Summary
Barnes meets Wood Mountain at a hotel in Fargo, informs him that the fight has been called off, and buys him breakfast as consolation. While talking, Wood mentions that he bumped into Patrice on the train and that she is staying in the Twin Cities to find her missing older sister. He muses out loud that he should go to the Cities himself and take care of her if she is in trouble, mostly in jest. However, on the train station, he makes a last-minute decision to buy a ticket to the Cities. When he arrives, he finds Bernadette, who tells him that Patrice knocked on her door earlier and was accompanied by Jack, one of the “scum” that Wood told Patrice to find. Wood goes to Log Jam 26 to talk to Jack and find Patrice’s whereabouts. While eating dinner, he recognizes Patrice as the waterjack performing in front of the crowd. He yells, tries to get her attention, and is kicked out, but not before he leaves a note for Patrice to come find him at his hotel.
Patrice has just finished another crowd-pleasing performance when a waitress tells her that she has a “passionate” admirer—referring to Wood—and that she ought to be careful. She then warns Patrice that “waterjacks don’t last” and that she should quit while she still can.
She reads the note that Wood left for her and, coupled with the warning just before, realizes that she is in grave danger and plans her escape for later that night.
The narrative switches back to the reservation, where Thomas and other committee members are trying to get signatures for their petition. They decide to make a copy of the bill as it gets increasingly tattered. Thomas gets asked to make up a joke for a newsletter that they are sending out. While typically reliable to find a joke in any situation, Thomas realizes that he can’t remember the last time that he’d made a joke.
Thomas sees Roderick, a ghost of an old boarding school friend who had died as a boy. He asks Roderick why he is haunting the factory, and Roderick replies that he is not here for Thomas, but for LaBatte, who called him here to save his life. They talk about the first time Roderick saved LaBatte’s life by taking on his jail time, which made him sick. Roderick was then sent to a sanatorium, which he claims fed him butter on all his food. He insists that he survived the sanatorium, even though he came home in a coffin on a train, as Thomas reminds him.
Roderick then tells Thomas that he is trying to save LaBette from his “dumbhead self” and confesses that LaBette has been stealing from the factory. Thomas tells Roderick that he doesn’t believe him, but later, once he leaves, he knows that Roderick was telling the truth. Later, he confronts LaBette about the stealing. LaBette confesses to his theft, saying that he doesn’t make enough to feed his large family. Thomas eventually tells him to quit stealing and gives him some money.
Thomas spots two young male missionaries walking down the road to his house. They start trying to proselytize to him, asking if he ever wonders why he is here on this land. They ask to enter the house, to which Thomas assents. When Thomas learns that they are Mormon, he asks them if they know Arthur V. Watkin, the congressman pioneering the termination bill, and asks why he wants to get rid of the Indians. They vehemently deny and deflect his assertion and leave Thomas with a book to read.
Thomas asks his father, Biboon, for the story of his name. He recounts the story of the Creator lining up the animals that were the best divers and asking them, one by one, to dive into the water and find the bottom. All the animals failed, until the humble water rat, who dove so deep and for so long that he drowned but still managed to grasp a paw of mud from which the Creator made the whole earth.
Back in the Twin Cities, Patrice realizes that the waterjack suit is turning her skin blue and smells of a chemical perfume. She decides to leave behind the costume for good and sneaks out in the middle of the night, sidestepping Jack who appears comatose on the floor. She finds Wood Mountain in the hotel room and tells him that she thinks that they—meaning Jack and his colleagues at Log Jam 26—have taken Vera. They go to Bernadette’s, who gives them breakfast and then hands off Vera’s baby. The trio—Wood, Patrice, and the baby—get on the train together, and Patrice is aware that they look like a family, which makes her uncomfortable, as someone who takes pride in being a single, working woman. Wood asks Patrice what she is going to name the baby, which takes her aback; she responds that he has a name, one that Vera gave him.
They return to the reservation with the baby together, Wood walking Patrice home, but their minds wander in different directions. Patrice is anxious that her father, a drunk, is at home, while Wood is thinking of names for the baby, settling on Archille, his father’s name, and names the baby Archille, temporarily.
She calls the baby “Gwiiwizens,” which means “little boy,” a plain name that hopefully deflects attention from any bad spirits. They meet Zhaanat at the house, who runs wildly over to them and hugs Patrice. She looks apprehensively at Vera’s baby but begins to nurse her, in lieu of the mother.
A public reading and explanation of the termination bill is held in Fargo. An official from the Bureau of Indian Affairs reads the bill out loud and explains that the federal government will be terminating all services to Indians and that they will be relocated to "areas of equal opportunity" (197). Resistance to the bill is immediately vocalized. They do not want to relocate from their homes, nor do they think they are "too advanced" to need governmental help anymore. They speak about their poverty and economic struggles to survive. They accuse Congress of breaking its promises to Indians enshrined in past treaties, which promised them the ability to stay on their land even if they did "better themselves." They accuse Congress of trying to destroy Indian identity through relocation. One of the Indians in the audience likens the governmental services to Indians as rent for using the entire country of the United States. Thomas takes a vote on the bill, which results in zero people for the bill, 47 people against. The meeting ends and Louis mentions that he has a daughter, a Chippewa scholar, who might be able to help them. After dinner, Thomas sees Paranteau, the absent father of the Paranteau family. He is wandering drunk through the street, and Thomas tries to get a hold of him to take him home, but he holds on to a metal pole and refuses to let go, eventually pissing himself and raving about an old basketball game. Paranteau suddenly takes off and runs away down the street. Thomas does not follow.
