The nuanced portrait of her exploiters and the economics of the bar where she briefly works as a performing “waterjack” are also well handled, showing a lot of nuance. Patrice’s experience of the city also tests the dynamic between exploitation and agency with a lot of care. One such subplot follows Vera, who has fallen into the hands of sex traffickers, without being gratuitous, suggesting more than it shows to avoid sensationalism. Other threads touch upon the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

Paranteau’s alcoholism represents a problem that was rife in the 50s but does not dominate the narrative. The novel deals with difficult topics very sensitively. Like the Justice trilogy, The Night Watchman actively identifies the settler-colonial threats that attempt to undermine tribal sovereignty. If Erdrich was accused of not being political enough in the early days, it would be impossible to leverage the same argument now. It is also explicitly political as the novel explores the era immediately preceding relocation in the 1950s. In contrast with Shadow Tag (2010) and even the Justice trilogy (2008-2016), The Night Watchman widens the narratological scope to embrace multiple characters from the Turtle Mountain community and present different models of kinship than the nuclear families that had become more present in Erdrich’s recent publications. Congress, other narrative threads deftly follow characters through boxing matches, urban missions, bear hunts, and tangled love stories. While protagonist Thomas Wazhashk gathers support from the Turtle Mountain Chippewa community to oppose the U.S. Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Night Watchman (2020), was inspired by the life of her grandfather Patrick Gourneau who was a tribal chairman during the Termination era of the 1950s.

Here, Dr Danne Jobin offers a review of the book and a summary of the discussion. The Indigenous Literature Reading Group met on 29th January 2021 to discuss Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Night Watchman (HarperCollins, 2020).

The night watchman louise erdrich