Pulitzer Prize winner! I listened to an Erdrich novel on audiobook and it prompted me to pick up this 451 page 2020 paperback acclaimed latest.

"The beauty of the leaves was gone again, another quarter off the great wheel of the year. The elegant branches were stark against the sky. He loved it when the true shapes of the trees were revealed. He slept and slept. He could sleep for an entire day and night. It seemed to him strange that with so little time left he would choose to so deliciously spend it unaware. He still craved to drink in the greatness of the world. When on warmer days he bundled up and sat outside in his little chair, he felt the roots of the trees humming below the earth. The trees were having a last bedtime drink of the great waters that flowed along down there. Like him, before they went to sleep. Beneath that layer of water he sensed beings. They moved so slowly that humans were not usually aware of their existence. But he did feel their movements down in those regions. And yet deeper, below those beings, there was the fire of creation, which had been buried at the center of the earth by stars."

Never even had been aware of tribal "termination" before; well worthy of the Pulitzer Prize.