ETHNIC CLEANSING AMERICAN STYLE

Louise Erdrich

 I’ve just finished reading The Night Watchman, yet another masterpiece by one of my favorite writers, Louise Erdrich. To me, her transcultural books have always proven astonishingly honest, informative, insightful and revealing. This one, deservedly, won a Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

I was first attracted to Erdrich's work in the 1980s, when I found her Love Medicine among the new arrivals at the Lincoln Library in Buenos Aires, an institution originally administrated by the US Embassy and later transferred to the Institute of American Culture (ICANA). It was a venue that was a real oasis for American expats as well as for serious Argentine students of English. I read a few pages of Love Medicine at the library and was immediately enthralled, so decided to check it out. Erdrich’s writing made easy, natural transitions between reality and magic, with the lines blurring between the two to such an extent as to almost make them one, parallel worlds traveling side by side in everyday life. Or at least that was the case, it seemed, if you were an Indian.

It was an episodic novel, written in quasi-short-story style, which related the loves and lifestyles of five interconnected Ojibwe families living on reservations in Minnesota and North Dakota. The book was scintillating, replete with both humor and pathos, and almost electric in its sensuality. Its stories were moving in their deep understanding of passion and love, spell-binding in its mysterious blend of magic and corporeality. Its raw beauty led me over the years to read a very large portion of Erdrich’s extraordinary and highly varied body of work, and my fascination with her literature has never waned. Her craft and originality are impeccable and ever-surprising.

In The Night Watchman, Erdrich delves into a major transcultural issue—what amounts to the ethnic cleansing that Washington has carried out, and continues evidently to abide, among North America’s original peoples over the course of US history. Although there are several parallel themes at play in the book, the main story is a fictionalized account of the effect on the Chippewa Nation’s Turtle Mountain Band of a 1953 congressional bill that termed as “emancipation” yet another attempt in a long series by white America to divvy up Native American land and “terminate” once and for all the cultural heritage of Indian tribes and the federal administration’s links to its preservation.

Erdrich has exclusive insight into that termination campaign since her grandfather, Native American elder Patrick Gourneau, was chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Nation’s Advisory Committee at the time in which the government was seeking to disband the tribe, and the Advisory Committee that Gourneau headed was resisting those attempts. Patrick was a prodigious letter-writer, and, having inherited those letters and done extensive related research, Erdrich was able to piece together the full history of what took place in a new and highly civilized clash between the Jim Crow American society of the fifties and those particular Indians who were struggling for their own survival and that of their way of life.

Patrick Gourneau - chief of the Turtle Mountain Band

In The Night Watchman, Patrick Gourneau becomes Thomas “Muskrat” Wazhashk, the night watchman at a jewel bearing plant located on the edge of the Turtle Mountain Reservation in the chilly wilds of rural North Dakota. The night watchman’s job is merely an occupation, since Thomas’s real mission in life is as Advisory Council Chairman for his band of the Chippewas.

Already when the story opens, Thomas has come to understand that the so-called “emancipation” that the government is seeking to impose on them amounts, in fact, to a termination plan. The “emancipation” consists of reclaiming supposedly federal land “awarded” to the Indians in successive treaties, stopping all federal aid to their schools, health services and institutions, doing away with their tribal status, and “assimilating them” into white society by sending them to what Erdrich refers as “the cities”—meaning Fargo, Minot or Grand Forks in North Dakota or Minneapolis-St. Paul in neighboring Minnesota.

Erdrich also gives us a look at what awaits Native Americans in “the cities”. The other main protagonist in this story is Patrice “Pixie” Paranteau, Thomas’s niece. Patrice (who hates her nickname “Pixie” and is trying to get people to stop using it) is just out of high school. She’s smart and serious, the valedictorian of her graduating class. She’s not sure what she wants—maybe to be an attorney—but she knows what she doesn’t want (not kids and not a husband). She’s curious about sex and romance and wants to lose her virginity, but not with a man who might cling to her afterward if she isn’t particularly crazy about his performance and fails to truly fall in love.

Getting tied down isn’t an option for Patrice. She has bigger fish to fry. She is a precision worker at the same plant where Thomas is the night watchman. She makes jewel bearings, a job for which (the plant’s white owners have discovered) Indian women are particularly well-suited because of their delicately intricate manual dexterity and their resilience for long hours of tedious work. And Patrice is the best of the best at assembling jewel bearings. Despite that fact, she barely makes enough to support her mother and younger brother, since the other factor calculated in putting the plant next to a reservation in the middle of nowhere, is that Indian labor is non-union and cheap.

