House made of dawn

House Made of Dawn

House Made of Dawn is a novel by N. Scott Momaday, widely credited as leading the way for the breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.

Contents

Sources [ edit | edit source ]

Details in the novel correspond to real-life occurrences. Momaday refers in his memoir The Names to an incident that took place at Jemez on which he based the murder in House Made of Dawn. A native resident killed a New Mexico state trooper, and the incident created great controversy. Native American beliefs and customs, actual geographical locations, and realistic events also inspired elements in House Made of Dawn. According to one of Momaday’s letters:

Abel is a composite of the boys I knew at Jemez. I wanted to say something about them. An appalling number of them are dead; they died young, and they died violent deaths. One of them was drunk and run over. Another was drunk and froze to death. (He was the best runner I ever knew). One man was murdered, butchered by a kinsman under a telegraph pole just east of San Ysidro. And yet another committed suicide. A good many who have survived this long are living under the Relocation Program in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, etc. They’re a sad lot of people.

According to one historian, the novel is highly accurate in its portrayal of a peyote service, though in southern California such services normally take place in the desert, not the city (Stewart, p. 319).

Plot summary [ edit | edit source ]

Analysis [ edit | edit source ]

Allusions/references to actual history, geography and science [ edit | edit source ]

Publishers [ edit | edit source ]

Originally published by Harper & Row, editions have subsequently been brought out by HarperCollins, the Penguin Group, Econo-Clad Books and the University of Arizona Press.

Further reading [ edit | edit source ]

External links [ edit | edit source ]

Google Book Search, House Made of Dawn. [1]. Excerpts of Momaday’s work, three pages per search. To view more of the book, type in phrases at the end of the last page viewed.

House Made of Dawn

The magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of a proud stranger in his native land.

He was a young American Indian named Abel, and he lived in two worlds. One was that of his father, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, the ecstasy of the drug called peyote. The other was the world of the twentieth century, goading him into a compulsive cycle of sexual exploits, dissipation, and disgust. Home from a foreign war, he was a man being torn apart, a man descending into hell.

198 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

N. Scott Momaday

N. Scott Momaday’s baritone voice booms from any stage. The listener, whether at the United Nations in New York City or next to the radio at home, is transported through time, known as ‘kairos»and space to Oklahoma near Carnegie, to the «sacred, red earth» of Momaday’s tribe.

Born Feb. 27, 1934, Momaday’s most famous book remains 1969’s House Made of Dawn, the story of a Pueblo boy torn between the modern and traditional worlds, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and was honored by his tribe. He is a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society. He is also a Regents Professor of Humanities at the University of Arizona, and has published other novels, memoir, plays and poetry. He’s been called the dean of American Indian writers, and he has influenced other contemporary Native American writers from Paula Gunn Allen to Louise Erdrich.

Momaday views his writings, published in various books over the years, as one continuous story. Influences on his writing include literature of America and Europe and the stories of the Kiowa and other tribal peoples.

«Native Americans have a unique identity,» Momaday told Native Peoples Magazine in 1998. «It was acquired over many thousands of years, and it is the most valuable thing they have. It is their essence and it must not be lost.»

Momaday founded The Buffalo Trust in the 1990s to keep the conversations about Native American traditions going. He especially wanted to give Native American children the chance to getting to know elders, and he wanted the elders to teach the children the little details of their lives that make them uniquely Native American. Once the Buffalo Trust arranged for Pueblo children to have lesson from their elders in washing their hair with yucca root as their ancestors did for as long as anyone can remember.

«In the oral tradition,» Momaday has said, «stories are not told merely to entertain or instruct. They are told to be believed. Stories are realities lived and believed.»

House Made of Dawn/Analysis

Contents

Identity [ edit | edit source ]

This section focuses on the novel’s thematic center: the problem of identity. First we deal with Abel’s early years of harmony and the gradual emergence of conflicts which lead to his departure from the community. Next we examine Abel’s attempts to resolve his confusion after his return from a war which has further undermined his sense of belonging. In fact, Abel has become a man between two cultures, unable to cope with either. In the last section of this reading we will show that Abel’s eventual return to his native culture takes the course of an initiation quest. The interpretation is based on a close analysis of the novel’s symbolism against the background of Mircea Eliade’s studies of initiation ceremonies and religious patterns.

By way of introduction to the tragic effects of identity conflicts among American Indians as Momaday witnessed them at Jemez, it may be best to quote from one of his letters. The names of the victims have been deleted to protect their privacy and that of their families:

Abel is a composite of the boys I knew at Jemez. I wanted to say something about them. An appalling number of them are dead; they died young, and they died violent deaths. One of them was drunk and run over. Another was drunk and froze to death. (He was the best runner I ever knew). One man was murdered, butchered by a kinsman under a telegraph pole just east of San Ysidro. And yet another committed suicide. A good many who have survived this long are living under the Relocation Program in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, etc. They’re a sad lot of people.

This statement spells out the disastrous violence, suffering, and despair which frequently accompanies cultural change. While Abel’s conflicts are aggravated by a particularly unsettling historical period, his difficulties in reconciling his tribal origin with the presence of a modern world are a latent and potentially disruptive problem for every generation of American Indians.

Abel is struggling to find an identity within his own tribe long before he comes into direct contact with the culture of modern America. From a developmental point of view his experience is universal: it is the struggle of a young man to establish a stable position in his community. From a historical perspective his crisis reflects a crisis of his culture which denies its young tribal members accommodation to changing conditions.

Abel’s problem grows out of a generation conflict within a tribal community in which the ancient traditions tend to lose their meanings for young Indians in their confrontation with the cultural tradition of modern America. The old generation of traditionalists tends to exert pressure on young tribal members in order to assure the perpetuation of the old ways. This can lead to a conflict between communal obligations and the search for a new Indian identity which must include the benefits of modern society.

Abel cannot simply adopt the traditional customs of his tribe as would have been natural in a community unaffected by the encroachment of an alien culture. He turns his back on the Indian world and enters modern America. Here, under the influence of an unsympathetic environment, Abel’s conflict is aggravated. He shows all the symptoms of identity confusion: estrangement from both the tribal and the Anglo-American cultures, sexual and emotional disturbance in his personal relationships, and an inability to channel his aggression appropriately.

His return to the native community suggests that Indian cultures are capable of overcoming such crises, not by isolating themselves but through an adherence to basic traditional values and by the selective acceptance of new elements from other cultures. This strategy, which has been a strength of American Indian societies throughout the period of contact with other cultural groups, must be continued. In giving an account of the developmental crisis in the protagonist’s life history Momaday makes a statement about Indian life in a period of increasing cultural and economic pressures. House Made of Dawn, then, is a novel about an individual and a communal search for identity.

The Indian community in which Abel grows up belongs to the Rio Grande Pueblo villages in New Mexico. Momaday opens the first chapter with the place name «Walatowa, Canyon de San Diego.» Walatowa literally means «the people in the canyon.» It is the native name of Jemez. As a result of their geographical isolation and their cultural conservatism the Rio Grande Pueblos have succeeded in keeping their languages, religions, and traditional customs relatively intact despite the pressures of Spanish and Anglo-American cultural encroachment. This is how Momaday portrays life in the village:

The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.

Abel grows up in a world where the preservation of old values counts more than progress. Even today Pueblo life revolves around a complex system of religious ceremonials based on a solar calendar, whose keeper is the cacique, the Pueblo medicine man. According to his observation of the course of the sun, the cacique determines all the essential events of tribal life, the planting, harvesting, and the religious ceremonies.

In House Made of Dawn the old man Francisco functions as the teacher and guardian of the traditional Pueblo way of life. He represents the old generation of the tribe which possesses the cultural heritage and strives to preserve it by handing it down to the next generation. Francisco teaches his grandsons, Abel and Vidal, to observe the sun. He tells them that «they must know the long journey of the sun on the black mesa, how it rode in the seasons and the years, and they must live according to the sun appearing, for only then could they reckon where they were, where all things were, in time.» In revealing the connection between the sun, the landscape, and the rhythms of Indian life, Francisco roots the two boys in the old ways of the tribe. Francisco’s teachings are central to their development as well as the perpetuation of Jemez tradition.

Despite this seeming harmony with the tribal world, however, Abel somehow remains a stranger within his community. Not only during his time away from the reservation but also while growing up among his own people, he lives in a state of isolation. He was born into his position as an outsider: «He did not know who his father was. His father was a Navajo, they said, or a Sia, or an Isleta, an outsider anyway, which made him and his mother and Vidal somehow foreign and strange.» Tribal communities are not necessarily homogeneous entities as they are often perceived by outsiders; within the tribe subgroups may exist which do not meet the full acceptance of the majority. The early deaths of his mother and brother increase Abel’s isolation. He is left with his grandfather, Francisco, as his only other relation.

Preoccupied with Abel’s conforming to the tribal tradition, Francisco monopolizes his education. He forbids him to find a substitute mother in Josie, one of the women in the village. The lack of family ties prevents Abel’s full integration into the native community. As Abel approaches adolescence he finds it increasingly difficult to accept tribal patterns and the domineering authority of his grandfather.

It is common for young people at this stage of personal development to question the way of life which adults in their families or communities expect them to adopt. Momaday shows in his novel the severity of the conflict between a budding individual and a rigid tribal pattern which depends for its perpetuation on the absence of individual awareness. He reveals how the crisis in Abel’s personal development reflects a crisis in Pueblo culture.

Abel’s decision to leave the Pueblo community grows out of the realization that he cannot find an identity simply by adopting the teachings of his grandfather. Momaday shows by means of a few central events that Abel has no choice but to step out of the limiting realm of his native village in order to remain true to himself.

