Termination

Reflections on Thomas Wazhashk

The year 1953 in America, the year I was born in the woods of Illinois, ushered in two seemingly unrelated developments: The intellectual key to understanding heredity and reproduction, the Double Helix, which is the discursive structure of biology; and the Termination Act in the U.S. Congress, a legislative move to break America’s promise to sustain the living cultures of indigenous people who inhabited the land for centuries before White colonizers subjugated their ancestors before the coming of manifest destiny.

The Double Helix, a conceptual model of DNA that explained the molecular structure and function of genes in biological replication, opened the door to knowledge of the human genome. Although there is a dark side lurking in knowledge of the Double Helix, a path to altering the course of human evolution in monstrous ways, there is also the chance of relieving suffering and extending lives. In direct contrast to the Termination Act, a broken promise rooted in greed and hubris, the concept of the Double Helix kept a promise of science rooted in sharing the wealth and benefits of durable knowledge.

The Termination Act of 1953 was one of many Acts legislated to force indigenous people from their aboriginal homeland. For example, the Removal Act of 1830, which eventually added 174 million acres to federal land at the cost of the Trail of Tears; the Dawes Act of 1887, aka the Assimilation Act, which authorized the federal power to “give” land allotments in private ownership to individuals, who had lived on the land as a tribal nation, for centuries, to those who would agree to dual citizenship, adding another 93 million acres to federal property; the Relocation Act of 1956, which offered indigenous people vocational training if they would leave their tribal land and move to a city; and The Termination Act, which sought to dissolve the federal promise to preserve the way of life of Native Americans for “as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow,” an Act produced using the Republican double helix for relieving free flowing capitalism from any fair reparation to human beings hurt in the past by marauders on the road to riches. Forget the promise. Free us from the past.

The Night Watchman, a historical novel written by Louise Erdrich (2020), which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021, reveals the power of literature to deny Congress the exercise of legal authority to scrub our collective memory of misdeeds and crimes to humanity committed by wealthy ancestors and to lift up heroes who might otherwise be forgotten. Erdrich tells the story of her grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, a Chippewa tribal leader, who worked as a night watchman at a factory that made jewel bearings “…used in Defense Department ordnance and in Bulova watches” (p.3). The factory provided jobs for people living on the reservation, particularly women, perhaps an early scent of the Relocation Act though unremarked in the text.

As a figure in literature, Patrick is renamed “Thomas Wazhashk,” but Erdrich is clear in her foreword: “This book is fiction. But all the same, I have tried to be faithful to my grandfather’s extraordinary life.” Erdrich crosses the border from history to fiction in a hybrid cognitive space using character naming as a psycho-genetic literary trope to tie Thomas forever to Patrick:

“Thomas was named for the muskrat, wazhhashk, the lowly, hardworking, water-loving rodent. Muskrats were everywhere on the slough-dotted reservation…. Although the wazhashkag were numerous and ordinary, they were also crucial. In the beginning, after the great flood, it was a muskrat who helped remake the earth” (p.4).

Thomas, the night watchman, does his job conscientiously. Despite the harsh winters that befall people living near Fargo, North Dakota, Thomas bundles up and keeps his promise to watch over the factory as the world slumbers. He also spends his time between his rounds educating himself about this new legal threat to his home and his tribe. Learning about the passage of the Termination Act, he visits Biboon, his father, “the old muskrat,” and explains this law enforcing a broken promise. It is a tale more than twice told: “First they gave us this scrap,” Biboon said. “Then they tried to push us off this scrap. Then they took away most of the scrap. Now, what you are saying is they want to push us off the edge of the scrap” (p. 118).

As I write this post—in my mind, a piece of literary analysis—I wonder if I would pass a high school course in English applying the criteria for such writing in the Common Core. If I were reading this novel in search of claims I might make and defend about, say, a character’s motivation or the subtext of a motif or a theme, what would happen to these muskrats fighting for the edge of a scrap of land? Would I read between the lines for the unutterable significance of Biboon’s explanation of how they did it before, how they held doom at bay, how they kept the land? “We wrote a letter,” Biboon said. “We got a school Indian to write the letter. And then we went there, we had, what you call them, signatures” (p. 119).

Would there be a space in a Core classroom for a piece of white trash from the rural Midwest written by a random Double Helix from hillbilly country like me to respond in any cognitive depth to the idea of literacy as a superpower even in the hands of the subjugated? What if I couldn’t fully support my claim? What if I expressed confusion, mystification, about the lives of these people in this fantasy world that might be more real to me than anything I might read in a history textbook? What if I thought I needed to own the responsibilities, but not the guilt, I share because these Acts were committed out of privilege to my skin color? It was white trash privilege that brought me to California because my father, though poor and uneducated, got his scrap of land and his guns that could not be questioned and raised thirteen children on it without having to raise money for a trip to Washington to fight for it with a list of signatures.

Would I learn that I could write about that in a literary analysis?