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The Night Watchman: Pulitzer Prize Winning Fiction

Louise Erdrich

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WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

WASHINGTON POST, NPR, CBS SUNDAY MORNING, KIRKUS, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a “termination” that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans “for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run”?

Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice’s shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn’t been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.

Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice’s best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.

In The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.

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Posts about this title from Boozhoo Books

Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Mar 31

First, let's talk book club books. \ \ Regrettably, I DNFed The Year of the Witching. This one just was not for me. \ \ I made it to the last quarter of The Night Watchman and then was confirmed to moderate Bookcon and all plans changed. I then was confirmed to moderate Bay Area Book Festival. \ \ My immediate reading priority: read all of the panel for Bookcon, finish The Night Watchman, read April's bookclub books, start reading the panel for May!\ \ So far I've read: \ \ Nothing Ever Happens Here by Seraphina Nova Glass\ \ This one was a small town thriller with a missing husband who could be an attacker, and a senior community with a podcast who helped solve it all. ADORED. \ \ Sundown Girls by LS Stratton\ \ This was a YA thriller with a supernatural bent and focus on the history of sundown towns. UNPUTDOWNABLE. Kept you guessing to the very end. \ \ How to Survive Your Murder by Danielle Valentine\ \ Also a YA thriller with slashers. Fans of My Heart is a Chainsaw will love the movie references in this one! This one also has a bit of a supernatural bent. \ \ You guys, I've already lost track of the body count! It's A LOT. \ \ I'm currently reading Who's All Going by Lisa Springer\ \ Another YA thriller! These have all been so great. This one is has influencers, a resort, a wellness cult. Hard to put down. \ \ Have you read any of these?

Weekly Reading Update

6 books

Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Mar 8

[Reading Indigenous voices on identity is a great way to understand history that has been suppressed, to correct false narratives and to counter erasure. Here are some books by Indigenous authors, both fiction and non-fiction, that center on Indigenous identity to add to your TBR. \ \ Non Fiction\ \

The Indian Card: Who Gets To Be Native In America by Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz,\ \ \ A groundbreaking and deeply personal exploration of Tribal enrollment, and what it means to be Native American in the United States .\ \
Truth Telling: Seven Conversations About Indigenous Life in Canada by Michelle Good\ \ \ A provocative collection of essays exploring the historical and contemporary Indigenous experience in Canada.\ \
Thunder Song: Essays by Sasha LaPointe\ \ \ Drawing on a rich family archive as well as the anthropological work of her late great-grandmother, Sasha LaPointe explores themes ranging from indigenous identity and stereotypes to cultural displacement and environmental degradation to understand what our experiences teach us about the power of community, commitment, and conscientious honesty.\ \ Unapologetically punk, the essays in Thunder Song segue from the miraculous to the mundane, from the spiritual to the physical, as they examine the role of art—in particular music—and community in helping a new generation of indigenous people claim the strength of their heritage while defining their own path in the contemporary world.\ \ 4: Making Love With The Land: Essays by Joshua Whitehead \ \ A moving and deeply personal excavation of Indigenous beauty and passion in a suffering world\ \ In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Joshua Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. \ \ Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls "biostory"—beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us. Whitehead ruminates on loss and pain without shame or ridicule but rather highlights waypoints for personal transformation. \ \ Written in the aftermath of heartbreak, before and during the pandemic, Making Love with the Land illuminates this present moment in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are rediscovering old ways and creating new ones about connection with and responsibility toward each other and the land.\ \
Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future by Patty Krawec\ \ The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home."\ \ \ \ Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps listeners see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. \ \ \ \ Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history.\ \ \ \ This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught\ \ \ Fiction\ \
There There by Tommy Orange\ \ \ \ A wondrous and shattering award-winning novel that follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.\ \
A Girl Called Echo by Katerina Vermette\ \ \ \ Echo Desjardins, a 13-year-old Métis girl adjusting to a new home and school, is struggling with loneliness while separated from her mother. Then an ordinary day in Mr. Bee’s history class turns extraordinary, and Echo’s life will never be the same. During Mr. Bee’s lecture, Echo finds herself transported to another time and place―a bison hunt on the Saskatchewan prairie―and back again to the present. In the following weeks, Echo slips back and forth in time. She visits a Métis camp, travels the old fur-trade routes, and experiences the perilous and bygone era of the Pemmican Wars.\ \
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (our bookclub read this month!)\ \ \ Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.\ \
Buffalo is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowell\ \ \ \ Powerful stories of “Métis futurism” that envision a world without violence, capitalism, and colonization.\ \ “Education is the new buffalo” is a metaphor widely used among Indigenous peoples in Canada to signify the importance of education to their survival and ability to support themselves, as once Plains nations supported themselves as buffalo peoples. The assumption is that many of the pre-Contact ways of living are forever gone, so adaptation is necessary. But Chelsea Vowel asks, “Instead of accepting that the buffalo, and our ancestral ways, will never come back, what if we simply ensure that they do?”\ \ \ \ Inspired by classic and contemporary speculative fiction, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo explores science fiction tropes through a Métis lens: a Two-Spirit rougarou (shapeshifter) in the nineteenth century tries to solve a murder in her community and joins the nêhiyaw-pwat (Iron Confederacy) in order to successfully stop Canadian colonial expansion into the West. A Métis man is gored by a radioactive bison, gaining super strength, but losing the ability to be remembered by anyone not related to him by blood. Nanites babble to babies in Cree, virtual reality teaches transformation, foxes take human form and wreak havoc on hearts, buffalo roam free, and beings grapple with the thorny problem of healing from colonialism. \ \ \ \ Indigenous futurisms seek to discover the impact of colonization, remove its psychological baggage, and recover ancestral traditions. These eight short stories of “Métis futurism” explore Indigenous existence and resistance through the specific lens of being Métis. Expansive and eye-opening, Buffalo Is the New Buffalo rewrites our shared history in provocative and exciting ways.\ \
Warrior Girl Unearthed by Angeline Boulley \ \ Perry Firekeeper-Birch has always known who she is - the laidback twin, the troublemaker, the best fisher on Sugar Island. Her aspirations won't ever take her far from home, and she wouldn't have it any other way. But as the rising number of missing Indigenous women starts circling closer to home, as her family becomes embroiled in a high-profile murder investigation, and as greedy grave robbers seek to profit off of what belongs to her Anishinaabe tribe, Perry begins to question everything.\ \ \ \ In order to reclaim this inheritance for her people, Perry has no choice but to take matters into her own hands. She can only count on her friends and allies, including her overachieving twin and a charming new boy in town with unwavering morals. Old rivalries, sister secrets, and botched heists cannot - will not - stop her from uncovering the mystery before the ancestors and missing women are lost forever.\ \ \ \ Sometimes, the truth shouldn't stay buried.\ \ \