A most significant experience during Abel’s adolescence is his vision of an eagle which carries a snake in its talons: «He had seen a strange thing, an eagle overhead with its talons closed upon a snake. It was an awful, holy sight, full of magic and meaning.» Both eagle and snake have deeply religious meanings for the Indians of the Southwest. The snake is associated with the coming of water and is worshiped in ceremonies such as the famous snake dance of the Hopis. The eagle is believed to attain supernatural powers on its flights and is revered in the eagle dance. The appearance of the eagle and snake together is of particular religious importance, just as the plumed serpent is a major mythological figure.

For Abel the eagle is a symbol of freedom, beauty, and life: «They were golden eagles, a male and a female, in their mating flight. They were cavorting, spinning and spiraling on the cold, clear columns of air, and they were beautiful.» When Abel first sees the two birds, he is «on the rim of the Valle Grande, a great volcanic crater that lay high up on the western slope of the range. It was the right eye of the earth, help open to the sun. Of all places that he knew, this valley alone could reflect the great spatial majesty of the sky.» Standing high above the plateau he has a view of the whole extent of his world and observes the eagles as they fly across and beyond the land, disappearing in the endless sky. Perhaps it is in this vision that Abel realizes the limitations of his life under the rules of his tribal community.

His observation of the eagles and the snake gains him the permission of the Eagle Watcher Society to take part in an eagle hunt. Again he sees the two eagles and eventually succeeds in catching the female bird. He returns to the other hunters in the plain who celebrate him in much the same way as Francisco was celebrated after his successful bear hunt. Abel, however, cannot enjoy this honor. He does not understand or cannot accept that his respect for the animal can be reconciled with his act of depriving it of its freedom for the benefit of the community. Eagle feathers are highly valued as indispensable requisites for ceremonials. The closeness of the captive eagle’s spirit to the village is regarded as a beneficial influence on the life at Jemez.

When his peers allow the less attractive male eagle to return to the sky, Abel is overcome by a feeling of longing, as if he wanted to follow the bird:

It leveled off and sailed. Then it was gone from sight, but he looked after it for a time. He could see it still in the mind’s eye and hear in his memory the awful whisper of its flight on the wind. It filled him with longing. He felt the great weight of the bird which he held in the sack. The dusk was fading quickly into night, and the others could not see that his eyes were filled with tears.

Instead of feeling victorious about the hunt, in keeping with tribal tradition, Abel is sad and disgusted. He decides to kill the bird rather than allow it to live in captivity in the village. This killing is not a ritual act, as one critic assumed, but an act of rebellion against a tribal custom Abel cannot comprehend. This interpretation is corroborated by the absence of any ritual preparation and by Abel’s psychological state when he acts.

Momaday dramatized this concept in Francisco’s bear hunt. Francisco proceeds strictly according to the code of honor which regulates the hunt:

And he did not want to break the stillness of the night, for it was holy and profound; it was rest and restoration, the hunter’s offering of death and the sad watch of the hunted, waiting somewhere away in the cold darkness and breathing easily of its life, brooding around at last to forgiveness and consent; the silence was essential to them both, and it lay out like a bond between them, ancient and inviolable.

The bear’s knowledge of Francisco’s approach, the absence of fear and hurry, and Francisco’s following «in the bear’s tracks» suggest an old intimacy between the hunter and the hunted. The ritual blessing of the bear with pollen is an expression of gratitude and respect, a plea for propitiation.

His inability to adhere to the rules of tradition brings about the final break between Francisco and Abel: «You ought to do this and that, his grandfather said. But the old man had not understood, would not understand, only wept, and Abel left him alone. It was time to go, and the old man was away in the fields.» Abel’s decision to leave is the final rejection of authority, grown out of the conviction that in the rigidness of his tribal environment he will be unable to find fulfillment and an identity. His leaving is a departure in dread, accompanied by fear of an unknown future in an unknown world.

Momaday stresses Abels acculturation by means of the symbol of the shoes. The shoes are typical of the white man’s fashion in the city and therefore conspicuous to traditional Indians. In some Pueblo communities tribal rules demand that shoes or boots can be worn only if the heel is cut off, to avoid injury to the sacred earth on which the community’s existence depends. Abel, however, does not share this orthodox view; to him the shoes are simply objects of good craftsmanship, admirable in their own right, like «the work of a good potter or painter or silversmith.» As Abel steps out of his native community, he is wearing these shoes, having waited «a long time for the occasion to wear them.» In this situation they signify the world he is about to enter, and as Abel realizes this he grows anxious and afraid:

But now and beyond his former frame of reference, the shoes called attention to Abel. They were brown and white; they were conspicuously new and too large; they shone; they clattered and creaked. And they were nailed to his feet. There were enemies all around, and he knew that he was ridiculous in their eyes.

Despite Abel’s fears of what awaits him in the alien world of modern America, his departure is a necessary step toward his understanding of himself.

Abel’s withdrawal from the tribe is the result of a disturbed communication between the old and the young generation. Anxious to preserve the ancient tribal ways, the old members of the pueblo have grown blind to the needs of the young. In the following section I examine Abel’s struggle for an identity in the context of the tension between modern American and tribal cultures.

When Abel returns to his grandfather after having served in the U.S. Army in World War II, he is drunk. His flight into alcohol indicates his inability to cope with the horror and turmoil of his recent past. Abel is confused. His drunken state reflects a lack of inner stability as a result of his bicultural situation. Alcoholism, in part a reaction to being cut adrift from native cultures and being unable to come to terms with the mainstream of American society, is a widespread problem among the American Indian population.

During the two weeks Abel spends in his grandfather’s house, he tries to halt his mental and physical disintegration and find his way back to the center of Indian life. He struggles to become attuned to the culture he left as an adolescent, and he tries to rid himself of the destructive influences of a war in an alien world.

On the morning after his return Abel climbs the hill outside the village. In the growing light of the new day, he looks out over the pueblo and the land. As he is standing there, a number of episodes from his boyhood and the war come to his mind. The series of flashbacks must be seen not merely as a technical device Momaday employs to make the reader familiar with the protagonist’s past. In reliving central episodes of his childhood and adolescence, Abel tries to reintegrate himself into his environment, to imagine himself into an existence he can understand and with which he can identify. He re-creates previous experiences in his mind, trying to come to grips with his confused state. His recollections become a psychological process of searching for the roots of his confusion.

While Abel is very capable of comprehending the memories of his Indian boyhood, he is unable to come to terms with the months and years he spent away from the pueblo: «This—everything in advance of his going—he could remember whole and in detail. It was the recent past, the intervention of days and years without meaning, of awful calm and collision, time always immediate and confused, that he could not put together in his mind.»

The shock of war is the determining factor in Abel’s early manhood, as the vision of the eagles’ flight was a central event in his adolescence. In the alien world he becomes subject to a dehumanizing military conflict. The dehumanization comes across forcefully in his recollection of his war experience through the recurrent reference to the tank as «the machine.» The tank symbolizes the deadening force of an aggressive, technological society. The atmosphere of death and destruction is reinforced by another recurrent image pattern; damp, matted, wet, cold, and falling leaves intensify the scene’s implications of decay and annihilation:

Then through the falling leaves, he saw the machine. It rose up behind the hill, black and massive, looming there in front of the sun. He saw it swell, deepen, and take shape on the skyline, as if it was some upheaval of the earth, the eruption of stone and eclipse, and all about it the glare, the cold perimeter of light, throbbing with leaves. For a moment it seemed apart from the land; its great iron hull lay out against the timber and the sky, and the center of its weight hung away from the ridge. Then it came crashing down to the grade, slow as a waterfall, thunderous, surpassing impact, nestling almost into the splash and boil of debris. He was shaking violently, and the machine bore down upon him, came close, and passed him by. A wind rose and ran along the slope, scattering the leaves.

The image of the machine as the embodiment of destruction and denial of life stands in sharp contrast to the crucial experience in Abel’s youth when the eagles appeared to him as symbols of life and freedom.

It has already been pointed out that Abel had no stable identity when he left the pueblo; indeed, he entered the world of modern America because the restrictive environment of his home impeded his growth toward personal identity. During his absence from the Indian village his inner stability does not grow but is further disturbed by the traumatic events of the war. As an Indian among white soldiers he is denied a personal identity by his comrades. He is the «chief» who is «giving it to the tank in Sioux or Algonquin or something.» This statement by one of Abel’s war companions shows why Abel is prevented from becoming assimilated. The dominant Anglocentric environment has stereotyped him as an Indian without regard for his individuality. In pressing him into this misconceived role, his peers not only shut him out from their culture but also deny his identity as a Jemez man.

Abel returns to the reservation in a state of identity confusion which is typical of adolescence. Even though Abel is approximately twenty-five years old, he is devoid of the sense of wholeness which is the basis for maturation into adulthood. [In his Identity: Youth and Crisis] Erik Erikson wrote that «the young person, in order to experience wholeness, must feel a progressive continuity between that which he had come to be during the long years of childhood and that which he promises to become in the anticipated future: between that which he conceives himself to be and that which he perceives others to see in him and expect of him.»

For Abel progressive continuity is disrupted by his inability to accept tribal rules and by the damaging impact of his life outside the native community. The break from his culture and the effects of the war lead Abel into a state of confusion, isolation, and estrangement. With regard to such a crisis Erikson pointed out that «youth which is eager for, yet unable to find access to, the dominant techniques of society, will not only feel estranged from society, but also upset in sexuality, and most of all unable to apply aggression constructively.» Abel shows all these symptoms of identity confusion in his estrangement from the ritual and ceremonial practices of his tribe, in his relationship with Angela, and in his outburst of aggression which leads to the killing of the albino.

