The Night Watchman was Louise Erdrich’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an Ojibwe family and boarding-school history.
Published in 2020, the novel is set mainly in 1953 on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. Thomas Wazhashk, a night watchman and tribal council member, works to oppose a federal termination policy that threatens Native sovereignty and treaty rights.
The story also follows Patrice Paranteau, a young Ojibwe woman who travels to Minneapolis in search of her missing sister. Their narratives connect political resistance, family obligations, labor, gender, and the long effects of boarding-school abuse.
Erdrich based the political storyline partly on her grandfather’s efforts against termination legislation. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2021. It is distinct from Erdrich’s 2012 Pulitzer-winning novel The Round House, which won the award for fiction but has a different plot and setting.