It was a quilt of patches left over from the woolen coats that had passed through the family. Here was his mother’s navy blue. It had been made from a trade wool blanket and to a blanket it had returned. Here were the boys' padded plaid wool jackets, ripped and worn. These jackets had surged through fields, down icy hills, wrestled with dogs, and been left behind when they took city work. Here was Rose’s coat from the early days of their marriage, blue-gray and thin now, but still bearing the fateful shape of her as she walked away from him, then stopped, turned, and smiled, looking at him from under the brim of a midnight-blue cloche hat, daring him to love her.
The quilt is not merely a garment, but an embodied assemblage of Thomas' family's shared history and symbol of their enduring bond. Each patch evokes a specific memory in Thomas that he reflects upon as he unwinds and prepares for bed at the end of his night shift. The memories, symbolized by each old patch of fabric, are quite literally stitched together into a blanket and keep him warm, emotionally and physically.
Thomas was named for the muskrat, wazhashk, the lowly, hard working, water-loving rodent... Although the wazhashkag were numerous and ordinary, the were also crucial. In the beginning, after the great flood, it was a muskrat who had helped remake the earth. In that way, as it turned out, Thomas was perfectly named.
Names hold symbolic importance in The Night Watchman because they link an individual character to a past family ancestor or to a mythical story. In the case of Thomas, his surname, Wazhashk, is the name of the "muskrat," a lowly hardworking animal given an essential role in the creation and maintenance of the world. We are given the story of the muskrat near the very beginning of the novel, signaling its importance as a form of foreshadowing Thomas' trajectory and his role within the community in Turtle Mountain. The muskrat, introduced here, resurfaces as an important symbol that reminds Thomas of his origin story and his essence as a humble and hardworking leader. The kind of vision and tenacity that Thomas demonstrates is portrayed with admiration, even with a tinge of awe, at his superhuman capacity to work. This feeling of awe is bolstered by his mystical link to the muskrat.
There were times when Patrice felt like she was stretched across frame, like a skin tent. She tried to forget that she could easily blow away. Or how easily her father could wreck them all. This feeling of being the only barrier between her family and disaster wasn't new, but they had come so far since she started work.
A "skin tent" is a haunting metaphorical image of Patrice and her position as the primary provider of her family. Patrice as a “skin tent” stretched to the brink of tearing illustrates the bone-deep ways poverty has formed her as a character to act not just as an individual but also as a kind of shelter for those around her.
E-man-ci-pation. Eman-cipation. This word would not stop banging around in his head. Emancipated. But they were not enslaved. Freed from becoming Indians was the idea. Emancipated from their land. Freed from the treaties that Thomas's father and grandfather had signed and that were promised to last forever. So as usual, by getting rid of us, the Indian problem would be solved.
The rhetoric of the bill tries to rewrite the material loss of land and culture as a kind of "emancipation" from their own Indian identity. The implication of such a statement is that being Indian is a form of bondage. The word "emancipation" is a chilling euphemism for the actual implications of the bill, revealing the devastating power of words.
The teacher showed him that he must place his hand on his heart and repeat words the other children already knew. All while staring at the flag. Thomas copied the teacher's words though he did not know what she was saying. Gradually, the sounds took shape in his mind. And still later, bits and pieces were added to the design. He had been there a few months when he heard the phrase a flag worth dying for, and a slow chill prickled.
The idea of rote memorization as a method for learning bleeds into a more ideological process of national assimilation through the collective ritual of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance while showing deference to the flag. School is inseparable from the nation-state and its assimilationist project of turning Indians into American citizens, in ideology if not exactly on paper. The words of the pledge, at first foreign and meaningless, grow and connect into a meaningful design through repetition and rote memorization. Education as indoctrination is on full display.
How could Indians hold themselves apart, when the vanquishers sometimes held their arms out, to crush them to their hearts, with something like love?
The descriptive imagery here demonstrates the ironic position of the United States vis-a-vis the Indians living on the land, wherein the US wishes to present itself as a benevolent "vanquisher" who will "crush" the Indian with "something like love."
Wood Mountain went to the baby and spoke to him in Dakota, which made Zhaanat's eyes flash because in her traditions there were lingering scores to settle. He switched to Chippewa, and she relaxed.
In this short but revealing scene, Erdrich hints at larger histories of conflict that exists between different indigenous languages used by the characters of the novel, in this case between Chippewa and Dakota. Chippewa is the first language of many of the characters, especially old-timers like Zhaanat. The fact that Wood Mountain speaks Dakota, a language spoken by the Dakota people of the Sioux tribes, means that he may have some affiliation with the tribe. Zhaanat's flashing eyes and reference to "lingering scores to settle" suggests a history of strife between the Chippewa and the Sioux. Indeed, the Chippewa and the Sioux were engaged in violent skirmishes over land in the midwestern United States during the 17th and 18th centuries. By the mid-19th century, the Chippewa had forced the Sioux out of most of Minnesota and Wisconsin. All of this long and complicated history is slyly and succinctly referenced in this scene, underscoring Erdrich's intimacy with the characters and their history.
The stars were impersonal. But they took human shapes and arranged themselves in orders that conveyed directions to the next life. There was no time where he was going. He’d always thought that inconceivable. For years now he’d understood that time was all at once, back and forth, upside down. As animals subject to the laws of earth, we think time is experience. But time is more a substance, like air, only of course not air. It is in fact a holy element.
In this passage, Biboon, Thomas' elderly father, is nearing the end of his life, meditating on mortality and what comes afterward. The evocation of the stars as "giving directions to the next life" evinces a cosmology where earthly life is a temporary passage in a wider arc of life. The notion of time being "all at once, back and forth, upside down" orients the reader to time as an all-encompassing space and movement, mirroring the fullness of life in motion. Time does not appear to be a linear progression at all, but rather a compression of deep past, present, and future into a mystical and multi-dimensional space.
The base of their marriage was work, each pitching in when the other flagged, like tonight. He squeezed her hand. She squeezed his hand back. That's how they sometimes talked.
Interpersonal relationships and intimacy are at the heart of Erdrich's novel, and one of the strongest ones in The Night Watchman is the marriage between Rose and Thomas. They have a deep partnership rooted in years of trust and hard work to the point where they can communicate with just a single gesture. This is one of the many examples of the forms of nonverbal communication that occurs in the novel on the strength of characters' close relationships, such as Vera communicating with Zhaanat and Patrice through their dreams.
But when Zhaanat and the old people talked about sex it was funny. He laughed a ghost laugh. Which sounded like water off an icicle, or like twigs in the woods rubbing together, way up high. But sex in general? It was a farce. Which was what it was to act assimilated. So he didn't. Except it was very hard to not be assimilated all alone, and he wished he could go home.
Roderick as a ghost is the purest symbol of the dislocated and spectral nature of being an unassimilated Indian in white America. In this passage, Roderick is reflecting on how he likes to hear Zhaanat talk in Chippewa because, while there are no swear words in Chippewa, it had lots of words for sex, and he found it funny when the old people talked about sex in Chippewa. There is a nostalgic yearning in his laughter for a language that represents a community that he is no longer a part of. Yet his lack of belonging seems to stem in part from his own refusal—a refusal to act assimilated. This refusal is an essential reason for why he is punished as a schoolboy. To act assimilated is to play along with a farce, to cosplay as someone he is not. He is too proud to play an inauthentic version of himself, but his refusal also condemns him to loneliness.
