When your day job is a night job, and your other day job involves saving your community, when are you supposed to sleep?
I had never read anything by Louise Erdrich before, but when my book club elected to discuss this one you know I had to go ahead and get it from my library.
I’m so glad I did! This book is so good!
The titular “night watchman” is Thomas Wazhashk, who is both a night watchman for the Turtle Mountain Jewel Bearing plant and chairman for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in the fall of 1953.
His job as night watchman pays well by the standards of the area, but since nothing pays well there, that’s not saying much. It just means he and his family are slightly better off than their neighbors, and they never seem to want for food, though they don’t have indoor plumbing, and I don’t think they have electricity.
The book starts when Thomas is made aware that there’s a Congressman who’s trying to “liberate” Native Americans so he can either take back their land or force them to pay taxes on the little bit of land they currently own.
Thomas goes about strategizing ways to put a stop to this, including reading The Book of Mormon to educate himself on the Congressman’s particular brand of racist religion and how he uses it to justify kicking people of color off their land.
The downside to his job is that it’s an overnight job. And since he has things he needs to do during the day as well (including attending to his duties as chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa) he has trouble staying awake and often hallucinates while on the job.
The upside to his job is that no one else is around, so he can use the time to read up on Mormonism and write letters to Congress explaining why they should leave Native Americans alone.
While Thomas is trying to save his community, one of the members of his community, Patrice, is trying to get away from the nickname “Pixie” and make everyone call her “Patrice,” but that’s not going very well. Everyone is too used to calling her Pixie.
Patrice has a younger brother who boxes, an alcoholic father, and an older sister, Vera, who used to see the bright side in everything until she disappeared. She moved to Minneapolis a year or two ago, and no one has heard from her since. Patrice decides to make a trip up to Minneapolis to find her sister.
To make a long story short, it turns out Vera got caught in a sex trafficking ring and was fed drugs to keep her complacent. When the men holding her hostage and profiting off her body decide she’s no longer profitable, they dump her out in the cold, assuming she’ll die.
She does not die, but manages to eventually find her way back to her tribe and her family.
In the process of looking for her, Patrice almost got caught in a similar system of exploitation. Someone sees her on the street trying to hail a cab and accurately pegs her as a a new girl from the country, uneducated on the ways of the city.
But Patrice is smarter than one might assume, and she manages to extricate herself from that situation before any damage is done.
While she was unable to find Vera, she did find Vera’s baby, and took him home, refusing to name him until her sister arrives home to tell them his name.
There’s a whole lot more going on in this book, but those are the broad strokes. In an introduction to the book, Erdrich said Thomas was based on her grandfather, who really did help fight against a motion to “liberate” Native Americans.
Patrice wasn’t based on any one person, but she and Vera both represent the vulnerability of native women to sex trafficking.
This book was so good, and I can’t even put my finger on what it was I loved about it so much. The prose was beautiful, and often wandering, but even when it wandered into subjects and scenes that had nothing to do with the plot, I never even thought to complain. I was fully willing to go wherever Erdrich wanted to take me because I enjoyed every minute of it.