First Abel tries to re-attune himself to the land and the culture of his tribe by searching for a sign in his environment: «He stood for a long time, the land yielding to the light. He stood without thinking, nor did he move; only his eyes roved after something.» Abel is feeling his way back to a center which has been lost to him. Only by relating himself to this center can he reestablish order and overcome his inner chaos. His search is informed with religious meaning, as it aims at a communion with the land which is sacred to his people. This search for a sign, as Mircea Eliade pointed out [in The Sacred and the Profane], is a universal religious impulse in a state of disequilibrium: «A sign is asked, to put an end to the tension and anxiety caused by relativity and disorientation—in short, to reveal an absolute point of support.»

When a little later Abel sees his grandfather and some of the other Indians working in the fields, he acquires for a moment the old familiar sense of unity with his homeland: «The breeze was very faint, and it bore a scent of earth and grain; and for a moment everything was all right with him. He was at home.» But even as Abel recognizes that he has not entirely lost the ties to his native environment, he soon finds himself unable to enter the ceremonial life of his tribe.

Five days after Abel’s return, the people of Jemez celebrate the game of the Chicken Pull. This activity was introduced by the Spaniards and adopted by many of the southwestern tribes. The Rio Grande Pueblos view the insertion of the rooster into the ground and its subsequent removal as a symbolic representation of planting and reaping. The scattering of the rooster’s feathers and blood are representative of rain and are believed to increase the fertility of the land and the success of the harvest.

Abel’s participation in this ancient ceremony offers him an opportunity for reconciliation with his tribal culture: «For the first time since coming home he had done away with his uniform. He had put on his old clothes.» His effort in the game, however, proves to be a failure: «When it came Abel’s turn, he made a poor showing, full of caution and gesture.» And when the albino as the victorious rider turns against Abel and starts beating him with the rooster in accordance with the rules of the game, he is unable to cope with the situation: «Abel was not used to the game, and the white man was too strong and quick for him.» He is estranged from the old traditions and consequently fails to integrate himself into the cultural context of his community.

Another Pueblo ceremonial which could have been of help to Abel is the Pecos Bull Dance, which the Jemez people perform on August 1. Momaday witnessed the ceremony as a child. He described it thus [in The Names]:

On the first of August, at dusk, the Pecos Bull ran through the streets of Jemez, taunted by the children, chased by young boys who were dressed in outlandish costumes, most in a manner which parodied the curious white Americans who came frequently to see the rich sights of Jemez on feast days. This «bull» was a man who wore a mask, a wooden framework on his back covered with black cloth and resembling roughly a bull, the head of which was a crude thing made of horns, a sheepskin, and a red cloth tongue which wagged about. It ran around madly, lunging at the children.

Abel’s reluctance to take part in the Bull Dance arises from his lack of identification with tribal rituals and perhaps also from his disbelief in their effectiveness. His loss of confidence after the Chicken Pull is a further obstacle to his participation in the event: «It was a hard thing to be the bull, for there was a primitive agony to it, and it was a kind of victim, an object of ridicule and hatred; and harder now that the men of the town had relaxed their hold upon the ancient ways, had grown soft and dubious. Or they had merely grown old.» Momaday indicates in this context the increasing difficulty of adhering to the old traditions, which is a major problem, particularly for the young Indian generation represented by Abel. The ancient traditions tend to lose their meaning for young tribal members in their confrontation with mainstream America. This crisis in the Indian cultures adds to the identity problem exemplified in the figure of Abel.

A further indication of Abel’s failure to reenter the Indian world of his childhood is his loss of articulation. His inability to find the proper words to acquire wholeness and communion with his culture and his homeland makes him aware that his return to the town has failed:

Abel walked into the canyon. His return to the town had been a failure, for all his looking forward. He had tried in the days that followed to speak to his grandfather, but he could not say the things he wanted; he had tried to pray, to sing, to enter into the old rhythm of the tongue, but he was no longer attuned to it. And yet it was there still, like memory, in the reach of his hearing, as if Francisco or his mother or Vidal had spoken out of the past and the words had taken hold of the moment and made it eternal. Had he been able to say it, anything in his own language—even the most commonplace formula of greeting «Where are you going»—which had no being beyond sound, no visible substance, would once again have shown him whole to himself; but he was dumb. Not dumb—silence was the older and better part of custom still—but inarticulate.

The word links the Indian to his religious and mythological heritage. Indian culture is based on an oral tradition and maintained through the creative power of the word. If the word is lost, culture and identity are forfeited, as wholeness can only be established by the word. The following passage shows that Abel has indeed lost the power of words:

He began almost to be at peace, as if he had drunk a little of warm, sweet wine, for a time no longer centered upon himself. He was alone, and he wanted to make a song out of the colored canyon, the way the women of Torreón made songs upon their looms out of colored yarn, but he had not got the right words together. It would have been a creation song; he would have sung lowly of the first world, of fire and flood, and of the emergence of dawn from the hills.

As his imaginative re-creation of his childhood and adolescence was an attempt to understand his problematic situation, his effort to make a song is an endeavor to restore harmony between himself and the universe. Abel’s creation song would have been a bid for the creative power that heals, restores harmony, and provides wholeness. However, he «has not the right words» and thus remains isolated. It is not until his recital of the Night Chant at the end of the book that he regains his voice.

Abel’s inability to achieve true intimacy, then, can be seen as the result of the absence of meaningful relationships in his formative years. He grew up fatherless, lost his mother and brother in early boyhood, and never fully achieved an intimacy with the tribal community. There was also a possibly decisive, unsuccessful encounter with a young Indian girl during his adolescence. Abel’s behavior toward Angela seems to indicate that this incident is still somewhere in the back of his mind. He tenaciously avoids exposing himself to humiliation and chooses to remain in the shell of his own self: «He would give her no clear way to be contemptuous of him.»

Abel is portrayed as the stereotype of the mute Indian. He avoids talking at any length and frequently does not react at all to Angela’s questions. His fear of getting hurt and his inability to communicate his feelings are typical of his behavior: «His face darkened, but he hung on, dumb and immutable. He would not allow himself to be provoked. It was easy, natural for him to stand aside, hang no.» His lack of articulation, which earlier in the novel prevented him from bringing forth a creation song, is now the main obstacle to an intimate relationship with Angela. She grows aware of a kind of powerlessness in Abel: «There he stood, dumb and docile at her pleasure, not knowing, she supposed, how even to take his leave.»

Abel’s failure to establish a relationship with Angela seems to be the result of his incomplete identity formation. Throughout the novel he appears as a loner on a quest for a secure place, for a stability which he cannot find in an intimate relationship because he has not found himself. This dilemma accompanies Abel on his odyssey between Indian and modern American culture.

The third characteristic of identity confusion, the inability to vent aggression appropriately, leads to the climax of the first chapter, Abel’s killing of the albino. This act of violence reflects Abel’s inability to cope with the confusion he is subject to in his personal and cultural isolation. American culture has estranged him from his home: his endeavor to enter into the ceremonial life of his tribe has been unsuccessful; his attempt to establish an identity in an intimate relationship with Angela has failed. The resulting frustration is one source of the aggression Abel directs against the albino. Another is the deeply rooted fear which has dwelt in him since his early childhood—the fear that evil forces in the universe may exert their influence in him. This anxiety is common among Indian tribes. Abel’s inability to comprehend the intricate nature of witchcraft leads to his individual and violent reaction against the albino, which could have been avoided through ritual.

Abel’s first encounter with the albino takes place during the Chicken Pull: «The appearance of one of the men was striking. He was large, lithe, and white-skinned; he wore little round colored glasses and rode a fine black horse of good blood.» The albino turns out to be the winner in the game, even though Angela observes that in his movements «there was something out of place, some flaw in proportion or design, some unnatural thing.» This is the first indication, apart from the physical otherness of the white man, that there is something strange about him. In the course of the game Abel finds himself confronted with the albino and loses out because of his alienation from tribal customs.

Abel’s latent fear of witchcraft is awakened by his encounter with the albino. Perhaps he is reminded of his childhood experience with the ill-reputed old woman Nicolás teah-whau.

The fear of witchcraft is Abel’s conscious motive for killing the albino, which makes his action an act of self-defense. The problem, however, is more complex, for Abel’s action cannot be seen simply in terms of the tribal context which allows the execution of witches. Abel’s act of violence grows out of his frustration about his cultural estrangement and his feeling of inadequacy. It is possible that Abel recognizes himself in the figure of the albino, a mixture of Indian and white. Viewed in this light, Abel’s act of destruction is an attempt to annihilate his own confused self. In doing so by culturally sanctioned means he is trying to find his way back to his tribal background. The albino, then, serves as a scapegoat. The cultural ambiguity of the albino figure is highlighted in this scene:

Then he [the white man] closed his hands upon Abel and drew him close. Abel heard the strange excitement of the white man’s breath, and the quick, uneven blowing at his ear, and he felt the blue quivering lips upon him, felt even the scales of the lips and the hot, slippery point of the tongue, writhing. He was sick with terror and revulsion, and he tried to fling himself away, but the white man held him close. The white immensity of flesh lay over and smothered him. He withdrew the knife and thrust again, lower, deep into the groin.

The killing of the albino is a symbolic representation of the cultural conflict which Abel is trying to resolve. In the context of his native culture his act is justified and necessary. Momaday himself said that «not a person at Jemez would have held Abel liable.» Nevertheless, Abel’s subsequent recognition of the ritual defenses against evil forces and his realization that evil can only be contained, but not eradicated, are fundamental steps to the resolution of his dilemma and his eventual understanding of his tribal tradition.