Barnes remains in love with Patrice and starts calculating how he measures up to Wood Mountain as a romantic prospect, adding and subtracting their positives and negatives to see who comes out on top. He has a conversation with Thomas about the termination bill where he says he doesn’t get why it is so bad as it sounds just like an opportunity to become regular Americans. Thomas explains that no matter what has happened, they cannot be turned into white Americans, as they will always be Indian. Barnes points to his mutt of European heritages that have merged into one American identity and asks why they can’t be the same. Thomas then walks Barnes through a scenario where he and his people have been displaced and killed off by Indians and asks him if he could simply “be an Indian” after that. Later, Barnes asks Thomas if marrying an Indian woman would make him Indian. Thomas looks with pity at Barnes, who seems like a big child, and tells him that he could not be an Indian, but they could like him anyway. Barnes ultimately takes comfort in this knowledge.
Zhaanat and Patrice both start having dreams haunted by Vera. When they realize that they are both having the same dream, they understand that Vera is trying to send them a message. They go to Thomas and tell him of their dreams. Patrice tells him about the warning signs that she saw in the house where she was supposed to have found Vera, which suggest she has disappeared and is in danger. He says that they have to go to the police with the information, but the two women instinctively refuse, disappointed that Thomas would trust the police with the matter of finding a disappeared native woman. They try to move the conversation forward but remain troubled by Vera’s disappearance.
Thomas returns to the factory for his night shift and is awakened from his slumber by a faint drumming sound. Thinking that the owl has returned, he instinctively gets up and leaves the building, but accidentally locks himself out in freezing temperatures. He tries to break in by hooking the window knob with a wire, but fails and falls down. He stays there, feeling pinned to the grass by the cold. Reflecting on his obedient and law-abiding ways, his mind unwillingly goes to Vera, and how following the rules does not guarantee safety.
The drumming grows louder and he sees shining beings amongst the stars—filmy and brightly indistinct. They are formed like “regular people” and dressed in ordinary clothing. He identifies one of them as Jesus Christ, who looks like the rest. Radiance fills him and he joins the rest of the shining people in dance as they move counterclockwise. He is wearing a headdress that spills forth light and begins to sing. When the drumming finally stops, Thomas breaks into the building by picking the lock of a bathroom window. He punches his time clock and notices that he is only two minutes off on his time punch. He pours himself a cup of coffee and waits for dawn.
Analysis
The novel delves more specifically into the violence and dangers that indigenous women face, especially in cities where they lack community. Patrice realizes that her waterjack suit has been poisoning her and that Jack has far more malicious intentions than she initially realized. Her resourcefulness and boldness allow her to escape, but we know that if not for Wood Mountain or the sympathetic waitress, she may not have. Her close call highlights the importance of community and relationships in achieving true safety, especially for native women, where the institutions of public safety often fail them.
The relationship between Wood Mountain and Patrice takes a new turn once the baby enters the picture and highlights their different priorities. Patrice is made very uncomfortable by publicly presenting as a couple with Wood Mountain and Vera’s baby on the train. She is extremely unreconciled to the idea of growing up, getting married, having kids, and settling down. She wants a different life for herself, whereas Wood Mountain is preoccupied with finding a name for a baby who is not even his and he just met. The immediate attachment and care that he shows for Vera’s baby demonstrates his strong paternal and caretaking instinct. Just as he tried to look after Patrice by going to Twin Cities, he now takes responsibility for caring for Vera’s baby.
During the Fargo meeting where the Bureau of Indian Affairs official reads out loud the bill, Erdrich switches into a more historical mode where the dialogue and speech is written out word for word, tagged with the name of the speaker. The effect is one of great verisimilitude, putting us in the room where the debate is unfolding. This technique highlights historical detail and shows that Erdrich is careful in demonstrating how early and actively Indians understood this termination bill and were ringing alarm bells about it.
Erdrich elucidates the formal and informal ways that colonialism perpetuates itself, one of them through religion. The appearance of the two Mormon missionaries and their encounter with Thomas highlights the relationship between Mormons, Christianity at large, and native tribal communities. The Mormons are convinced that they must proselytize to American Indians, who are considered “Lamanites” who must still atone for their sins, evidenced by their darker complexion. Erdrich visibilizes how colonialism is perpetuated not just through the government but through Christianity and its missionary ethos.
The appearance of Roderick and explanation of his origin story—punished by a boarding school teacher and sentenced to a sanatorium where he eventually died—reveals that death occurs in apparently benevolent systems of care and education too. Roderick as a ghost shows not only how the violence of colonial assimilation endures spectrally after death, but also how the bonds between people continue too. Thomas’ nonchalant reaction to Roderick’s ghostly appearance evinces intimacy between the spiritual and living world in the novel. Also consider that Zhaanat and Patrice decide to call Vera’s baby “Gwiiwizens,” meaning “little boy,” to deflect any attention from malevolent spirits. And, while Patrice returns from the Cities without Vera, they remain steadfast in their belief that she is alive not because of any material evidence, but because they receive cryptic communications from her in their dreams. Spectral and dream worlds are upheld as channels for communication and depositories of knowledge in the novel.
Thomas’ encounter with the stars is another supernatural moment in the novel. The shining people are dressed in normal everyday clothing, making them appear close to humans, like the dead or ancestors. The presence of Jesus Christ amongst them suggests that the novel has an inclusive vision of spirituality wherein ancestral spirits and the Christian God might intermingle and share space. The appearance of the supernatural shining people dispels the fears about Vera that were overcoming him. Thus, the shining people are positively staged as bright and kinetic energy that dispels the dark and crippling fears that were besetting him just a moment prior.
