrice herself a night watcher when she is visited by the spirit of her recently deceased alcoholic father (328f.).
Despite the richness of its two main characters, The Night Watchman is very much an ensemble novel. Here, as in Ojibwe culture generally, community is primary and designations such as “cousin,” “uncle,” and “aunt” cover, we are told, “a host of relationships” (48). In this culture full of frank talk, sexual banter, and familial teasing, “self-determination,” as Kate Reavey writes of Erdrich’s Four Souls, “is only possible within the support of community.” Thus we get to know a plethora of significant characters, including
- Patrice’s mother, Zhaanat, a wise and eerily prescient guardian of the Chippewa language and traditional ways, who “sometimes knew things she should not have known” (21, 196);
- Lloyd Barnes, a White math teacher and boxing coach, whose expressed desire to become “an Indian” and (mostly unsuccessful) courtship of three local women, including Patrice, is a consistent source of the novel’s levity (214);
- Wood Mountain, Barnes’ boxing protégé, who pursues Patrice more successfully, but ends up falling in love with the rescued son of Patrice’s traumatized sister, Vera, whom he eventually marries (189); and
- Millie Cloud, a socially awkward and sartorially obsessive “Chippewa scholar” and author of a master’s thesis on economic conditions on the Ojibwe reservation, who plays a key role in the fight against termination (325).
Like so many of the novels discussed here, The Night Watchman contains a great deal of psychological realism. It does so, however, in a way that works the “always thin” boundary between the physical world and the dream world, consistent with the principle (often associated with Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce tribe) that “wisdom comes to us in dreams” (Vick; Smohalla, qtd. in McLuhan 56). Thus Thomas’s night watch is haunted by the spirit of Roderick, a boarding-school friend, the circumstances of whose death are only explained late in the novel (403). When Zhaanat seeks to locate her lost daughter Vera, she enlists her cousin Gerald, whose spirit flies down to Minneapolis to find Vera and sees that she now has a child (46). At one point, while contemplating the manifold evil in the world, Thomas looks up at the northern lights and sees, then dances with, a series of benign “beings… floating downward from the heavens,” who leave him with “their comforting presence” (226, 230).
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Ironically, given how merciless the novel is on the subject of Mormon theology, Thomas soon learns that Joseph Smith “had also been visited by an extremely bright being who was semitransparent” (276).
Above all, however, the wisdom of Erdrich’s novel lies in its deep, highly nuanced, and historically contextualized concern for social justice. First announced on August 1, 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 called for “the eventual termination of all tribes, and the immediate termination of five tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa” (1). More specifically, it advocated the breaking up of tribal land and “the termination of federal services furnished to such Indians because of their status as Indians,” heretofore promised for as “[l]ong as the grass grows and the rivers flow” (91, 120). In seeking to abrogate all prior treaties, Erdrich’s novel shows, white farmers and ranchers, mining interests, and timber companies all sought to exploit indigenous peoples’ poverty and their historical misunderstanding of the concept of land rights.
Of course this push for “termination”—which Thomas quipped was “[m]issing only the prefix. The ex.”—was but a relatively late episode in the long history of Indigenous American dispossession: after the slaughter of the theretofore ubiquitous buffalo, on which tribes relied for food, clothing, and ceremonial objects; after the demise of indigenous peoples’ nomadic lifestyle and their confinement to reservations; and after the ravages of smallpox, tuberculosis, the flu epidemic of 1918, and alcohol (90). In The Night Watchman, the immiseration that results from these successive waves of disposition is most manifest when Patrice’s chance fall into a snow drift sheltering a hibernating bear becomes the only thing between the Paranteau family and starvation (312).
What feels new about HCR 108, however, is the cynical doublespeak of emancipation and increased economic opportunity. The “innocuous dry language” in which the bill is couched, allows its primary advocate, Utah Senator Arthur V. Watkins, to not “even have to get his hands bloody” (79, 186). This was dispossession not at the point of a rifle but through policies, laws, and onerous taxation—all, as Thomas reflects, despite indigenous peoples having “fought in four or five United States wars” (93).
Central to the widespread effort to induce indigenous peoples to leave their reservations, thereby opening up their lands to drilling, mining, and timbering, were publicity campaigns portraying major cities (in this case, Minneapolis) as a haven of “Good Jobs,” “Exciting Community Life,” and “Happy Homes”—in short, as “The Chance of Your Lifetime” (63). In The Night Watchman, the trauma of potential termination finds its twin in a trauma of relocation, most notably when indigenous women relocate to the cities in response to these campaigns and become dispossessed through White male violence and exploitation.
