Power, Solidarity, and Community Action Theme Analysis

My grandfather Patrick Gourneau fought against termination as a tribal chairman while working as a night watchman. He hardly slept, like my character Thomas Wazhashk. This book is fiction. But all the same, I have tried to be faithful to my grandfather’s extraordinary life. Any failures are my own. Other than Thomas, and the Turtle Mountain Jewel Bearing Plant, the only other major character who resembles anyone alive or dead is Senator Arthur V. Watkins, relentless pursuer of Native dispossession and the man who interrogated my grandfather.

Thomas was named for the muskrat, wazhashk, the lowly, hardworking, water-loving rodent […] Although the wazhashkag were numerous and ordinary, they 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.

Word went out that dough was in Patrice’s bucket. That she’d forgotten to cook it, bake it, fry it […] Saint Anne pushed a buttered bun across the table to Patrice. Someone handed an oatmeal cookie down the line. Doris gave her half a bacon sandwich.

Mr. Vold forbade speech. Still, they did speak. They hardly remembered what they said, later, but they talked to one another all day.

Thomas had a good friend in the Bureau of Indian Affairs Area Office in Aberdeen, South Dakota, who had sent him a copy of the proposed bill that was supposed to emancipate Indians. That was the word used in newspaper articles. Emancipate.

Many years back, the first Wobleszynski had encroached on the land owned by Wood Mountain’s grandmother. Since then, the Wobleszynskis sent their cattle to graze on Juggie’s land so often that her family had finally shanghaied a cow. This happened during berry-picking time, when there were extra people camped out everywhere, so if the cow was stolen it was quickly absorbed into boiling pots. Nothing was ever traced or proved but nothing was ever forgotten, either. Over the years, resentment between the families had become entrenched.

Valentine said, “You can have my days.”

“What do you mean?”

“My sick days. Mr. Vold told me that I could give my days to you. Under the circumstances.”

“This one takes away the treaties.”

“For all Indians? Or just us?”

“All.”

“At least they’re not picking on us alone,” says Biboon. “Maybe we can get together with the other tribes on this thing.”

So it comes down to this, thought Thomas, staring at the neutral strings of sentences in the termination bill. We have survived smallpox, the Winchester repeating rifle, the Hotchkiss gun, and tuberculosis. We have survived the flu epidemic of 1918, and fought in four or five deadly United States wars. But at last we will be destroyed by a collection of tedious words.

How should being an Indian relate to this country that had conquered and was trying in every possible way to absorb them? […] How could Indians hold themselves apart, when the vanquishers sometimes held their arms out, to crush them to their hearts, with something like love?

“Survival is a changing game.”

“I would like to move we refer to House Concurrent Resolution 108 as the Termination Bill. Those words like emancipation and Freedom are smoke.”

Louis Pipestone tended the petition like a garden.

He reached over to his lunch box. Maybe he’d left that crust. It was LaBatte’s lunch box, full. A meat sandwich with real butter. More bread, this time with butter and sugar. A baked potato, still warm. Apples.

They had as good as killed Roderick down there.

“A pimp is someone who owns the lady. Takes the money she got paid for having sex, see?”

“No. I don’t see,” said Patrice flatly. But she did see. Jack would have tampered with her slightly, just enough so that when somebody else came along she’d have that shame, then more shame, until she got lost in shame and wasn’t herself.

His mind was everything to him, but he hadn’t the slightest notion how to save it. He just kept diving down, grabbing for the word, coming back up. The battle with termination and with Arthur V. Watkins had been, he feared, a battle that would cost him everything.