Contesting Termination: Biopower and Indigenous Resistance in Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman (2020)

Abstract

The current study examines Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman (2020) through the intersecting frameworks of Michel Foucault's biopower and Indigenous resistance theory. Depolying Patrick Wolfe's account of settler colonialism as a tenacious structure, the study debates that the Termination policy (House Concurrent Resolution 108) functions as a biopolitical tool that governs Indigenous lives through administrative, bureaucratic, and legal mechanisms instead of overt violence. The analysis proves that Erdrich represents Termination across four registers: legislative language, bodily discipline through industrial labor, dissolution of collective land tenure, and blood quantum as racial governance. Simultaneously, the novel depicts Indigenous resistance through political action, cultural continuity, spiritual endurance, and communal solidarity. By drawing on Vizenor's survivance, Simpson's resurgence, Coulthard's grounded normativity, Audra Simpson's refusal and Scott's hidden transcripts, the study also reveals that Erdrich refuses to reduce Indigenous communities to passive victims. Indigenous resistance instead materializes itself as an ongoing practice entrenched in language, storytelling, ceremony, kinship, and everyday care. This article contributes a academically integrated reading that moves beyond historical interpretation to foreground the novel's sustained critique of biopolitical governance and its affirmation of Indigenous resilience, validating that reading Foucault alongside Indigenous resistance theorists can produce future possibilities for understanding federal Indian policy and contemporary Indigenous literature's engagement with sovereignty and cultural survival.

Keywords: biopower, Indigenous resistance, settler colonialism, Termination policy, Louise Erdrich, survivance