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Gender-based violence is by no means unknown in Erdrich’s tribal community. Prior to her abusive husband’s alcohol-induced death, Zhaanat sleeps “with a knife beneath her pillow and a hatchet at her feet” (326). Over the course of the novel, we learn that Bucky Duvalle had sexually assaulted Patrice; then, when rebuffed, he had tried to win her by ruining her reputation (73). But Zhaanat survives her husband and Patrice seemingly causes Bucky’s face to droop through the projection of her “malignant” hatred (352).
No such direct comeuppance attends those who perpetuate sexual violence in the city. Patrice’s sister Vera leaves home for Minneapolis with a new husband, who promptly abandons her and her child. She then falls victim to a sex trafficking ring that controls women with drugs, chains, and dog collars, and eventually locks her up in the hold of a ship, “where the men entered and used her body, day and night” (264). When Vera returns to the reservation at the novel’s end, she is but a shadow of her former fun-loving self.
Midway through The Night Watchman, Patrice travels to Minneapolis to find her sister, only to fall into a similar trap when she is recruited to swim in a dive bar water tank wearing a sexually suggestive rubberized suit based on Paul Bunyan’s blue ox, Babe. Her employer preserves this outfit, we discover in time, with a highly poisonous powder, as if the suit were more valuable than its wearer (174). Having learned from Patrice of the chains and dog collars she discovered in Minneapolis, Thomas concludes that what happens in the cities is “so extreme an evil that it struck at his fundamental assumptions”—i.e., that “if he worked hard enough and followed their rules… he could keep his family secure, his people from the worst harms” (222ff.).
Like the Ojibwe wisdom keepers, Erdrich’s novels are funny, especially on the subject of sex. When Patrice finally turns to her experienced friend Betty to overcome her sexual naïveté, we are treated to a hilarious description of a woman’s orgasm while Betty and Patrice nearly choke on their “maple long johns” (294f.). This association of laughter and sex then opens onto Ojibwe conceptions of the spirit world, as when Thomas finds that the “tall tales” of the Book of Mormon pale in comparison to the stories of the trickster spirit Nanabozho, who
got angry at his own butt and burnt it off, created a shit mountain to climb down when stuck high in a tree,… changed himself into a stump and made his penis look like a branch where the kingfisher perched,… and created everything useful and much that was essential, like laughter. (382)
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However Erdrich may come down on her own status as an Ojibwe wisdom keeper, she repeatedly associates wisdom, laughter, and sex, as when she puts these words in the mouth of the “brilliant and shrewd talker” Eddy Mink:
I got some wisdom for you. Listen up. Government is more like sex than people think. When you are having good sex, you don’t appreciate it enough. When you are having bad sex, it is all you can think about. (183)
But what is most remarkable about Erdrich’s use of humor is her way of eliciting laughter as a response to significant adversity and violence. Her portrayal of two hapless Mormon missionaries, who actively seek “to change Indians into whites” and tell an Ojibwe interlocutor (without the slightest sense of irony) that Mormonism “was the sole religion to have originated in America,” is standard-issue comedy (92, 347). What sets Erdrich’s work apart is her ability, like Patrice and the younger Vera, “to make life’s bitterness into comedy” (48). Patrice’s highly sexualized and ridiculous underwater dance as the blue ox Babe is both deeply troubling and funny, inspiring in Patrice herself
the sort of feeling and thinking that could only be described in Chippewa, where the strangeness was also humorous and the danger surrounding [an] entire situation was of the sort that you might laugh at, even though you could also get hurt. (132)
Erdrich likewise conjoins laughter and violence (in this case, the memory thereof) when she has the ghost of Thomas’s childhood friend Roderick follow the Turtle Mountain delegation to Washington, DC, only to discover that “there were so many Indian ghosts in Washington that he decided to stay” (440).
