The Night Watchman

My grandfather Patrick Gourneau fought against termination as a tribal chairman while working as a night watchman. He hardly slept, like my character Thomas Wazhashk. This book is fiction. But all the same, I have tried to be faithful to my grandfather’s extraordinary life. Any failures are my own. Other than Thomas, and the Turtle Mountain Jewel Bearing Plant, the only other major character who resembles anyone alive or dead is Senator Arthur V. Watkins, relentless pursuer of Native dispossession and the man who interrogated my grandfather.

Thomas was named for the muskrat, wazhashk, the lowly, hardworking, water-loving rodent […] Although the wazhashkag were numerous and ordinary, they were also crucial. In the beginning, after the great flood, it was a muskrat who had helped remake the earth. In that way, as it turned out, Thomas was perfectly named.

Word went out that dough was in Patrice’s bucket. That she’d forgotten to cook it, bake it, fry it […] Saint Anne pushed a buttered bun across the table to Patrice. Someone handed an oatmeal cookie down the line. Doris gave her half a bacon sandwich.

There were times when Patrice felt like she was stretched across a frame, like a skin tent. She tried to forget that she could be so easily blown away. Or how easily her father could wreck them all. This feeling of being the only barrier between her family and disaster wasn’t new, but they had come so far since she started work.

Many years back, the first Wobleszynski had encroached on the land owned by Wood Mountain’s grandmother. Since then, the Wobleszynskis sent their cattle to graze on Juggie’s land so often that her family had finally shanghaied a cow. This happened during berry-picking time, when there were extra people camped out everywhere, so if the cow was stolen it was quickly absorbed into boiling pots. Nothing was ever traced or proved but nothing was ever forgotten, either. Over the years, resentment between the families had become entrenched.

Valentine said, “You can have my days.”

“What do you mean?”

“My sick days. Mr. Vold told me that I could give my days to you. Under the circumstances.”

“This one takes away the treaties.”

“For all Indians? Or just us?”

“All.”

“At least they’re not picking on us alone,” says Biboon. “Maybe we can get together with the other tribes on this thing.”

In the newspapers, the author of the proposal had constructed a cloud of lofty words around this bill—emancipation, freedom, equality, success—that disguised its truth: termination. Termination. Missing only the prefix. The ex.

“They think if you follow their ways your skin will bleach out. They call it lightsome and gladsome.”

So it comes down to this, thought Thomas, staring at the neutral strings of sentences in the termination bill. We have survived smallpox, the Winchester repeating rifle, the Hotchkiss gun, and tuberculosis. We have survived the flu epidemic of 1918, and fought in four or five deadly United States wars. But at last we will be destroyed by a collection of tedious words.

How should being an Indian relate to this country that had conquered and was trying in every possible way to absorb them? […] How could Indians hold themselves apart, when the vanquishers sometimes held their arms out, to crush them to their hearts, with something like love?

He had been there a few months when he heard the phrase a flag worth dying for, and a slow chill prickled.

“Survival is a changing game.”

“I would like to move we refer to House Concurrent Resolution 108 as the Termination Bill. Those words like emancipation and Freedom are smoke.”

Gawiin ingikendizo siin. I am a stranger to myself […] This was again the sort of feeling and thinking that could only be described in Chippewa, where the strangeness was also humorous and the danger surrounding this entire situation was the sort that you might laugh at, even though you could also get hurt, and there were secrets involved, and desperation, for indeed she had nowhere, after her unthinkable short immediate future rolling in the water tank, nowhere to go but the dressing room down at the other end of the second-floor hall of Log Jam 26.

He reached over to his lunch box. Maybe he’d left that crust. It was LaBatte’s lunch box, full. A meat sandwich with real butter. More bread, this time with butter and sugar. A baked potato, still warm. Apples.

She began to wonder whether she was even dead. Although she had been dead way back when she’d been alive. Maybe for a long time. Of that she was sure.

“A pimp is someone who owns the lady. Takes the money she got paid for having sex, see?”

“No. I don’t see,” said Patrice flatly. But she did see. Jack would have tampered with her slightly, just enough so that when somebody else came along she’d have that shame, then more shame, until she got lost in shame and wasn’t herself.

And Patrice thought another thing her mother said was definitely true—you never really knew a man until you told him you didn’t love him. That’s when his true ugliness, submerged to charm you, might surface.

His mind was everything to him, but he hadn’t the slightest notion how to save it. He just kept diving down, grabbing for the word, coming back up. The battle with termination and with Arthur V. Watkins had been, he feared, a battle that would cost him everything.