The Night Watchman

“Someday, a watch. Patrice longed for an accurate way to keep time. Because time did not exist at her house. Or rather, it was the keeping of time as in school or work time that did not exist. There was a small brown alarm clock on the stool beside her bed, but it lost five minutes on the house. She had to compensate when setting it and if she once forgot to wind it, all was lost. Her job was dependent on getting a ride to work. […] If she didn’t get a ride, it was thirteen miles of gravel road. She couldn’t get sick. If she got sick, there was no telephone to let anybody know. She would be fired. Life would go back to zero.”

Patrice feels constant pressure to provide for her family. As the quote demonstrates, one simple day of being sick could result in her family losing their entire income. She must be very careful and meticulous to ensure that she will be able to continue to work at the jewel bearing plant so that she can support her them all.

“There were times when Patrice felt like she was stretched across a frame, like a skin tent. She tried to forget that she could easily blow away. Or how easily her father could wreck them all. This feeling of being the only barrier between family and disaster wasn’t new, but they had come so far since she started work.”

As the primary earner for their family, Patrice is saddled with the pressure of having to provide. Rarely is she able to make decisions for only herself. Patrice constantly puts herself last, even allowing Wood Mountain to pursue Vera when Patrice was thinking of him while in Washington. By the novel’s end, she gains more autonomy, and can hopefully start saving for school if Millie’s funding comes through to pay Zhaanat.

“The sense of something there, with her, all around her, swirling and seething with energy. How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included. Patrice closed her eyes and felt a tug. Her spirit poured into the air like song. Wait! She opened her eyes and threw her weight into her cold feet. This must be how Gerald felt when he flew across the earth. Sometimes she frightened herself.”

Patrice feels distinctly connected to the earth, and the novel ends with her spirit again flowing through a tree before being called back. Beyond Patrice, the theme of connection with the earth can be seen throughout the book, as many members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa feel this same type of connection.

“‘You look like a white woman,’ said Zhaanat, in Chippewa. Patrice laughed. They were both pleased with her disguise.”

Because of the unique dangers of being an Indigenous woman, Zhaanat and Patrice both feel more comfortable because Patrice looks like she is white rather than Chippewa. However, this façade immediately fades, as one of the men from Log Jam 26 quickly realizes that she is Indigenous and points this out to his boss.

“Soon Thomas began to speak with his father in Chippewa—which signaled that their conversation was heading in a more complex direction, a matter of the mind and heart. Biboon thought more fluently in Chippewa. Although his English was very good, he also was more expressive and comical in his original language.”

The idea of non-dominant languages being able to express a wider range of ideas and emotions is a recurring motif in this novel. Thomas knows that he needs his father at his best, and so he uses the language which affords him the widest range of expression.

“For days, he’d tried to make sense of the papers, to absorb their meaning. To define their unbelievable intent. Unbelievable because the unthinkable was couched in such innocuous dry language. Unbelievable because the intent was, finally, to unmake, to unrecognize. To erase as Indians him, Biboon, Rose, his children, his people, all of us invisible and as if we never were here, from the beginning, here.”

Thomas struggles throughout the novel to defeat House Concurrent Resolution 108 because he fears the effect it could have on his community and family. Furthermore, this quote highlights the fact that the government is attempting to get rid of Indigenous people, even though it was their land long before the United States was founded.

“E-man-ci-pation. Eman-cipation. But they were not enslaved. Freed from being Indians was the idea. Emancipated from their land. Freed from the treaties that Thomas’s father and grandfather had signed and that were promised to last forever. So as usual, by getting rid of us, the Indian problem would be solved.”

“Emancipation” as it appears in House Concurrent Resolution 108 seems to be positive. However, Thomas knows that it’s just another polite way of trying to destroy Indigenous communities, and his focus on the word “emancipation” is a recurring motif, especially when paired with the concept of “termination.”

“It was as though he had entered another time, a time he hadn’t known had existed, an uncomfortable time where Indians were not at all like white people.”

