Her father is an absent alcoholic who occasionally crashes the house and pesters his wife for money. Returning to the house, she creeps carefully to avoid attracting her father’s attention. Patrice is the primary breadwinner in the family. Valentine tries to insult her by claiming that she only ever brings lard bread for lunch, but Patrice knows everyone eats lard bread because everyone else on the reservation is poor too. She has forgotten to bake the dough in her bucket and thus just has raw dough for lunch, but is fed by the generous donations of her fellow workers. Valentine ignores her when she arrives at work, chatting up Doris, who is white. Patrice catches a ride to the factory with two other friends: Valentine Blue and Doris Lauder. She prefers Patrice over Pixie because it sounds more adult and suits her ambitions to rise in the world.

The narrative shifts from Thomas at his night shift to Patrice Paranteau, unwillingly known as “Pixie,” at work in a jewel bearing factory, where she has started working after graduating high school. His surname, Wazhashk, comes from the muskrat, a lowly but hardworking animal crucial to maintaining the survival of its ecosystem, a fitting namesake for Thomas as we later learn. We meet Thomas Wazhashk starting his shift as a night watchman at a jewel factory. While she explicitly names the book as a work of fiction, she also acknowledges that she has tried to be faithful to her grandfather’s “extraordinary life.” The next page is the date, September 1953, placing the novel within historical context. The author, Louise Erdrich, writes that her grandfather, like the character Thomas Wazhashk, had tirelessly fought against this termination. The novel begins with a preface recounting the historic congressional bill, House Concurrent Resolution 108, which abrogates nation-to-nation treaties and ends all federal funding of Indian tribes, calling for the eventual termination of all tribes and immediate termination of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.

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