I was excited to write a book that had indigenous people doing factory work because you don’t read that.Īs in the book, your grandfather really did fight a U.S. It hired mostly women, and what an extraordinary thing. The jewel-bearing plant is real and it still stands. It’s the first book I’ve based in the Turtle Mountains. It was a quieter narrative because to me the real point was to talk about what it was like in the ’50s, and to explore what the world was like on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. His character really imbued the book with a sense of acceptance, or at least not the usual crazy, crazy villainy that I love to write. Honestly, he was the most decent, thoughtful-he was just a good person. I think it was my grandfather’s influence. This was the kind of book where I dispensed with a lot of melodrama. What was it like writing your first book explicitly based on someone from your family? Your new novel, The Night Watchman, has a factory where your grandfather worked. I got very homesick once I left because, it wasn’t that I missed the power lines and the road, but I missed the sky because I was used to this huge sense of openness and I could always see the weather coming from the endless distances. I guess I didn’t know there was anything else. We would hook a rope on the back bumper of the car and my dad would drive these roads, which you remember, and we would have a pair of skis on, hanging onto the rope behind the car, in the ditches.

That struggle features in the novel, as do kidnapping, hibernation, car pools, boxing and an underwater go-go dancer.Įrdrich: Well that reminds me of ditch skiing, a North Dakota thing. Senator was trying to “terminate” the tribe, she says, and push its members off the last scrap of land reserved for them. In the 1950s, Gourneau juggled both jobs at a time when a mendacious U.S. Protagonist Thomas Wazhashk, who by night keeps watch in a factory while also tending to the affairs of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa as tribal chairman, is drawn from Erdrich’s maternal grandfather, Patrick Gourneau. Though much of her fiction is informed by experience- The Master Butcher’s Singing Club features a German immigrant’s butcher shop, like the one her father’s parents owned in Little Falls, Minn.-this is the first book explicitly based on a member of her family. Her new novel T he Night Watchman is in one sense a departure. Her more recent novels would stand alone, though the last three-Pulitzer finalist The Plague of Doves, The Round House and LaRose-revolved around the theme of justice, and the difficulty Native Americans have faced obtaining it. They came back over and over,” Erdrich says by phone from Minneapolis, where she owns Birchbark Books. “The early novels, I couldn’t stop writing about certain characters.

Author of the night watchman