Barnes thinks back to his mental image of an Indigenous woman before arriving on the reservation. He is shocked when he meets Zhaanat and sees Pokey’s home, because he was certain Patrice looked like the woman he pictured. Instead, he must confront the difference between what he imagines and how the community really lives.

“There it was, in the first line of the dry first sentence, the word termination, which instantly replaced in Thomas’s mind the word emancipation with its powerful aura of expanse. In the newspapers, the author of the proposal had constructed a cloud of lofty words around this bill—emancipation, freedom, equality, success—that disguised its truth: termination. Termination. Missing only the prefix. The ex.”

Emancipation and termination permeate the storyline focusing on House Concurrent Resolution 108, which Thomas calls the “Termination Bill.” Thomas knows the many ways that white men and the US government have worked to eliminate Indigenous people, and he knows that this bill is no different, even if the language sounds as though it is emphasizing freedom. The real intention is destruction of the tribe and their connections to their land.

“It comes down to this, thought Thomas, staring at the neutral strings of sentences in the termination bill. We have survived smallpox, the Winchester repeating rifle, the Hotchkiss gun, and tuberculosis. We have survived the flu epidemic of 1918 and fought in four or five deadly United States wars. But at least we will be destroyed by a collection of tedious words. For the disposition of, for the intensification of, for the termination of, to provide for, et cetera.”

Erdrich emphasizes how racism has transformed itself from a violent process (e.g., the Winchester repeating rifle, the Hotchkiss gun, etc.) to a sanitized, legal one which takes on the appearance of pro-Indigenous and pro-freedom.

“She had been torn—whether to cut his hair herself. They would cut his hair off at the school. And to cut hair meant someone had died. It was a way of grieving. Just before they left, she took a knife to his braid. She would hang it in the woods so the government would not be able to keep him. So that he would come home. And he had come home.”

This quote gets directly to the trauma of boarding schools and their assimilationist policies in which there was no respect for Indigenous culture or practices, forcing Thomas’s mother to cut his hair so that at least someone who understood what it meant would be the one to do it. The importance of his return is also crucial to this theme and the trauma of the boarding experience. Many did not come home, such as Roderick, because they died due to negligence and indifference.

“First, they gave us this scrap, then they tried to push us off this scrap. Then they took away most of the scrap. Now, what you are saying is they want to push us off the edge of the scrap.”

Biboon’s statement links directly with the theme of connection to the earth. Indigenous people have long been dispossessed of their land since colonists arrived in the United States. At every step, Indigenous folks like Biboon, Thomas, Juggie, Millie, and Patrice have had to fight to defend their right to the land, even though it was theirs to begin with and even though treaties made with the government were supposed to guarantee it.

“All of these jobs and titles could be expressed in Chippewa. It was much better than English for invention, and irony could be added to any word with a simple twist.”

A recurring motif is that the Chippewa language allows for a fuller range of expression. In this example, in which Thomas is talking with Biboon, the narration suggests that Chippewa is flexible and can be both humorous and creative. By talking about the language in this way, Erdrich challenges readers to think more critically about the role of language in this novel.

“This was again the sort of feeling and thinking that could only be described in Chippewa, where the strangeness was also humorous and the danger surrounding this entire situation was of the sort that you might laugh at, even though you could also get hurt, and there were secrets involved, and desperation, for indeed she had nowhere, after her unthinkable short immediate future rolling the water tank, nowhere to go but the dressing room down at the other end of the second-floor hall of Log Jam 26.”

Patrice is distinctly out of her comfort zone, never having left the reservation before. She returns to the comfort of Chippewa in her mind, but her idea also touches on the motif of Chippewa as a means of better expression in being able to contain both the “strangeness,” the “humorous and the danger” all in one expression.

“[D]isposition of federally owned property […] with to such Indians may be discontinued as no longer necessary […] cause to such lands to be sold and deposit the proceeds of sale […] trust relationship to the affairs of the Band and its members has […] terminated […] termination […] terminating.”