Patrice’s father figure is her uncle and tribal elder Thomas. Her own father is a mean drunk who only returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife—who sleeps with an axe handy—and children,  and to bully Patrice for money. Patrice’s mother, Zhaanat, on the other hand, is, on the most intimate of levels, her role model, even though she seeks a separate destiny. Zhaanat is a strong and spiritual woman, a psychic and a healer, and Patrice has apparently inherited her mother’s mystical gifts.  

Patrice scrimps and saves every penny she can in the hope of following her dear older sister Vera, who has moved to Minneapolis. But already in the early pages of the book, we discover that Vera may have gone missing. Patrice is worried because her big sister has not been in touch in months. She is rumored to have had a  child, and, having managed to save a little over a hundred dollars, Patrice is determined to go to the city and find Vera and her baby. It is while Patrice is on that fateful journey that Erdrich shows the reader different forms of exploitation and violence to which innocent young Native Women are subject when they venture off the reservation and into “the cities”, basically broke and on their own. Although the trip puts her life and virtue in grave danger, unlike Vera, Patrice manages to get away relatively unscathed after meeting up with a Chippewa prize-fighter named Wood Mountain, whom she knows from the reservation, and who heroically aids her in not only getting away and back to the reservation, but also in finding her sister’s child and taking the baby back with her.

Much of the novel focuses on Patrice’s search for Vera, her conflict with the responsibility of taking in Vera’s child, her confusion over her feelings for Wood Mountain, who immediately loves and cherishes Vera’s son and wants to make a life with the baby and Patrice. That might be an almost mundanely common story, were it not for the fact that it takes place against the backdrop of the harsh realities of life on an impoverished reservation, contrasting with the depth and variety of emotions, spirituality, tribalism, vulnerability and resilience of a Native people making a valiant last stand in the still natural corner of the world to which they have been pushed by the relentless advance of an aggressive, exotic white race.  

Much of the final part of the book is a fascinating look at real-life events, when a group of Chippewa elders accompanied by a college-educated younger member of the band and by Patrice—as well as a Native American ghost called Roderick, who accompanies Thomas almost everywhere he goes—scrape together enough funds to travel to Washington and testify before Congress, in a last-ditch attempt to save their reservation and their way of life.

They are pitted against their nemesis, the only completely non-fiction character in the story, Senator Arthur V. Watkins, who sponsored the bill—which, in one of his letters, Erdrich’s grandfather described as “about the worst thing for Indians to come down the pike”—a man whom Erdrich describes as “indeed a pompous racist.” Always objective if militant in her research, however, the author adds that “to give Watkins his due, he was also instrumental in bringing down Senator Joe McCarthy, ending an ugly era in national politics.”

The author also gives his due to later disgraced President Richard Nixon, pointing out that Nixon addressed Congress in 1970 and called for an end to America’s tribal termination policy. “Five years later,” she says, “a new era of self-determination for Native people began.”

Despite this fact, she is critical of the first Trump administration, saying, “Indeed, the Trump administration and Assistant Secretary of the Interior Tara Sweeney have recently brought back the termination era by seeking to terminate the Wampanoag, the tribe who first welcomed the Pilgrims to these shores and invented Thanksgiving.”

Turtle Mountain Reservation, land of the Chippewa

I usually am not a believer in “afterwords”. The story, I feel, should tell itself, and not depend on explanations after the fact. But in this case, Erdrich’s lengthy afterword is a succinct history of continual efforts to disenfranchise the native peoples of North America. Specifically, she summarizes in part: “In all, 113 tribal nations suffered the disaster of termination; 1.4 million acres of tribal land was lost. Wealth flowed to private corporations, while many people in terminated tribes died early, in poverty. By the end, 78 tribal nations…regained federal recognition; 10 gained state but not federal recognition; 31 tribes are landless; 24 are considered extinct.”

This is a sad legacy culled from factual American history and one that we would do well to incorporate and to seek to correct by holding sacred the Native cultures of a land in which all non-Indians are immigrants. But in this day of aggressively outlawing inclusion, equity and diversity, we can expect Native termination to continue to be swept under the rug or distorted to make Native Americans look like the aggressors and white Americans the heroes and saviors of America.