The Night Watchman

Patrice can smell Doris’s perfume in the car, and she asks her about it. Doris asks if she has a boyfriend, telling her that people know that Barnes has a crush on her. Patrice pretends she doesn’t already know. Doris says she doesn’t have anyone. When the conversation returns to perfume, she says that she doesn’t wear it at work because Grasshopper likes it. Doris also adds that the man she is interested in hasn’t noticed her yet. Patrice thinks Doris is pretty and doesn’t understand why someone wouldn’t notice her.

Eventually, Doris asks what she thinks of Bucky Duvalle. Patrice explains that Bucky and his friends had picked her up hitchhiking the summer before, and they took her to Fish Lake after Bucky threw himself at her. She had hopped into the water and swum out to Thomas’s boat to get away from them. Doris says that her brother is a friend of Bucky’s, and Patrice realizes that he was probably one of the boys in the car. She loses trust in Doris, who says that Bucky wants to ruin Patrice’s reputation so that she’ll come to him. She also adds that at least someone other than Grasshopper likes her.

The narrative jumps to Patrice resting her head on the train. She falls asleep.

As he drives to work, Thomas is irritated knowing that the papers detailing the government’s new plan are in his bag. He has been trying to make sense of them for days, thinking that they were:

[u]nbelievable because the unthinkable was couched in such innocuous dry language. Unbelievable because the intent was, finally, to unmake, to unrecognize. To erase as Indians him, Biboon, Rose, his children, his people, all of us invisible and as if we never were here, from the beginning, here (79).

He doesn’t look at the papers until he eats his lunch, which gives him strength.

Thomas’s tenure as watchman began seven months earlier. His role as chairman of the Turtle Mountain Advisory Committee had not been all consuming, “[b]ut every so often, the government remembered about Indians. And why they did, they always tried to solve Indians” (80). To Thomas, “solving” meant removing. He heard of the new plan through the news, and Moses got copies of the papers. He thinks about the word “emancipation” and how it is used in the bill. Emancipation in this context means getting rid of the treaties that his family worked so hard to put together and that were supposed to last forever. Emancipation from treaties “solves” a problem for the federal government. As tribal chairman, his job is ensuring that his community “remain a problem” (80).

Barnes thinks of the pictures of Indigenous American women he’d seen as a child on fruit crates, often holding fruit or offering butter. Before coming to the reservation, he left his family’s print shop in Des Moines because he likes math. He thought of Patrice as the number 26, not because of her age but because of “the swoop of the 2 and the snail of the 6. It went with her” (81). He is waiting for the right moment to talk to her.

As he drops Pokey off at home, he tells the boy he’d like to talk to his parents and comes inside. Pokey already knows that Patrice won’t be there. Barnes is shocked by the sparsity of the home. Zhaanat silently gives them each a bowl of stew she’d been cooking. They both sit, and Zhaanat speaks to Pokey in Chippewa. Barnes notices that she’s missing her pinkie finger on one hand and has six fingers on the other. He tells Pokey to thank her for him.

Through Pokey, Zhaanat asks why Barnes came, and Barnes explains that he came just to tell her that Pokey is doing well in math. Zhaanat thanks Barnes but knows he didn’t come for that reason.

Barnes tries to keep himself from staring at her hands and thinks about how this is different than the fruit crate images. He suggests that he should go, and Zhaanat says something to Pokey, which Barnes asks him to repeat. He tells him that Patrice doesn’t like him because of his smell. He leaves, and Pokey asks why Zhaanat had to say that. Pokey thinks that Barnes will just shower and think that the problem is solved. Zhaanat is shocked when Pokey tells her that he probably thinks that they smell bad.

Patrice is jostled awake by a man telling her that his wife will change seats with her. Patrice ignores him. The man tries to get the conductor to ask Patrice to move, but she sinks lower in her seat and stays quiet, pretending to be asleep. Another man offers to swap seats with him, and when Patrice opens her eyes, she is surprised to see Wood Mountain, who is on his way to another fight. They discuss his fight the other night. When conversation turns to Barnes, she says she doesn’t like him.

When the train stops, Wood Mountain gets up to stretch his legs. Patrice puts her coat on her seat to keep someone else from taking it. When he sits down again, he is winded from doing sprints. He and Patrice talk about his training regimen. He soon asks where she will go when she arrives in the Twin Cities, and she says that she has a few addresses. He recommends going to find the “scum” since Vera may have gotten in trouble. Patrice isn’t sure what kind of trouble he means, and Wood Mountain tells her that she worries him.

The chapter opens with a section of the bill, though, in Thomas’s mind, it includes “termination” in the first line rather than “emancipation.”

Thomas finished eighth grade when he was eighteen, and he continued to educate himself by reading everything possible; he found it calming. This is how he knows that he understands the words in the bill and that his shock comes from what they mean. He wants to know who put the bill together.

He calls a Hidatsa friend from boarding school named Martin Cross, who is the tribal chairman at Fort Berthold, which is home to the Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa tribes. Martin tells him that Senator Arthur V. Watkins is the one leading the charge for the bill. He also explains that Watkins is a Mormon and that “[i]t’s in their religion to change Indians into whites” (92).

Since the call is long distance and the tribe has little money, Thomas ends the call quickly.

Thomas can’t believe that they have survived diseases and war but will finally be “destroyed by a collection of tedious words” (93). It is two o’clock in the morning, and he is at his desk. He can’t remember the last time he had a good sleep. He takes out a pen and begins to write to Archie. He falls asleep but is awakened by a sound and goes outside to find an owl. When he returns, he writes “Went outside to answer Snowy Owl’s question, Who? Owl not satisfied with answer” (95).

Mr. Vold reads the joke on Thomas’s timecard while he sits with Doris, calling it a “typical Indian joke” (96). She is not wearing perfume and in fact smells terribly because she’d washed her hands with a dirty rag. Doris doesn’t understand the joke, and Walter calls LaBatte to explain it, which he does. Doris and Walter laugh.

LaBatte stops laughing as soon as he leaves, concerned that Thomas saw an owl, as “it meant death” (97). He thinks about those close to Thomas, including himself since they went grew up and went to school together. 

Thomas is part of the “after-the-buffalo-who-are-we-now” generation (98). He’d always been able to tell time by a watch, not just using the sun. He speaks Chippewa and English. His generation must figure out what it means to be an Indigenous American when the United States was taking over. The white Americans believe that this bill is the best route for them, and Thomas wonders, “How could Indians hold themselves apart, when the vanquishers sometimes held their arms out, to crush them to their hearts, with something like love?” (98).

Thomas remembers the year he left for boarding school. His family was always hungry. The reservation provided one meal per day, but the boarding schools gave out three. His mother, Julia/Awan, cried when he left. She was broken-hearted by having to cut his hair but did so because they would do it at the school anyway. She put his hair “in the woods so the government would not be able to keep him. So that he would come home. And he had come home” (99).

The American flags at the school stand out in Thomas’s memory. He hadn’t known that that’s what they were when he first saw them. There, the teacher taught him how to say the pledge of allegiance, but he didn’t know what it meant.