Thomas is shocked by House Resolution 108. It takes him some time before he’s able to start strategizing how to best defeat it, and part of this comes out of the disbelief that the government is trying once again to eliminate them. However, he is also not surprised as periodically, the government does return to the “Indian problem” and tries to “solve” it.

“The services that the government provides to Indians might be likened to rent. The rent for use of the entire country of the United States.”

Eddy points this fact out during the hearing, and it flips the narrative of financial support on its head to show that the US government has been taking advantage of Indigenous communities. They were on this land first, and so Eddy points out the hypocrisy of the government pulling back its support.

“His voice was leaden with emotion but what he said was both unthinkable and disappointing to Patrice and Zhaanat. To seek police assistance for an Indian woman was almost sure to put her in the wrong. No matter what happened, she would be the one blamed and punished. It was for that reason unthinkable to approach the police, and it was disappointing because Thomas trusted their enemies.”

The police have historically not been on the side of Indigenous women, and Patrice and Zhaanat are aware of that. They know that Vera, who has already been through a horrible experience, will likely be blamed rather than protected or saved from her captors. Patrice and Zhaanat believe that the dangers of being an Indigenous woman mean that Vera will likely come home through either her own will or through their intervention.

“‘Sometimes when I’m out and around,’ said Wood Mountain, ‘I feel like they’re with me, those way-back people. I never talk about it. But they’re all around us. I could never leave this place.’”

Wood Mountain feels like there is a through line from past to present that will continue to the future, and as talk of relocation looms if the bill passes, there is a threat that this connection would be severed.

“Things started going wrong, as far as Zhaanat was concerned, when places everywhere were named for people—political figures, priests, explorers—and not for the real things that happened in these places—the dreaming, the eating, the death, the appearance of animals.”

This ties in with the severing of that connection as part of a colonial agenda to take land away from Indigenous peoples. To Zhaanat, changing the names is the first step.

“And now even these half-ruined places that bore the names of saints and homestead people and priests, these places were going to be taken. In her experience, once these people talked of taking land it was as good as gone.”

Naming places exerts a certain amount of power over them. This is a colonial power, one that does not manifest itself in military force but rather in these names. Zhaanat believes that this is the first step in losing land. This is also a historical nod to the many religious missionaries that came to evangelize on Indigenous land, often forcing students to give up their language.

“When Patrice couldn’t answer, she realized that here in Washington, she’d seen people shot, a thing she’d never seen before, even on the reservation, a place considered savage by the rest of the country.”

Erdrich challenges readers to reconfigure their perceptions of history and approach it from the perspective of Indigenous peoples. In this example, she contrasts the safety of the reservation with the chaos of American urban areas and points out the stereotypes assigned to Indigenous people.

“Everyone knew they were Indian or not Indian regardless of what the rolls said or what the government said, it was given or not a given. Long ago, a guy in a bar had made a family tree for him. When Thomas looked at the tree, he pointed out the Indians and came out a full-blood, though he knew there was French somewhere. Then the person made the tree again and made him more white, more Indian, more white. It turned into a game. And it was still a game, but a game that interested Senator Watkins, which meant it was a game that could erase them.”

Senator Watkins appears to care deeply about blood lineage as a means of social categorization. However, the Turtle Mountain Chippewa think differently, as Thomas notes, and Watkins’s interest highlights the government attempting to define what it means to be Indigenous.

“Together they drank the icy birch water, which entered them the way life entered the trees, causing buds to swell along the branches. Patrice leaned to one side and put her ear to the trunk of a birch tree. She could hear the humming rush of the tree drinking from the earth. She closed her eyes, went through the bark like water, and was sucked up off the bud tips into a cloud. She looked down at herself and her mother, sitting by a small fire in the spring woods. Zhaanat tipped her head back and smiled. She gestured at her daughter to come back, the way she had when as a child Patrice strayed.”

Patrice’s story ends here as she dives into the birch tree and viewing herself and Zhaanat from above. This relates directly to the theme of connection with the earth, as Patrice moves through the earth and into the sky and then back down again.