2021 Pulitzer Prizes Recognize Native American Novelist, Poet, and Cartoonist

Louise Erdrich’s (Chippewa) novel “The Night Watchman” and Natalie Diaz’s (Mojave) poem collection “Postcolonial Love Poem” won the Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction and Poetry, respectively, on Friday. Finalists for other prizes included a Native cartoonist’s work about current events; a true story about an Indigenous woman’s search for justice in Indian Country; and a book that explores the role of Native peoples in the Civil War. 

Erdrich’s “The Night Watchman” follows a Chippewa councilman and a young plant worker who embarks on a dangerous trip to find her older sister, according to the publisher’s description. It is set during the termination period of the 1950s and based on the life of Erdrich’s grandfather, who “carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C.,” according to the publisher.