Which ones have you read? Which ones are on your TBR? Which ones are you reading soon?\ \
To join the bookclub, join the Discord!\ \
As a reminder, any book purchased through my bookshop this month, benefits Black Walnut Books, an Indigenous, Woman and Queer owned bookstore. Check these books out below!](https://boozhoo.binderybooks.com/item/vAojso0PfGkbps2dLo3u/)

Indigenous Books About Identity

10 books

Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Feb 28

Bookclub just got an upgrade, and then upgrade is YOU!\ \ As you know, I run two bookclubs for this community: Good Day To Read Indigenous and Women in Horror. I love the idea of us coming together every month, and not only reading the same book, but supporting the authors! and championing these books. I'm excited that this year, we've chosen both new releases and backlist titles to read together! Imagine, what we as a community (and there are well over 2,000 of you here now!) could do for a backlist titles (AND NEW RELEASES!) if we all purchased the books and reviewed them around the same time (convincing those that follow our reviews to go out and get the books, rinse and repeat!)\ \ I believe that my chronic mood reading (my ADHD) has negatively impacted book club and so to counter that, I'm going to be making reading schedules moving forward for each club (See Below!)\ \ \ \ There will be four blocks (weeks typically) with Chapter (page) designations. There will be a Discord channel for each session. Please note: THIS MEANS SPOILERS FOR THAT SECTION. My hope is that we can all be reading at the same time (I know in reality, this won't be possible for everyone all the time, so if there are times you get behind or don't feel like keeping up, you can visit the channels whenever you'd like).\ \ I imagine our reader community discord as a space to come together to build connection, to share conversations and to share perspectives. Our community is a strong source of support for Indigenous authors and women writing horror, the voices that haunt and heal us. We are choosing to be intentional about our reading choices. These conversations matter. I'd love everyone to join in this month, in any way that makes sense for you, whether that's coming with a question, sharing a quote or passage that moved you, something that deeply unsettled you or gave you a different perspective. This year I'd like to focus on moving beyond consuming stories and toward honoring them. You all shape and strengthen this space and it's a privilege to share it with you.\ \ Beyond The Page\ \ This month, Boozhoo Books will be supporting Black Walnut Books. That means that every book purchased by clicking a book below through Bookshop (or on any post) is purchasing a book from Black Walnut Books, an Indigenous, Queer, Woman owned independent bookstore. In fact, even if you don't buy the book from the post, but click through, ANY and EVERY book that you purchase, supports this bookstore. Choosing to purchase from Indigenous owned bookstores is a way for us to support Indigenous communities beyond amplifying author's voices. I also see a small percentage from your book purchases, so not only will you receive a book (or 7, no judgment) you will be supporting an Indigenous creator and publisher, authors, bookseller, bookstore all at once. Hillary, the owner, is Southern Pomo and Coastal Miwok and a member of the Dry Creek Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians. She focuses on sharing and amplifying Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Queer communities, voices and authors. If you are able to spend money on books this month, please consider purchasing books through my bookshop link below, supporting both this imprint and Black Walnut Books. Where you choose to spend your money could make a real difference, going beyond values and into action.\ \ Book reviews help authors. I encourage you to share your reviews beyond our Discord, whether that's on social media or a site like Goodreads. If you don't feel like posting a review, post a picture and of the book and tag the author (do not tag the author in reviews!). You can also tag me, so I can repost! If you end up buying your books through Black Walnut Books, tag them as well!