Recommendations
Books Like The Night Watchman
Best books to read after The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
If The Night Watchman moved you — Thomas Wazhashk's night shifts and his campaign to save his tribe from termination, the community's collective resistance, Patrice's journey to the city looking for her sister — these eight books share its portrait of Native American political resistance, its Erdrich North Dakota world, or its engagement with what communities do when the government tries to take everything.
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Love Medicine
by Louise Erdrich
Two Ojibwe families on the North Dakota reservation from 1934 to 1984 — Erdrich's debut is the entry point to the North Dakota series that The Night Watchman is part of: the same community seen in the generation after Thomas Wazhashk's fight to save it; recommended for readers who want to see what the community that Thomas protected became
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The Round House
by Louise Erdrich
Joe Coutts on the same North Dakota reservation in 1988 — Erdrich's National Book Award winner is the closest companion to The Night Watchman in its portrait of a Native community confronting a federal legal system that cannot provide justice; where The Night Watchman is about the legal existence of the tribe itself, The Round House is about the legal protection of the tribe's individual members
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LaRose
by Louise Erdrich
Two North Dakota families grieving a death together — Erdrich's companion novel to The Night Watchman in her North Dakota series; a very different novel (domestic rather than political, grief rather than resistance) but the same community and the same investment in what Ojibwe tradition and community can do when individuals and families are in crisis
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Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
Tayo, a Laguna veteran, healing through traditional ceremony — Silko's foundational novel shares The Night Watchman's insistence that indigenous traditions are living forces rather than historical relics, and that those traditions provide forms of healing and community that federal institutions cannot replicate; where The Night Watchman focuses on the political threat to tribal existence, Ceremony focuses on the personal and psychological forms of healing that tribal existence makes possible
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In the Heart of the Country
by J.M. Coetzee
Magda, a South African woman on an isolated farm, narrating a life of isolation and violence — Coetzee's debut shares The Night Watchman's engagement with what happens to communities that resist the colonial and governmental systems that seek to control them; where Erdrich's Thomas is organizing collective resistance, Coetzee's Magda is completely isolated; both novels are organized around the question of what survival looks like under colonial domination
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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
by Dee Brown
The history of the American West from the Native American perspective, from 1860 to 1890 — Brown's landmark work of narrative history is the nonfiction companion to The Night Watchman: both are organized around the systematic assault on Native American sovereignty and land, and both insist on the humanity and political agency of the Native people who resisted; where The Night Watchman is fiction about the 1950s termination era, Brown's history covers the earlier period of conquest that made the termination era possible
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The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin
An Anarresti physicist traveling to the twin planet Urras, from which his people were exiled — Le Guin's science fiction classic shares The Night Watchman's engagement with what happens to a people when they are segregated from the mainstream society and given a marginal existence in exchange for their freedom; Le Guin was the daughter of the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who studied California Native Americans, and her engagement with dispossession and alternative community is in direct conversation with the history of Native American termination that The Night Watchman depicts
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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The history of the United States from the perspective of its indigenous peoples — Dunbar-Ortiz's revisionist history is the nonfiction companion to The Night Watchman: it provides the historical framework within which Thomas Wazhashk's fight against termination makes sense, tracing the long arc of federal Indian policy from the colonial period to the present; recommended for readers who want to understand the political and historical context of the novel
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