The «Priest of the Sun» chapter is the most puzzling and haunting section of House Made of Dawn. The narrative voice is centered in Abel’s consciousness as he is lying, delirious from alcohol and the brutal beating he received from Martinez, a violent and corrupt police officer, on the beach outside Los Angeles. Through multiple flashbacks Momaday reveals the psychological situation of a man who is lost between two worlds, torn apart culturally and spiritually, and drifting toward death. Abel is «reeling on the edge of the void,» but he does not fall. The very moment when Abel seems to have exhausted all the possibilities of finding redemption holds the seed to his ultimate recovery. In the extremity of his situation Abel gains insights into the core of his native culture which lead him to a new understanding of his place in the scheme of things.

A gap of about six and a half years lies between the end of the opening chapter and the beginning of the next, «The Priest of the Sun.» During this time Abel served his prison sentence for killing the albino and, after his release, settled in Los Angeles. However, the burden of the past proves too heavy and the pressure of life in the city too great to allow him integration into his new environment.

In this second chapter Momaday abandons a continuous plot line and operates instead with a device resembling the cutting technique employed in film. Whereas the series of flashbacks in the opening chapter showed a certain continuity by following Abel’s growth, this characteristic is now absent. Without any apparent logical connections, fragmentary scenes from Abel’s past alternate with blurred perceptions of his immediate environment. The flashbacks encompass scenes from Abel’s childhood—Josie, Francisco, Vidal, and his departure from the village—from the trial and his stay in prison, and finally from his relationships with Milly and Angela.

The trial scene is of particular significance, for it is here that the issue of cultural relativism is addressed most explicitly. Abel registers the proceedings with detachment and a keen awareness that his case lies beyond his judges’ frame of reference: «Word by word these men were disposing of him in language, their language, and they were making a bad job of it. They were strangely uneasy, full of hesitation, reluctance. He wanted to help them.» Father Olguin, the Catholic priest in the pueblo, tries to explain Abel’s perception of his victim as an evil spirit, admitting that the motivation behind and execution of the killing must ultimately resist comprehension by anyone outside the Jemez world. The nature of Abel’s act is such that it cannot be assessed in terms of American law.

Abel states his own feelings on the issues with the conviction of someone who believes himself to be in accordance with the relevant law:

He had killed a white man. It was not a complicated thing, after all; it was very simple. It was the most natural thing in the world. Surely they could see that, these men who meant to dispose of him in words. They must know that he would kill the white man again, if he had the chance, that there would be no hesitation whatsoever. For he would know what the white man was, and he would kill him if he could. A man kills such an enemy if he can.

The tragedy is that Abel’s law and the law of his judges are incompatible, resting on different cultural assumptions, and that it is in accordance with his judges’ law that he is sentenced and sent to prison.

This passage of House Made of Dawn is reminiscent of the trial scene in Albert Camus’s The Outsider. In fact, Momaday declared that he had Camus in mind when he wrote about Abel’s trial. Although for different reasons—philosophical rather than cultural in nature—Meursault in The Outsider is unrepentant of his killing. He too experiences his case with a profound sense of detachment and isolation. Like Abel he «wasn’t to have any say,» and «his fate was to be decided out of hand.» Yet he too feels the need to help his judges: «Quite often, interested as I was in what they had to say, I was tempted to put in a word, myself.» In the end neither Abel nor Meursault can make himself understood.

It is not only the fragmentary structure which precludes any easy interpretation of this crucial chapter. Equally complex is Momaday’s use of imagery; only when the seemingly unrelated symbols are combined in a coherent pattern does the full meaning of the beach scene surface. I have argued above that Abel has been suffering from the lack of stable identity, as evidenced by his position as an outsider in the community, his inability to identify with tribal rituals and ceremonies, and his failure to relate on a level of intimacy to his female partners. The process of degeneration resulting from this lack of stability reaches its climax in Abel’s struggle with the murderous police officer and subsequently with death itself. The symbols which surround these events suggest that what is actually happening in this powerfully conceived scene is a rite of passage in which Abel progresses from lack of understanding to knowledge, from chaos through ritual death to rebirth.

That Abel is lying on the beach, close to water, is of further importance in this context; although there is no suggestion that he actually comes into contact with the sea, he is closely associated with it and the small, silver-sided fish which dwell off the California coast. Water is traditionally a symbol of potential life, of creation and fertility, the element from which all cosmic manifestations emerge and to which they return. Water creates and dissolves. According to Eliade:

Immersion in water symbolizes a return to the pre-formal, a total regeneration, a new birth, for immersion means a dissolution of forms, a reintegration into the formlessness of pre-existence; and emerging from the water is a repetition of the act of creation in which form was first expressed. Every contact with water implies regeneration: first, because dissolution is succeeded by a «new birth,» and then because immersion fertilizes, increases the potential of life and of creation. In initiation rituals, water confers a «new birth.»

Abel’s proximity to and association with water, then, suggest the dissolution of his state of estrangement and the potential for rebirth into his tribal culture.

Abel’s connection with the fish reinforces the meaning of his transformation:

There is a small silversided fish that is found along the coast of southern California. In the spring and summer it spawns on the beach during the first three hours after each of the three high tides following the highest tide. These fish come by the hundreds from the sea. They hurl themselves upon the land and writhe in the light of the moon, the moon, the moon; they writhe in the light of the moon. They are among the most helpless creatures on the face of the earth.

The fish imagery not only reflects Abel’s suffering but also indicates the upward movement in his development after he has become aware of his situation. When Abel raises the energy to fight against and eventually escape the drift towards death, the fish too have found their way back to safety in the depth of the sea, as Abel will eventually return home to his tribal community: «And far out in the night where nothing else was, the fishes lay out on the black water, holding still against all the force and motion of the sea; or close to the surface, darting and rolling and spinning like lures, they played in the track of the moon.»

The most complex symbol Momaday employs in this chapter is that of the moon. The common denominator in a number of scenes throughout the novel, it brings the various episodes together in Abel’s and the reader’s minds. The moon, of course, is also associated with the sea and the initiation ritual. Most important, however, it is Abel’s realization of the cosmic significance of the moon which brings about his new understanding of a universal order. To appreciate the subtlety of this image pattern, we need to scrutinize in detail its various functions.

The connection of the moon with initiation rituals has already been mentioned. The moon’s reappearance after her three-day «death» has traditionally been read as a symbol of rebirth. The Juan Capistrano Indians of California, according to James Frazer [as quoted by Eliade], declared, «As the moon dieth and cometh to life again, so we also, having to die, will again rise.» In a number of shamanistic initiation rites the novice is «broken in pieces» in analogy to the phases of the moon. Among the Plains Indians it was customary to focus one’s eyes on the moon in order to secure help in a moment of distress. The Pueblo medicine-water chief implored the moon to give him power to see disease. With this information the prominence of the moon image in Abel’s consciousness becomes more readily intelligible.

However, it is not just the meanings of regeneration, spiritual assistance, and clearer vision which make the moon such a revealing image of Abel’s struggle for recovery. His rise to a securer mode of being is affected above all by his growing awareness of the moon as a unifying and controlling force in the universe. Eliade pointed out [in Patterns on Comparative Religion] that «the myths of `quest’ and of `initiation trials’ reveal, in artistic or dramatic form, the actual act by which the mind gets beyond a conditioned, piecemeal universe, swinging between opposites, to return to the fundamental oneness that existed before creation.» An important step towards Abel’s understanding of cosmic unity lies in his realization that the moon controls the sea as well as the land: «Why should Abel think of the fishes? He could not understand the sea; it was not of his world. It was an enchanted thing, too, for it lay under the spell of the moon. It bent to the moon, and the moon made a bright, shimmering course upon it» [italics added]. This recognition of the moon’s universal power to order and control the universe reflects Abel’s growing reattainment to American Indian thought.

In the Southwest, as elsewhere among tribal peoples, the moon functions together with the sun as the measure of the yearly cycle in the life of the community. The Santa Clara Pueblos believe that «the function of the sun, the moon, stars, the Milky Way, and other such features, is to make the earth inhabitable for human beings» [Edgar L. Hewett and Bertha P. Dutton, The Pueblo Indian World]. This idea has practical consequences for everyday Indian life. The belief, for instance, that the moon exerts a strong influence on the growth of plants has immediate impact on the process of sowing and reaping. At the beginning of House Made of Dawn, Momaday refers to the moon’s influence on the communal work in the fields: «The townsmen work all summer in the fields. When the moon is full, they work at night with ancient, handmade plows and hoes.» The holiness attributed to the moon by American Indians is alluded to in the «red and yellow symbols of the sun and the moon» which decorate the lectern in the Indian church in Los Angeles. Eliade noted that «the moon shows man his true human condition; that in a sense man looks at himself, and finds himself anew in the life of the moon.» If one subscribes to this idea, then Abel’s rediscovery of his native heritage appears to be a result of his reattainment to a lunar rhythm.

Abel’s understanding of the secrets of lunar control of the universe also arises from recollections and reinterpretations of some of his earlier hunting experiences. The image of the moon functions as an associative link to other scenes where animal imagery mirrors Abel’s distress. One of these instances, the parallel between him and the fish, has already been discussed. The eagle hunt is another example: «Bound and helpless, his eagle seemed drab and shapeless in the moonlight, too large and ungainly for flight.» A third event of this kind occurs in one of Abel’s recollections of his childhood. It is the hunting scene in which he recovers a shot water bird:

He took it up in his hands and it was heavy and warm and the feathers about its keel were hot and sticky with blood. He carried it out into the moonlight, and its bright black eyes, in which no terror was, were wide of him, wide of the river and the land, level and hard upon the ring of the moon in the southern sky.

