One Book One Northwestern
2024-25: "The Night Watchman" by Louise Erdrich
Faculty Co-Chairs: Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, a citizen of the Lumbee tribe, is dean of Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy and the Carlos Montezuma Professor and Megan Bang, (Ojibwe and Italian descent) is a professor of learning sciences and director of Northwestern's Center for Native American and Indigenous Research.
Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich's grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
View content from the 2024-2025 One Book selection
2015-16: "The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America” by Thomas King
Faculty Chair: Journalism Professor and former Dean of Medill Loren Ghiglione
The book offers a penetrating, provocative look at the history of Indian-white relations in North America. It focuses on government efforts to remove and relocate Native peoples and white efforts to exterminate and assimilate them. It contrasts popular perceptions of what King calls “Dead Indians,” the romantic reminders of a largely fictional past (“dignified, noble, silent, suitably garbed”), and “Live Indians,” contemporary and contemptible (“invisible, unruly, disappointing”). And, to explain the complexities of Native resistance and reinvention, it offers a concluding chapter titled “What Indians Want.”
One Book sponsored 76 events that year—the most in One Book history at the time.
View content from the 2015-16 One Book selection