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Cover of The Night Watchman

The Night Watchman

by Louise Erdrich · 2020

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Based on the extraordinary life of Louis Erdrich's grandfather Patrick Gourneau, who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, with lightness and gravity, and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a literary master. Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel-bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new "emancipation" bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn't about freedom: Congress is fed up with Indians.…

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Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
"Winner"
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2021 · pulitzer.org
NPR Books We Love
"When I find a new Louise Erdrich novel, I grab it with a grin and open it immediately. In The Night Watchman, we join Chippewa tribal councilman Thomas Wazhushk on his overnight shift at a factory near his band’s North Dakota reservation. It’s 1953, and Wazhushk is fighting a brutal federal plan to terminate his tribe’s sovereign status and rights to its land. He and other tribal members have an aching love for this place as they watch the turning of “the great wheel of the year,” “the leaves gold on green.” But the tribe is desperately poor, and its existence is under dire threat from a faraway bureaucracy. Wazhushk is based on Erdrich’s own grandfather, who waged a real-life struggle for his tribe’s survival. Reflecting on this, Erdrich writes, “… if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change … let this book give you heart.” I know it does me."
NPR Books We Love — 2020 · apps.npr.org