Excerpt, The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

An excerpt from "...this banquet of a novel that invites us back into Louise Erdrich’s ongoing Chippewa chronicles, a character on the reservation boasts, “Law can’t take my Indian out of me.” Unfortunately, the United States government is hoping to do just that through the Termination Bill, an Orwellian plan that promises to “emancipate” Indigenous people from their lands and their tribal affiliations. This isn’t in 1893; the novel takes place in the 1950s. Even that might sound like distant history — but part of Erdrich’s point is that little has changed: As she reminds us in an afterword, the Trump administration has recently tried to terminate the Wampanoag, “the tribe who first welcomed Pilgrims to these shores and invented Thanksgiving.” - Luis Alberto Urrea, from the NYT Review of The Night Watchman (2020)