In these instances the moon imagery connects Abel’s present and past experiences. In recollecting the dying water bird, with its fearless black eyes, Abel can establish a link between his own desperate state and the reaction of the animal. The bird is part of the complexity of nature and is by nature without the fear of death. Abel too had a natural attitude towards death when, as a boy, he was still close to the Indian understanding of the universe. His loss of identification with his heritage has led him away from this natural view of death and contributed to the intense fears which are haunting him now.

The moon, then, is strongly suggestive of a hope for rebirth. This is an entirely new perspective for Abel. If one recalls the scene in which he destroys the eagle because he felt pity and shame, it is obvious that Abel did not share in the traditional belief of many hunting communities that the spirit of the animal survives and returns in a new physical manifestation. If he had been attuned to the rituals of the hunters, as old man Francisco was on his bear hunt, he could have killed the eagle in the appropriate ritual way, with a sense of gratitude and appreciation rather than remorse.

Momaday uses a number of devices to reinforce further the connection between Abel and the moon. In two instances the course of the moonlight on the water functions as a bridge, and in the following passage a flock of birds serves as a link: «Then they [the birds] were away, and he had seen how they craned their long slender necks to the moon, ascending slowly into the far reaches of the winter night. They made a dark angle on the sky, acute, perfect; and for one moment they lay out like an omen on the bright fringe of a cloud.»

Abel’s recognition of the moon as a vital influence shows that he is beginning to return to the traditional Indian concept of the universe. The following passage, which comprises the three images of sea, moon, and fish, unites bird and fish imagery and thus widens the scope of Abel’s vision to a universal dimension:

Land and sea, man and animal are related in their connection with the moon. This notion coincides with the general idea of the interrelatedness of all elements in the Indian universe. By growing aware of this idea Abel discovers that he too is tied up in the totality of creation and has a legitimate place in it.

The runners after evil ran as water runs, deep in the channel, in the way of least resistance, no resistance. His skin crawled with excitement; he was overcome with longing and loneliness, for suddenly he saw the crucial sense in their going, of old men in white leggings running after evil in the night. They were whole and indispensable in what they did; everything in creation referred to them. Because of them, perspective, proportion, design in the universe. Meaning because of them. They ran with great dignity and calm, not in the hope of anything, but hopelessly; neither in fear nor hatred nor despair of evil, but simply in recognition and with respect. Evil was. Evil was abroad in the night; they must venture out to the confrontation; they must reckon dues and divide the world.

The vision confronts Abel with the ritualistic practices the elders of the tribe employ to maintain control over the supernatural. The race is connected with the ceremony of clearing the irrigation ditches in the spring. It is an imitation of water running through the channels, a magic bid for the vital supply of rain, and a ritual act to prevent the harvest from being influenced by evil powers. This vision modifies Abel’s view of his own actions in the past; he realizes that, although his destruction of the albino as a source of evil was in accordance with tribally sanctioned practices, Pueblo religion offers nonviolent ways of controlling supernatural powers. The ritualistic expression of human creativity through words in songs and prayers and through motion in dance and ceremonial races is the central instrument by which the Indian maintains a balance between himself and the universe.

Abel’s growing understanding of the cosmic order in terms of his tribal heritage leads him to the recognition that his estrangement from the center of Indian life has been the cause of his dilemma. This diagnosis of the source of his «disease» puts him on the road to recovery. Abel’s previous inability to make sense of his situation is indicated in a flashback to his departure from the village, which is the continuation of the corresponding passage in the opening chapter: «He tried to think where the trouble had begun, what the trouble was. There was trouble; he could admit that to himself, but he had no real insight into his own situation. Maybe, certainly, that was the trouble; but he had no way of knowing.»

Now in his hallucinatory state the insight for which he had searched so long suddenly comes to him: «He had lost his place. He had been long ago at the center, had known where he was, had lost his way, had wandered to the end of the earth, was even now reeling on the edge of the void.» This recognition epitomizes the entire development of the novel up to this point. Abel realizes that the Indian world of his boyhood is the only place where he can find a meaningful existence and an identity. As in a vision quest Abel receives a sign which shows him the way to personal wholeness.

Once Abel has by means of his subconscious gained insight into the meaning of ritual and the controlling forces in the universe, he is ready to establish a formal union with his tribal heritage through the ceremony of the Night Chant which Ben Benally conducts for him. The changes he undergoes as a result of his vision enable him to make the «spiritual commitment» of submitting himself to the healing powers of the Night Chant. In doing so, he shows his new found trust in the effectiveness of Indian ceremonials. In the Night Chant ceremony Abel, as the «patient,» remains passive yet, but it is the first step toward his own conduction of a ceremony—the funeral rite after the death of his grandfather—and toward his participation in the ceremonial race that ends the novel.

The result of the Night Chant is the restoration of the wholeness Abel had lost in his crisis of identity and through his exposure to the disruptive forces of incompatible cultural patterns. American Indian ritual and song aim at the preservation of order and at the integration of the individual into the larger context of his environment. [In her «The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary Perspective on American Indian Literature,» an essay appearing in Abraham Chapman’s Literature of the American Indians] Paula Allan remarked that through ceremonial practices «the isolated individualistic personality is shed and the person is restored to conscious harmony with the universe.» The Night Chant, then, reestablishes Abel’s inner balance and equilibrium with the world around him. In order to achieve this harmony Abel must regain his physical and mental wholeness and his power of the word.

Significantly, Abel’s return to his tribal tradition takes place only a short time before dawn. This event is part of a coherent pattern of dawn images which permeate the novel. The book opens and closes with Abel running across the land at dawn. When Abel is lying on the beach after his fight with Martinez, struggling against death, he can hear the «sound of the city at night, ticking like a clock toward the dawn.» If one takes the symbol of dawn to stand for rebirth, a new beginning, and creation, the reference to dawn at this point anticipates Abel’s resurrection.

At the center of the dawn image pattern stands the following passage, which encompasses the historical migration of a tribe, its cultural crisis, and its potential regeneration:

Man came down the ladder to the plain a long time ago. It was a slow migration, though he came only from the caves in the canyons and the tops of the mesas nearby. There are low, broken walls on the tabletops and smoke-blackened caves in the cliffs, where still there are metates and broken bowls and ancient ears of corn, as if the prehistoric civilization had gone out among the hills for a little while and would return; and then everything would be restored to an older age, and time would have returned upon itself and a bad dream of invasion and change would have been dissolved in an hour before the dawn.

This short passage [from The Way to Rainy Mountain] encapsulates the essence of House Made of Dawn:’ the novel shows how a traditional Indian community which is threatened in its cultural survival by an encroaching alien world is struggling to defend itself against this influence. The demand for strict adherence to traditional practices leads to pressure within the tribe and thus aggravates the crisis. This pressure may result, as in Abel’s case, in identity conflicts among young Indians, who, though rooted in their cultural background, cannot ignore the reality of a modern age brought about by an alien culture. Their need to develop their individuality within the tribal community must find the support of their elders.

In much the same way as the reference to the cyclical concept of time indicates the potentially positive resolution of the historical crisis in Indian culture, the cyclical structure of the novel justifies a hopeful reading of Abel’s future. At the close of the book Abel returns to the personal wholeness and harmony with the universe which were his main strengths at its beginning. Indeed the cyclical concept of tribal history and the cyclical movement of Abel’s personal history interconnect at the end. Abel, whose dilemma is the product of historical crisis in Indian culture, overcomes his identity conflict and symbolically resolves the communal crisis of his tribe. Momaday’s own comment on House Made of Dawn points in this direction: «I see the novel as a circle. It ends where it begins and it’s informed with a kind of thread that runs through it and holds everything together» [«An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,» Puerto del Sol 12, No. 1 (1973)] This race, then, is a race for identity, both personal and communal. It finds its final resolution in the ceremonial race which shows Abel reconciled with his native culture and the Indian universe.

It is a stick race: the runners imitate the Cloud People who fill the arroyos with life-giving rain, and keep in motion, with only their feet, a «stick-ball» which represents the moving drift of the water’s edge. The first race each year comes in February, and then the dawn is clear and cold, and the runners breathe steam. It is a long race, and it is neither won nor lost. It is an expression of the soul in the ancient terms of sheer physical exertion. To watch those runners is to know that they draw with every step some elemental power which resides at the core of the earth and which, for all our civilized ways, is lost upon us who have lost the art of going in the flow of things.

Abel’s running at dawn, singing the words of the Night Chant, marks the end of his struggle for identity. He has finally returned to his place in the house made of dawn. He has found the right words to articulate himself and he has a vision of the appropriate path to wholeness. The novel’s final scene is charged with mythological overtones: according to a Pueblo emergence myth, Iatik, the corn mother, after creating the present world, called on the people to emerge from the previous world underground. As they entered their new environment they were blind. Then, the story [as related by Richard Erdoes in The Rain Dance People] goes on to explain, «Iatik lined them up in a row facing east and made the sun come up for the first time in this new world to shine upon them. And when its rays shone upon the eyes of the people, they were opened and they could see.»

In the primordial setting of dawn over the Jemez Valley, Abel too «could see at last without having to think. He could see the canyons and the mountains and the sky. He could see the rain and the river and the fields beyond. He could see the dark hills at dawn.» His new vision and voice are expressions of his communion with his native tradition and raise the hope that he may become the living link between the ancient past and a promising future for his tribal culture.

