The Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa-the tribe for which Erdrich’s grandfather was the chairman-was one of the first tribes the government. government to target individual tribes for termination. That passage didn’t immediately eliminate any Native tribes, but it established termination as the United States government’s guiding policy and laid the groundwork for the U.S. That bill, House Concurrent Resolution 108, passed on August 1, 1953. Watkins’s bill sought to abrogate treaties signed between Native tribes and the United States government as well as dissolve the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Watkins introduced the termination bill in an attempt to, (according to Watkins), help Indians assimilate into white society, as prophesied in Mormon scripture. Erdrich uses Watkins’s real name for the character based on him in the novel. Erdrich currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Īs Erdrich writes in an introductory note to the novel, The Night Watchman is based on her own grandfather’s attempts to fight the Termination Bill introduced by Senator Arthur V. Erdrich has received many awards and accolades over the course of her prolific career her novel The Round House won the National Book Award in 2012, and The Night Watchman won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2021. Much of her work explores Native American heritage and identity, and her work often contains narratives that interweave and overlap across multiple novels that take place in the same fictional setting, similar to William Faulkner’s novels set in Yoknapatawpha county. Erdrich’s work is often said to belong to the Native American Renaissance, which includes work by Native American writers beginning in the late 1960s. She has written more than 28 books in total, including works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s books. From North Dakota, Erdrich went on to attend Dartmouth College before receiving a Master of Arts degree from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. Her father and her mother, an Ojibwe woman, both taught at a boarding school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Wahpeton, North Dakota. Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota in 1952. Louise Erdrich is one of the most renowned writers of her generation. The Bear Skull in the Tree Was Painted Red and Faced East.The Lake, the Well, the Crickets Singing in the Grass.Termination for Federal Contracts and Promises Made with Certain Tribes of Indians.

A Letter to the University of Minnesota.

The night watchman pulitzer prize