There are many stories of earth’s creation, but the one a father tells his son in Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman is one of my favorites. “In the beginning,” the father says, sitting outside in the autumn sun, “the earth was covered with water . . . “ And when the Creator decided there should be land, animal after animal descended through the water to find mud. But not one could swim down that far . . . until the little muskrat, not the best swimmer but with plenty of tenacity, tried. After a long time, its limp body rose to the surface and in its clenched paw was a tiny bit of mud. The little muskrat had given its life to help create the earth.

It wasn’t until after I finished Erdrich’s fictionalized story of her grandfather’s own long and tenacious work to save his Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe from termination (and the right to live on land they’d lived on for generations) that the name she gave her main character, Thomas Wazhashk (wah-Shush-k)—‘muskrat’ in the Ojibwe language—fully resonated. 

The Night Watchman, as with most of Erdrich’s novels, takes place in North Dakota, a state far from the Catskills but close to my heart. Every early autumn for many years, I’ve left the humid greenness of the east for the lighter dryer sage and ochres of the Dakota plains. I meet two of my best friends in their hometown of Bismarck and we pile in their pickup, drive out to the Badlands to camp, and mountain bike on a trail called the Maah Daah Hey.

In the language of one of the Badlands tribes, the Mandan, “Maah Daah Hey” means ‘an area that has been around for a long time’ as well as ‘grandfather.’ Riding a knobby tired bike through this stunning landscape of rose colored buttes, canyons carved over thousands of years, and waves of shimmering prairie grass, I often think of the people who walked these lands long before me and who still walk them.

Erdrich’s novels are rich with these people. Her characters are immediately compelling, pulling you into their lives both on and off the Turtle Mountain reservation. Thomas Wazhashk spends his nights making the rounds of a jewel bearing ordnance plant and trying to keep his state of exhaustion from turning shadowy objects into ghosts of long-gone friends. While not yet a grandfather, Thomas already has the protective soul of one. As the tribal chairman, he spends his days tending to anything the tribe needs . . . and with the arrival of the news that the US Government is soon deciding whether there’s a need for the tribe, or any tribe, his unpaid work goes from a few hours a week to full-time. 

Fortunately for Thomas he isn’t the only one looking out for tribal family. His smart, pretty, always wary niece Pixie —sorry, Patrice—also has a lot on her plate. Her newly married sister left the reservation for Minneapolis and disappeared, she financially supports her mother and younger brother, her mother keeps a knife under her pillow in case Patrice’s father returns, and a boy from her past has kept her from trusting men in the present. But if anyone can handle multiple servings of suffering, it’s Patrice. It’s no surprise that Thomas looks her way for assistance when he travels to Washington to defend their tribe.

As serious as their mission is, as deplorable as their treatment has been by European settlers and the US government, Erdrich’s characters maintain not just their dignity but their sense of humor, their wisdom. When Barnes, one of the European settler descendants wonders aloud why Thomas wouldn’t be happy being “a regular American,” Thomas patiently explains. “If we Indians had picked up and gone over there and killed most of you and took over your land, what about that?” he asks. “You have to take our language and act just like us.”

“I couldn’t do that,” says Barnes. 

“Good thing you don’t have to,” says Thomas. “I can’t turn all the way into a white man, either.”

As a descendant of white Europeans myself, I grew up romanticizing Native Americans thanks to the children’s novels I devoured. I put one foot in front of the other to walk silently through the woods. I wished that my hair was straight and dark. I had no idea how they actually lived in real life, what they had been through. As member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Louise Erdrich certainly can’t speak for every Native American, but as a novelist she gives voice to many she has known and researched and imagined. She exquisitely describes their inseparability from nature, their ways of communicating beyond language and beyond death. She shows us a people who have lived here a very long time and, thanks to her grandfather, hopefully for a long time to come.