Language [ edit | edit source ]

In 1969, one year after the publication of his novel House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday, in an article entitled «The Story of the Arrowmaker,» interpreted the Kiowa legend of the arrowmaker as a story essentially about the power of language. For the arrowmaker, says Momaday, «language is the repository of his whole knowledge and experience, and it represents the only chance he has for survival.» The legend depicts «the man made of words.» Other writers have pointed out the Native American’s belief in the power of language; Margot Astrov, in her introduction to American Indian Prose and Poetry, writes, «The word, indeed, is power. It is life, substance, reality. The word lived before earth, sun, or moon came into existence.» In their anthology [entitled Literature of the American Indian], Thomas E. Sanders and Walter W. Peek say this about the power:

The belief in such powers of language is not peculiar to the American Indian; Ernst Cassirer and Bronislaw Malinowski, among others, discuss the power of the word in various societies. Cassirer, writing of the bond between the linguistic consciousness and the mythical-religious consciousness [in his Language and Myth] tells us that, «the Word, in fact, becomes a sort of primary force, in which all being and doing originate. In all mythical cosmogonies, as far back as they can be traced, this supreme position of the Word is found.» [In an essay appearing in Max Black’s 1962 The Importance of Language] Malinowski links this supreme position of the word to the development of language in every individual. He writes, «we realize that all language in its earliest function within the context of infantile helplessness is protomagical and pragmatic.» The writings of N. Scott Momaday, himself a Kiowa, show him to be aware of the creative and healing power of the word in this broad understanding, and the power of language is an important theme in House Made of Dawn.

The prologue of the novel begins where the hero ends, running in the race of the black men at dawn. Later in the novel we learn the significance of this race; it is the race

of old men in white leggings running after evil in the night. They were whole and indispensable in what they did; everything in creation referred to them. Because of them, perspective, proportion, design in the universe. Meaning because of them. They ran with great dignity and calm, not in the hope of anything, but hopelessly; neither in fear nor hatred nor despair of evil, but simply in recognition and with respect. Evil was. Evil was abroad in the night; they must venture out to the confrontation; they must reckon dues and divide the world.

The race, then, is man’s confrontation with his universe; his division of the world into good and evil; his creation of meaning. The prologue begins with a prayer, the Navajo Night Chant—or more properly a song from the Night Chant—through which the singer restores order in the world through his reverence for the words of the song and the influence of his voice. The prologue demonstrates the dual function of language to create and to heal, and represents in capsule form the primary concerns of the novel.

He had tried in the days that followed to speak to his grandfather, but he could not say the things he wanted; he had tried to pray, to sing, to enter into the old rhythm of the tongue, but he was no longer attuned to it. And yet it was there still, like memory, in the reach of his hearing, as if Francisco or his mother or Vidal had spoken out of the past and the words had taken hold of the moment and made it eternal. Had he been able to say it, anything of his own language—even the commonplace formula of greeting «Where are you going»—which had no being beyond sound, no visible substance, would once again have shown him whole to himself; but he was dumb. Not dumb—silence was the older and better part of custom still—but inarticulate.

Similarly isolated is Angela Grace St. John, a white woman who comes to Los Ojos to rest and await the birth of her child. She frequently demonstrates a profound sensitivity to the mythical potential of appearances, as when she thinks of Abel as a badger or a bear, or when, watching him cut wood, she says, «I see,» and is «aware of some useless agony that was spent upon the wood, some hurt she could not have imagined until now,» but her concern early in the novel is to escape that power of her imagination, «to see nothing at all, nothing in the absolute.» Her seduction of Abel is a battle for power which Abel wins, and which leads Angela to reject the Church in favor of the power of the individual imagination to name and create reality. Years later Abel calls for her in pain from his hospital bed, and she comes to him, not as a lover, but as one who has accepted the ability to name the mystery of their affair. She has transformed their affair into a myth of a maiden and a bear and told her son that myth. Ben Benally says about her story:

Ben is struck with wonder by Angela’s story, and compares it to the legends told him by his grandfather years ago. The significance of these legends is explained in Tosamah’s sermon about the Gospel According to St. John (which may be a hint as to the significance of Tosamah’s first and Angela’s last name):

Section two of the novel, which bears Tosamah’s name, consists of slices of sermons delivered by him and of Abel’s thoughts. Yet this section is unified by the theme of the power of the word. Abel cannot at first understand the experiences he remembers, yet immediately after his vision of the old men running after evil in the night, who, he understands, create an order in the universe, he realizes what has long been his problem: «Now, here, the world was open at his back. He had lost his place. He had been long ago at the center, had known where he was, had lost his way, had wandered to the end of the earth, was even now reeling on the edge of the void.» And he begins to understand that this has happened because he has lost «the power to name and assimilate» the world. He remembers the powerlessness of being disposed of in language during his trial, the meaningless questionnaires according to which the individual is defined in white society, the blank emptiness of his prison cell, the way his fellow soldiers referred to him as «the chief» and talked about him as if he were not there. Juxtaposed to these memories are those of the wonder of the natural world, in which Abel remembers himself as being articulate. The one passage in the novel in which Abel is fully capable of describing the world around him is the one in which he describes his hunting wild geese with his brother. Abel’s memories are clarified by Tosamah’s sermons, and this second section of the novel serves to explain the resolution approached through Angela, Milly, Ben, and Francisco in the next sections.

Ben Benally also shares with Abel the stories of his life, but his belief in language, unlike that of Milly, is in the power of prayer, song, and legend to heal and create. It is from Ben that Abel learns the Night Chant, the healing prayer which he sings in the final section of the novel. Indeed, the third section of the novel, called appropriately the «Night Chanter,» is primarily about Abel’s learning the power of prayer from Ben. Ben, like Angela and the old grandmother of Tosamah, draws Abel again and again into the presence of his spirit to confront the truth; Ben says:

«House made of dawn.» I used to tell him about those old ways, the stories and the sings, Beautyway and Night Chant. I sang some of those things, and I told him what they meant, what I thought they were about.

Ben understands the way life in white society strips the reservation Indian—and has stripped Abel—of his language:

And Ben understands both the fear which drove Abel to kill the albino and the act of the imagination by which the evil of the albino was identified:

Although Ben has chosen to remain in the city, his memories of life on the reservation show his reverence for the traditional Navajo way of life, and his belief in the efficacy of prayer and storytelling link him to the old man Francisco, Abel’s grandfather.

Francisco is the only character who is able early in the novel to articulate his relation to the world, yet he is divided between the traditional ceremonialism of his tribe and that of the Catholic Church. This division is represented literally by his being the son of the old priest, Fray Nicolas. He has tried to teach Abel the old ways, but we are told several times by Abel that his grandfather does not understand him. At the end of the novel, however, in the «Dawn Runner» section, Abel has learned to understand Francisco. As Francisco lies on his death bed, he speaks six times on six successive dawns, in what seems to be a last attempt to tell Abel what it is to be a man. Francisco, like the teller of the legend of the arrowmaker, takes and has taken the risk of passing a heritage on to his grandsons through his words:

These things he told to his grandsons carefully, slowly and at length, because they were old and true, and they could be lost forever as easily as one generation is lost to the next, as easily as one old man might lose his voice, having spoken not enough or not at all.

Here is the risk of the oral tradition, always «one generation removed from extinction.» And here is the creative and healing power of all stories told by one individual to another, the risk of entrusting one’s being to another, the risk of «consummate being in language.» Francisco places the stories of his young manhood, his tragic love, and the race of the black men at dawn into Abel’s hands. It becomes Abel’s responsibility to grasp these stories, to respect their power, and to pass them on.

Francisco dies, but Abel has learned from him and from the several other characters of the novel the power of language to create and to heal. When he continues the tradition of the race of the black men at dawn he is joining the tradition of naming the world, he is saying to the universe that the word of the ancients has survived. Running alone behind the other men whose bodies are painted black with ashes, Abel begins under his breath to sing, to pray the Navajo prayer taught to him by Ben Benally. We are told that, «he had no voice; he had only the words of a song. And he went running on the rise of the song.» Of the arrowmaker Momaday writes that, «the arrowmaker has more nearly perfect being than other men have, and a more nearly perfect right to be. We can imagine him as he imagines himself, whole and vital, going on into the unknown darkness and beyond. This last aspect of his being is primordial and profound.» So it is with Abel.

Literary significance & criticism [ edit | edit source ]

House Made of Dawn produced no extensive commentary when it was first published—perhaps, as [William James Smith mused in a review of the work in Commonweal LXXXVIII (20 September 1968)] because «it seems slightly un-American to criticize an American Indian’s novel»—and its subject matter and theme did not seem to conform to the prescription above.

Overall, the book has come to be seen as a success. Sprague concluded in his article that the novel was superb. And Momaday was widely praised for the novel’s rich description of Indian life. Now there is a greater recognition of Momaday’s fictional art, and critics have come to recognize its unique achievement as a novel. Despite a qualified reception the novel had succeeded in making its impact even on earlier critics though they were not sure of their own responses. They found it «a story of considerable power and beauty,» «strong in imaginative imagery,» creating a «world of wonder and exhilarating vastness.» In more recent criticism there are signs of greater clarity of understanding of Momaday’s achievement. In his review [appearing in Western American Literature 5 (Spring 1970)], John Z. Bennett had pointed out how through «a remarkable synthesis of poetic mode and profound emotional and intellectual insight into the Indians’ perduring human status[«] Momaday’s novel becomes at last the very act it is dramatizing, an artistic act, a «creation hymn.» In [«The Novel as Sacred Text: N. Scott Momaday’s Myth-Making Ethic,» Southwest Review 63 (Spring 1978)].

