The Night Watchman: A Novel

Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.

She had felt the movement of something vaster, impersonal yet personal, in her life. She thought that maybe people in contact with that nameless greatness had a way of catching at the edges, a way of being pulled along or even entering this thing beyond experience.

Joseph Smith and the early Mormons had tried their best to murder all Indians in their path across the country, but in the end did not quite succeed. Arthur V. Watkins decided to use the power of his office to finish what the prophet had started. He didn’t even have to get his hands bloody.

the author of the proposal had constructed a cloud of lofty words around this bill—emancipation, freedom, equality, success—that disguised its truth: termination. Termination. Missing only the prefix. The ex.

As Indians had for generation after generation, they were attempting to understand a white man reading endlessly from a sheaf of papers.

You cannot feel time grind against you. Time is nothing but everything, not the seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. Yet this substanceless substance, this bending and shaping, this warping, this is the way we understand our world.

Zhaanat’s knowledge was considered so important that she had been fiercely hidden away, guarded from going to boarding school. She had barely learned to read and write on the intermittent days she had attended reservation day school. She made baskets and beadwork to sell. But Zhaanat’s real job was passing on what she knew.

if you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt.

The services that the government provides to Indians might be likened to rent. The rent for use of the entire country of the United States.