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Termination for Federal Contracts and Promises Made with Certain Tribes of Indians
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Night Watchman, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power, Solidarity, and Community Action
Oppression and Supposed Good Intentions
Humor and Pain
Sex, Violence, and Gender
Agency and Exploitation
Summary
Analysis
On the way back, Thomas thinks about how Senator Watkins had asked every person who testified about “their degree of Indian blood.” No one knew the answer. It isn’t something they kept track of. It was a game, but one that interested Watkins, which meant it was a game that could erase them. Patrice feels spent. She sees an article in the newspaper about the woman who fired the gun. She wanted Puerto Rico to live so badly she’d been willing to kill. Would Patrice have been willing to do the same thing? Moses misses his wife; it’s the longest they’ve been apart since they’ve been married. Thomas feels a sharp pain on the right side of his face, and the strength drains from his legs. He wakes up in a hospital, where a nurse tells him he had a stroke.
As a result of his efforts over the past months, Thomas has a stroke, echoing the creation story of his namesake muskrat, which dove to the bottom of the ocean to bring back the silt to create the Earth but died as a result. It’s notable, too, that Arthur Watkins presumably doesn’t suffer any ill effects after the hearing, suggesting that for him, it was more or less another day, another hearing, and because he is insulated by the power granted to him by his position, the stakes for him are, at most, success or failure, not life or death. This fact again demonstrates his failure to grasp the seriousness and full implications of his actions.
Themes