Father Olguin shivered with cold and peered out into the darkness. «I can understand,» he said. «I understand, do you hear?» And he began to shout «I understand! Oh God! I understand—I understand!»

Critic Kenneth Lincoln identified the Pulitzer for House Made of Dawn as the moment that sparked the Native American Renaissance. Many major American Indian novelists (e.g. Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, James Welch, Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich) have cited the novel as a major inspiration for their own work.

Awards and nominations [ edit | edit source ]

References [ edit | edit source ]

Please add <> only to book title pages.

House Made of Dawn

Introduction

When it was first published in 1968, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn garnered scarce critical and commercial attention. Yet within a year, it won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and had received international critical acclaim.

During the early 1970s America became interested in the plight of Native Americans as the truth about reservation life was exposed and publicized by Native American activists. By chronicling the struggles of a young Native American man named Abel, Momaday was able to explore some of the issues and conflicts that faced the Native American community in the twentieth century. House Made of Dawn was a crucial link in teaching the general public about the real lives and beliefs of Native Americans.

Although most critics admire the poetic beauty of his narrative style, Momaday’s indirect way of storytelling—weaving together past, present and myth with no apparent order—may prove challenging to some readers who are used to a linear progression of events. Most critics, however, consider this style necessary for understanding Abel and his culture.

Author Biography

Momaday was born on the Kiowa Reservation in Lawton, Oklahoma, on February 27, 1934. His father, Alfred Morris, was an artist and teacher; in fact, his artworks are used to illustrate several of Momaday’s books, including his history of the Kiowa people, The Way to Rainy Mountain. His mother, Mayme Natachee Scott, taught and wrote children’s books.

Momaday spent his childhood on a succession of Native American reservations, learning the cultures of the Pueblo Indians. The family eventually settled in Jemez, New Mexico, which is the model for Walatowa in House Made of Dawn.

Momaday attended military school in Virginia, and then went to college at the University of New Mexico. After graduation, he taught at the Apache reservation in Jicarilla for a year. He won a poetry scholarship to Stanford, where he studied under famed poet and literary critic Yvor Winters, who became his mentor and greatly influenced his poetic style. In 1963 he received his Ph.D. from Stanford.

House Made of Dawn, his first novel, was published in 1968. Although not commercially successful, it received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969. After that, Momaday moved to the University of California at Berkley, where he designed a graduate program in Indian Studies. In 1982 he became a professor at the University of Arizona. He has published several books of poetry, short stories, and essays. In addition, Momaday has often displayed his drawings and paintings in galleries throughout the country. He is an active member of the Gourd Dance Society, where he has succeeded his grandfather, Mammedaty.

Plot Summary

Prologue

The very first section of House Made of Dawn creates the mood for the story. Set in a canyon at sunrise, the protagonist of the novel, Abel, is introduced. Thematic issues that will appear throughout the book are also presented: Abel’s isolation and his struggle to communicate, as well as the communion of man and nature. In addition, it introduces the image of Abel running, which will also be the final image in the novel.

The Longhair

In 1945, Abel’s grandfather, Francisco, rides his horse-drawn wagon into town and picks up Abel from the bus station. The young man is returning from his service in the army during World War II. So drunk that he does not recognize his own grandfather, Abel stumbles off the bus and into his grandfather’s wagon.

Waking the next day at Francisco’s house, he recalls frightening images from his early life on the Native American reservation: the mournful sound of the wind blowing over a hole in the earth; the sight of a snake carried up into the sky by an eagle and then dropped, wriggling in its fall to the hard ground. He then reflects on his wartime experiences.

The story shifts to Father Olguin, the Catholic missionary assigned to the reservation at Walatowa. He is visited by Angela St. John, a pregnant white woman from Los Angeles. Mrs. St. John is pregnant and has come to bathe in the local mineral baths to soothe the soreness in her back. She asks Father Olguin to recommend a local person looking for work who can chop wood for her. A few days later, Abel comes to her house. He chops the wood, but does not talk to her.

At the feast of Santiago, Abel participates in a competition that is based on a folk story about Santiago, who founded the town by sacrificing a rooster. The townspeople believe that the discarded feathers and blood of the rooster produced plants and animals from the ground. At the feast, contes-tants ride horses toward a rooster that is buried up to its neck in the ground, trying to reach down and pull it out. Abel does poorly at the competition. The winner is an albino on a black horse, who takes the rooster over to Abel and beats him with it.

A few days later, Abel walks to Angela St. John’s house. She invites him in, gives him coffee, and asks if he would like to make love to her. He accepts, and the two become lovers. Father Olguin comes to talk to her about her sin a few days later, but she does not regret her actions.

After a festival in town, Abel sits in a bar and has a few drinks with the albino. They leave together, and, while walking up the street, the man puts his arm out to Abel. Abel pulls out his knife and stabs the man, killing him.

The Priest of the Sun

Seven years later, the story shifts to Los Angeles. Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah, the pastor of the Holiness Pan-Indian Rescue Mission and the Priest of the Sun, preaches to Native Americans in the city. Tosamah is a Kiowa, and he recalls stories told him by his grandmother, who had been present for the last of the Kiowa tribe’s sun dances in 1887. He passes these Indian stories along to those in his congregation, many of whom are from other native groups.

Abel has served his jail time for the murder of the albino. He is trying to start a new life in Los Angeles at the urging of the Indian Relocation Service. Abel has a close friend, Benally, who is an Indian also transplanted from the reservation to the city; Abel also has a girlfriend named Milly, who is the social worker assigned to his case. He struggles to stay out of trouble and survive in a white man’s world.

The Night Chanter

Benally clarifies some of the details of Abel’s life in Los Angeles. He is familiar with many of the members in the Native American community and mentions their names in the process of telling the story. He remembers that after his release from prison, Abel was brought to the factory where Benally worked. Feeling sorry for him, Benally gave him a place to live and went out to bars and to the beach with him.

One night they are stopped by Martinez, a local police officer. When Abel does not respond appropriately, Martinez hits his hands with his nightstick. His bones are not broken, but Abel’s pride is—soon he stops going to work, and spends his days drinking and wandering the streets:

He went downhill pretty fast after that. Sometimes he was here when I came in from work, and sometimes he wasn’t. He was drunk about half the time, and I couldn’t keep up with him … Pretty soon I wouldn’t give him any more, but you know what he did? He started asking Milly for money.

He loses a succession of jobs, and eventually is attacked and beaten up on the street.

Benally contacts Angela St. John. She visits Abel in the hospital and tells him that she has told Indian stories to her son Peter about a man born of a bear and a maiden. Benally puts Abel on a bus back to the reservation.

The Dawn Runner

When he returns to the reservation, Abel discovers that his grandfather is dying. Abel listens to him murmuring in his delirium for six days about a bear hunt from his youth. The old man dies on the seventh morning.

Abel wakes Father Olguin before dawn and makes arrangements for the old man’s funeral service. He takes off down the road south of town. When he spots the figures of men running, he strips off his shirt and runs after them.

Characters

The protagonist of the story, Abel is a Native American war veteran who struggles to find his place in the world. Some critics have interpreted Abel’s behavior as being caused by the strain of trying to balance the expectations of white culture with Indian culture. Others assert that the novel’s flashbacks indicate that Abel was estranged and uncommunicative even before he left the reservation for the army.

The story begins when Abel returns to the Walatowa reservation on a bus, so drunk that he can hardly stand or recognize where he is. Shortly after his return, Abel is hired by Angela St. John to chop wood. The two quickly start an affair. After being humiliated in a festival competition, Abel drinks in a bar with his chief rival, the albino. As they leave the bar, the albino takes a step toward him and Abel stabs him. Tosamah later explains that Abel testified in court that he thought the albino was turning into a snake.

After spending seven years in jail for the murder, Abel moves to Los Angles. He takes a job at a factory and meets Benally, who becomes his friend. He also becomes romantically involved with Milly, the white social worker assigned to his case. Much of the story told in Los Angeles is interspersed with sights of Abel wandering around, severely injured from a beating, with his thumbs broken—the book does not explicitly say what happened, but an earlier encounter with a brutal police officer named Martinez implies that it was he who inflicted the damage.

In the end, Abel leaves the city and returns to the reservation. A week after his return, Francisco dies. After arranging his funeral, Abel goes running to the point of exhaustion.

The Albino

The albino (also called The White Man) is a mysterious but important person in this story. He is frequently called «the white man.» At the feast of Santiago, the albino beats Abel in a competition, humiliating him. A week later, Abel drinks with the albino in a bar. They leave together, and Abel hallucinates that the man is turns into a snake. He takes out his knife and stabs the albino to death.

Ben Benally

Benally is a Native American man and a good friend to Abel. Raised on a reservation, Benally adapts to life in Los Angeles and appreciates the benefits of urban culture. He asks little more of life than to keep his job and to have a room to stay in without any interference. He is sympathetic to the way life is on the reservation, but he also recognized the benefits of assimilation: «You know, you have to change. That’s the only way you can live in a place like this. You have to forget about the way it was, how you grew up and all.»

Francisco

Francisco is Abel’s grandfather. A believer in the traditional ways, he is described as a «longhair.» The novel opens with him trying to capture a sparrow so that he might have its feathers to use for ceremonial purposes. An elderly man, Francisco is mentioned in an old journal, written by Fray Nicholas. He wrote in an 1888 entry, «Listen I told you about Francisco [and] was right to say it. He is evil [and] desires to do me some injury [and] this after I befriended him all his life. Preserve this I write to you that you may make him responsible if I die.» There is no indication that Francisco had done anything violent to Fray Nicholas.