Novelist Luis Alberto Urrea captures what may be the most salient aspect of The Night Watchman’s tone when he writes: “The trend here… is toward redemption. Hard-won survival. And, in the face of suffering and struggle and governmental malfeasance, hope. Laughter erupts as unexpectedly as tears.” In a 2009 commencement address at Dartmouth, her alma mater, Erdrich tells a story from her student days that anticipates by a decade Patrice’s ability to turn bitterness into a wise form of comedy. Having once attended an introductory philosophy class reeking of the 60 pounds of onions she had just peeled for one of her several campus jobs, Erdrich concludes: “If there’s one thing we all have in common, it is absurd humiliation, which can actually become the basis for wisdom.”
In the end, it is Thomas, not Patrice, who best exemplifies the spirit of the Serenity Prayer as I have formulated it, embodying as he does “the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Fully appreciating the gravity of the termination bill, Thomas mobilizes his community against it, leading a delegation of 45 to a Bureau of Indian Affairs meeting in Fargo, then a much smaller group to address a pair of Senate subcommittees in Washington, DC.
Photo: Turtle Mountain Chippewa Heritage Center
Having been exhorted as a child to “[s]tudy hard because we need to know the enemy,” Thomas wisely understands that he will best achieve his tribe’s aims not by treating Arthur V. Watkins as an enemy—though he is certainly that—but rather as an “adversary” to be “outwitted” (276). He consistently argues from his adversary’s self-interest, reasoning that the “only way to fight the righteous was to present an argument that would make giving him what he wanted seem the only righteous thing to do” (278). Rather than contest the principle of termination per se, he decides to “buy time” on the grounds that “the reservation was currently unable to sustain itself without support”—a tactic that ultimately had the same outcome after President Johnson moved to end the practice of termination in 1968 (400).[1] Instead of directly attacking the bad faith inherent in their adversary’s convoluted contention that HCR 108 actually emancipated members of the five affected tribes, Thomas and his fellow delegates apply what Thomas Millay has called “the solvent of simplicity,” as when Eddy Mink argues that the provision of federal services under the extant treaties “might be likened to rent… for use of the entire country of the United States” (201).
Both Patrice and Millie Cloud prove central to the tribe’s fight against termination. Millie, on whose master’s thesis the delegates rely, grows in both self-confidence and appreciation of her indigenous heritage, while joining the long list of those who fall in love with Patrice (417). Patrice, looking like Clark Kent in her new eyeglasses, successfully testifies to the Senate subcommittee. But whereas Thomas goes so far as to “try to butter [Senator Watkins] up to the teeth,” Patrice is “thrilled” by the actions of a Puerto Rican separatist who shoots up a session of the House of Representatives and who “could have been her sister” (406, 395f.). Although Patrice remains “inhabited by a vengeful, roiling, even murderous spirit,” that same spirit that took her revenge on Bucky Duvalle, she proves increasingly in control of her destiny, ultimately refusing the marriage plot that the novel teases its readers with. Having long been courted by Wood Mountain, with whom she first has sex, Patrice welcomes Wood Mountain’s interest in marrying her sister Vera, since she “would embrace anyone and anything that could help to put together Vera’s demolished heart” (409, 432).
In the Afterword to her novel, Erdrich speaks of the Turtle Mountain delegation that her grandfather led as “the first to mount a fierce defense [against termination] and prevail” (447). But this partial victory comes at an appreciable personal cost. On the journey home from D.C., Thomas suffers a stroke, which causes him to play a “hide-and-seek game” with words in his memory and yet treats him to a vision of past time when the wild prairies were thick with buffalo (442f.). Speaking of her grandfather, Erdrich notes that he
recovered from his initial stroke and went on to work on improving the reservation school system, writing a Turtle Mountain Constitution, and writing and publishing the first history of the Turtle Mountains. He was tribal chairman until 1959. (444)
In the wake of Patrick’s organizing efforts, the women at the jewel bearing plant won pay increases, restoration of their canceled coffee break, and a new cafeteria. Patrick Gourneau, Erdrich tells us, “suffered a long decline,” yet he “never stopped being funny, optimistic, and kind” (448). It is this conjunction of humor, optimism, and kindness, most notably embodied in Thomas, that gives Erdrich’s masterful novel, in the words of Luis Alberto Urrea, the feel of “a call to arms. A call to humanity.”
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As for the ultimate pertinence of the Serenity Prayer to The Night Watchman, let me simply quote the Afterword’s final lines:
Lastly, 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. (451)
[1] At the novel’s end, Erdrich notes that the first Trump administration would attempt in 2018 to terminate the Wampanoag, “the tribe who first welcomed Pilgrims to these shores and invented Thanksgiving” (450).
