The Night Watchman
“Patrice had come to think that humans treated the concept of God, or Gizhe Manidoo, or the Holy Ghost, in a childish way. She was pretty sure that the rules and trappings of ritual had nothing to do with God, that they were ways for people to imagine they were doing things right in order to escape from punishment, or harm, like children. She had felt the movement of something vaster, impersonal yet personal, in her life. She thought that maybe people in contact with that nameless greatness had a way of catching at the edges, a way of being pulled along or even entering this thing beyond experience.”
Louise Erdrich has a way of bringing me face to face with horrors of humanity, while inviting me to find comfort at the same time. Which is the most spiritual of places. In this beautiful story, Erdrich reimagines her own grandfather’s experience fighting to save his tribe’s reservation in North Dakota in the 1950’s. And yes, I was cheering for and feeling the anguish of her grandfather’s character, Thomas Wazhashk. How could I not love him when Erdrich says of him “Thomas had tried to educate himself, mainly by reading everything he could find. When he needed to calm his mind, he opened a book. Any book. He had never failed to feel refreshed even if the book was no good.” So like my own experience!
But I was following, with greater interest , the story of Patrice, a young tribal woman, coming of age in this American decade better remembered for the birth of rock and roll and the love of poodle skirts.
I am sorry to say it was a culture shock for me, viewing the fifties through this previously invisible lens. I couldn’t put the book down, as I wanted to keep learning more about how Patrice navigated a host of paradoxes that helped me to see more deeply into my own. Her mother kept for her a home of comfort sustained by food and tonics created from herbs she collected herself. And then she also hunted and skinned a bear for meat. And she kept an ax handy in case her husband, Patrice’s father, returned from a drunken binge in a violent state. Patrice spent her days working in a modern factory, and her evenings negotiating the shifting ground beneath her tribal culture.
Erdrich weaves the story of Wazhashk’s passion to preserve his tribe’s way of life with Patrice’s own hero’s journey to find her sister. We see the larger political game driven by men who believe they are ordained by God, alongside the local, personal experience of disregard for basic human dignities. As I watched Patrice question and then learn to trust her own intelligence, I grieved for the limitations imposed on her life. And in my grief, I felt the comfort, as did she, of a sacred fire burning for her father’s lost soul, a tin mug of her mother’s tea “made from aromatic cedar fronds and melted snow, ingredients that joined earth and heaven.”
I was enraged by the treatment Wazhashk and his tribal delegation received at a hearing regarding their land rights. But I was comforted by the spiritual visitations he received, the connections he couldn’t seem to avoid, guiding him in his sacred quest.
This is not a romanticized book about the Native American experience, and I hope I am not romanticizing. But in this story Erdrich painted an enticing landscape of survival, the tools of which were the comforts given and received, the stability in the face of chaos engendered by stoking the dying embers of sacred traditions and rituals which may not, as Patrice said, have had anything to do with God. But which likely sustained, in some way, the mystery she encountered, the “catching of the edges, a way of being pulled along or even entering this thing beyond experience.”