\ \ THIS MONTH'S BOOKS\ \ Good Day to Read Indigenous\ \ Each year, this club will read a book by Louise Erdrich. This month we will be reading The Night Watchman, winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize. Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.\ \ Women in Horror\ \ This month we will be reading The Year of Witching by Alexis Henderson.\ \ In the lands of Bethel, where the Prophet's word is law, Immanuelle Moore's very existence is blasphemy. Her mother’s union with an outsider of a different race cast her once-proud family into disgrace, so Immanuelle does her best to worship the Father, follow Holy Protocol, and lead a life of submission, devotion, and absolute conformity, like all the other women in the settlement.\ \ But a mishap lures her into the forbidden Darkwood surrounding Bethel, where the first prophet once chased and killed four powerful witches. Their spirits are still lurking there, and they bestow a gift on Immanuelle: the journal of her dead mother, who Immanuelle is shocked to learn once sought sanctuary in the wood.\ \ Fascinated by the secrets in the diary, Immanuelle finds herself struggling to understand how her mother could have consorted with the witches. But when she begins to learn grim truths about the Church and its history, she realizes the true threat to Bethel is its own darkness. And she starts to understand that if Bethel is to change, it must begin with her.\ \ I can't wait for us to read March's selection together! Let me know down below what you're most looking forward to about bookclub in March!

Building Community Through Book Club

2 books

Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Dec 2 2025

[Hello,\ \ So excited for next years books! Can't wait to read them together! If you aren't in the bookclub yet, simply join the Discord to join in the fun.\ \

Good Day To Read Indigenous Book Club 2026 Reads

12 books

Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Nov 18 2024

Notes From The Mixed Up Desk, November 18, 2024

Newsletter: Pitchfest for Unagented Authors, what I've been reading,

6 books

Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Aug 7 2024

This morning I announced Indigenous Book Bingo, which will run from this Friday 8/9 until the end of Native American Heritage Month 11/30.\ \ I have attached all of the books that are on the Bingo card for easy access.

Books Included on Indigenous Book Bingo

Here is a list of the books included on Indigenous Book Bingo.

25 books

Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Apr 23 2024

Louise Erdrich is one of the first Inidgenous authors readers become familiar with. She is best known for her _Love Medicine _series.\ \ Her 2021 book, The Nightwatchman won the Pulitzer prize and is on my TBR list. I intend to read this book this year.\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ This is a fiction book based on Erdrich's grandfather who worked as a nightwatchman and his fight against native dispossession.\ \ On August 1, 1953, the United States Congress announced House Concurrent Resolution 108, a bill to abrogate nation-to-nation treaties, which had been made with American Indian Nations for “as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow.” The announcement called for the eventual termination of five tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Band of Chipewa.\ _My grandfather Patrick Gourneau fought against termination as tribal chairman while working as a night watchman. He hardly slept. _- from the Author’s Note\ \ I am sure to love this book because I love a blend of fact and fiction. Erdrich always has stories with an interesting cast of characters. I have loved every Erdrich book that I have read so far.\ \ Do you like historical fiction? Let me know if you have read this one and what you thought.

My Indigenous Bookshelf

A Series Where I Share Indigenous Books/Series that have on my physical bookshelf. This will include books that I've read and want to read. CLICK PHOTO TO READ.

1 book

Posts about this book from across Bindery

Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Mar 31

Weekly Reading Update

6 books

Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Mar 8

Indigenous Books About Identity

10 books

Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Feb 28

Building Community Through Book Club

2 books

Boozhoo Books\ \ Naomi\ \ • Dec 2 2025