Question 1

What was the federal termination policy?

Accepted Answer

Federal Indian termination policy refers to a series of legislative acts passed by the United States Congress in the 1950s that aimed to end the federal government's special relationship with Native American tribes — to 'terminate' the legal recognition of tribes as sovereign entities, dissolve their reservations, and assimilate Native Americans into mainstream American society. House Concurrent Resolution 108 (1953), the legislative beginning of the termination era, declared that it was the policy of Congress to 'end their status as wards of the United States, and to grant them all of the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship.' Between 1953 and 1964, approximately 109 tribes were terminated — they lost their federal recognition, their reservation lands were sold or transferred, and their members lost their eligibility for federal health and education services that other Americans receive through other programs. The termination policy was eventually repudiated: in 1970, President Nixon declared in a special message to Congress that termination was wrong, and the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 formally ended the termination era. The Night Watchman is set during the years when the Turtle Mountain Chippewa were fighting termination legislation, and Thomas Wazhashk's campaign — based on the real campaign led by Erdrich's grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, who served as chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa — is the historical account of how that fight was won.

Question 2

How is The Night Watchman based on Erdrich's grandfather?

Accepted Answer

Louise Erdrich has said that the character of Thomas Wazhashk in The Night Watchman is based on her maternal grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, who served as chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota during the 1950s and led the tribal council's resistance to the federal termination legislation that threatened to dissolve their tribe. Erdrich found her grandfather's papers among family effects, including his correspondence with government officials during the termination fight, and used them as the documentary basis for the novel. She has described the novel as a tribute to her grandfather and to the Turtle Mountain community that resisted termination, and the novel's portrait of the community's collective effort — the letter-writing campaign, the petition-gathering, the trip that the tribal delegation makes to Washington, D.C. — is drawn from the historical record. The Night Watchman is therefore both a work of historical fiction and a family memoir: Erdrich is telling the story of her own family's resistance and of the community that she grew up in.

Question 3

How does The Night Watchman relate to Erdrich's other North Dakota novels?

Accepted Answer

The Night Watchman is part of Erdrich's long-running North Dakota fictional project — a series of interconnected novels set in the same region and populated by overlapping characters and families — but it is set earlier than most of the others: while Love Medicine, The Round House, and LaRose are set in the late twentieth century, The Night Watchman is set in 1953, during the federal termination era. This means that some characters in The Night Watchman are ancestors of characters who appear in the later novels; readers who have read Love Medicine and The Round House will recognize family names and community patterns, and the novel gives historical depth to the contemporary world of those novels. At the same time, The Night Watchman is fully readable as a standalone novel for readers who have not encountered the other books in the series; it does not require prior knowledge of the North Dakota characters and world.

The Night Watchman Reading Order

Complete The Night Watchman Book List