And these treaties had been made since the beginning of our country on a nation-to-nation basis with every tribe. And the most important part in doing that was to abrogate all treaties. You want to just explain what this proposal was, what its impact would have been?ĮRDRICH: Termination was a way to finally resolve the - what Congress thought of as the Indian problem, and that would be to move everyone off reservation land because it wouldn't be reservation land anymore, turn over their land, sell their land, move everyone to cities. I'd never put that together with the timeline for the termination bill and what effect it had on the first five tribes slated to be terminated.ĭAVIES: A lot of this story is about this effort, which your grandfather led and which the main character in your book, Thomas, leads, which was this effort to oppose an initiative in the United States Congress to, effectively, kind of terminate the existence of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, which he was chairman of. And I knew that he had fought termination during that time, but I never put together his letters and the details of what it was like for him to work as a night watchman. So, of course, those years are somewhat mysterious to me. What shook you loose and got you started on this book?ĮRDRICH: I went back to reading my grandfather's letters, which were written during the year I was born, 1954. You kind of weren't getting anywhere, which is kind of a shock to me considering how prolific you have been. It's been a while.ĭAVIES: You know, you say in the acknowledgments to this novel that you tried to write several books before getting underway on this one, and that your impetus had disintegrated. Well, Louise Erdrich, welcome back to FRESH AIR.

Her new novel is set in 1953 and is inspired by her grandfather's role in resisting a congressional effort to withdraw federal recognition from her family's tribe. She won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction twice.Įrdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, and much of her writing is centered on the experience of Native Americans. In a career going back to the 1970s, she's published 17 novels and more than 30 books in all, including children's literature, poetry and nonfiction. Our guest today is author Louise Erdrich.

The watchman louise erdrich