Francisco recalls taking part in the Winter Race and has a page in his ledger with a drawing of himself running the race and the caption «1889.» In the 1940s, when the novel begins, Francisco is a farmer working on the communal land owned by the reservation. Francisco was instrumental in raising Abel, and has been his only relative since his mother died when he was five. As such, he holds an important place in Abel’s life and acts as a role model for the confused young man.

Martinez

Martinez is the brutal, sadistic police officer who ambushes Abel and Benally. Martinez accosts them in an alley when the two men are drunk, attempting to intimidate them. When Abel does not cower before him, Martinez cracks his knuckles with his nightstick. It is that senseless and brutal act that alienates Abel from white civilization. Benally also asserts that Martinez would stop in at the bar sometimes to pick up bribes—sometimes a free bottle of liquor, sometimes money.

Milly

A white social worker, Milly becomes Abel’s girlfriend. Eventually, he drives her away with abusive behavior.

Media Adaptations

Father Olguin

Father Olguin is the Roman Catholic priest at the mission at Walatowa. He is a confused man, torn between the traditions of his religion and those of the society around him. He lives with a physical handicap as a result of a childhood illness.

Because of his unique position, Father Olguin functions as an intermediary between the outside culture and the people of the reservation. When Angela St. John arrives at Walatowa, she asks Father Olguin to help her hire an Indian worker. On first meeting her, he «regarded his guest discreetly, wondering that her physical presence should suddenly dawn upon him so.» As the story progresses, he develops strong feelings for her.

A large part of the book is devoted to the pages that Father Olguin reads out of the diary of Fray Nicholas, a priest who was at the reservation in the 1870s. At the end of the novel, when Abel comes to him at dawn to arrange the funeral of his grandfather, Father Olguin does not hesitate to accept the responsibility, but he is disturbed that he has been waken up so early. He reprimands Abel for waking him, but then has a sudden realization of how unimportant time is to Abel and his people. This leads to a greater understanding of his place in the community and Native American culture in general. «‘I can understand,’ he said. ‘I understand, do you hear?’ And he began to shout. ‘I understand! Oh, God! I understand—I understand!‘»

Angela St. John

Angela is the white woman who comes to the reservation for health reasons and ends up having an affair with Abel. Although she is pregnant, her husband never visits her at the reservation. Seven years after their affair, Abel sees her walk by on the street in California and tells Benally about her. After Abel is beaten and hospitalized, Benally contacts Angela, and she goes to visit him in the hospital. She explains that she has raised her son with an awareness of Indian culture, telling him a story about a bear and a maiden that resembles the story that runs through Francisco’s mind as he is dying.

John Big Bluff Tosamah

As pastor of the Los Angeles Holiness Pan-Indian Rescue Mission and Priest of the Sun, Tosamah gives sermons on both Biblical stories and Indian folklore, often mixing the two. Like N. Scott Momaday, he is a Kiowa, and some of the stories he tells of last days of the Kiowa people are repeated in Momaday’s history of the Kiowa, The Way to Rainy Mountain.

Tosamah has a vast knowledge of Indian folklore and Bible stories, but he was raised in the city; therefore, his knowledge of the Indian ways is mostly theoretical. Tosamah expresses scornful admiration for the ways in which white society has controlled and obliterated the Indian: «They put all of us renegades, us diehards, away sooner or later. They’ve got the right idea. They put us away before we’re born. They’re an almighty wise and cautious bunch, these cats, full of discretion.» Once, when Tosamah ridicules the Indians who stay with the old traditions, the «longhairs,» Abel becomes so angry that he almost starts a fight, driving him to a two-day drinking binge that almost costs him his job.

The White Man

Themes

Prejudice and Tolerance

Strangely, for a novel about Native American suffering in the white world, there is not a lot of overt prejudice on the parts of the characters in House Made of Dawn. The most brutal character in the novel, Martinez, says nothing to indicate that his action is racially motivated; he has a Spanish name himself, making him no more a representative of the white culture than Abel. The two white women, Angela and Milly, treat Abel well and respect his heritage.

The only character to really point out racial differences is Tosamah. He sarcastically declares his respect for the whites for the way they have oppressed the Indians. This prejudice is mirrored in Tosamah’s prejudice against Native Americans that follow traditional beliefs. In talking about «long-hairs,» or the people who follow the traditional way and do not adapt to urban life, Tosamah is so negative that he alienates Abel.

Culture Clash

Some critics interpret Momaday’s novel as a statement about the difficulty faced by Native Americans as they are forced to assimilate into the outside world. This struggle is reflected in the experiences of the protagonist, Abel, as he returns home after a stint in the army during World War II.

Late in the book, Abel recalls a culture clash between his Native American world and the white world during his time in the military. While under fire and faced with an advancing tank, Abel stood up, whooped, danced, sang, and gave an obscene gesture to the tank. Momaday is not clear about whether this monologue is meant to be testimony in a court marshal (it ends with Abel running off into the trees), but it is clearly not normal behavior under fire.

When he arrives back at Walatowa drunk, it is clear that he has not assimilated the standards of the white culture; yet after a short time, it becomes obvious that he is not comfortable with Native American culture either. While his grandfather, Francisco, remembers trying to instill «the old ways» into Abel, Abel remembers his advice as, «You ought to do this and that.» He makes «a poor showing, full of caution and gesture» when he tries at the rooster-grabbing competition during the festival. Later, he kills the competition champion when he sees turning into an animal—the sort of transformation common to Native American stories such as Benally’s story about a Bear and a Snake.

After his release from prison, Abel lives in the Native American community in Los Angeles. He attends the services of Tosamah, who is both pastor and Priest of the Sun. While Abel’s friend, Ben, is able to mix his native culture with his new white culture, Abel is unable to bring the two elements together in harmony. When his heritage and pride is insulted, he quits work, drops out of society, and spends his days drinking. In the end, he finds some balance between the two cultures: he is able to memorialize his grandfather’s death with both a Christian ceremony and an Indian race at dawn.

Return to Nature

Native American culture is closely associated with elements of nature in the novel. Native American customs are concerned with natural objects: the sparrow feathers Francisco gathers for a prayer plume, and the rooster used in the competition. When there is harmony between people and nature, the world is working as it is intended.

Examples of this harmony can be found with the characters in the novel. Francisco, an old farmer, is said to have «an ethnic, planter’s love of harvest, and of rain.» Abel chops wood in a way that indicates a special understanding of the inanimate object, a relationship that the white woman Angela wonders about. «He gave himself up to it,» she thinks, admiring the beauty of his action. Milly, making love to Abel, is described as moving her mouth «like a small animal.»

The problem with Abel is that just as he becomes disconnected from his native culture, so too he becomes detached from nature. He recalls having seen an eagle carry a snake off into the sky with mixed emotions: «It was an awful, holy sight, full of magic and meaning.» He remembers an eagle caught in a ceremonial hunt: «The sight of it filled him with shame and disgust.»

In the end, Abel returns to the reservation and reestablishes his relationship with nature by running, opening his lungs and his whole being to where he is: «He could see at last without having to think.»

Topics for Further Study

Style

Point of View

In this novel, Momaday often shifts from one point of view to another; as a result, it is not always clear whose thoughts are being related, or when, or what they have to do with the overall story. At first it seems that Abel will be the focus of the novel, but soon the point of view shifts to Francisco. Moreover, there is little consistency in the point of view: while it seldom shifts from one person’s perspective to another within one scene, it does not follow a pattern of staying with any one point of view for a whole chapter, or even a section.

For example, Father Olguin gains perspective about what the reservation was like in the last century from the diary that he reads that was written by his predecessor. Momaday is able to relate his ideas about the relationship between Native American religion and Christian religion through the sermons of Tosamah. The incidents of Abel’s life in Los Angeles are not related through his point of view, but from Benally’s perspective.

By shifting point of view frequently and sporadically, it is possible for Momaday to have Abel be the central character in the book without delving deeply into his thoughts and to present the communal point of view that is more characteristic of Native American thought than of the European tradition.

Setting

More than most novels, the setting of House Made of Dawn is integral to its purpose. Because the story is about a man torn between his Native American world and the white world, the reservation is rendered quite differently from that of Los Angeles. At times, the story goes beyond obvious, rational differences and considers fundamental ways in which people of the different settings think differently.

Folklore

One reason that House Made of Dawn made such a powerful impact when it was published was for its treatment of Native American folklore and the values these tales passed on to subsequent generations. In Western culture, readers look for the «moral» of a story, especially one that is told in the context of a religious lesson. In the case of the folklore, interpretation for an audience of outsiders is almost impossible, so it is hard to explain the culture that values them. On the contrary, the fact that Western myths can be made so accessible is one of the factors that has helped Western culture dominate the globe during the age of colonization.

Historical Context

The Postwar Reservation

As with many other minority groups in America, Native American populations became more connected with the mainstream culture as a result of World War II. Prejudice and discriminatory policies did not disappear overnight, but the fact that people from ethnic subcultures were thrown together in barracks in the war led to some softening social boundaries. Many whites met real Indians for the first time, and many Indians met their first whites.

Like Abel in House Made of Dawn, many Native Americans came back to the reservations they had lived on with conflicted views, having been forced to align their own beliefs with American culture. Unfortunately, what little progress was made in human understanding was very quickly overruled by developers, who soon tried to exploit reservation land for their own profit.

Historically, the U. S. government dealt with the problem of taking land from indigenous peoples by providing land and services at limited locations: the reservations. From the start, the concept of reservations was divided between two general schools of thought. Some people considered them as sanctuaries, where the Indians could relax, free from persecution. Others, however, viewed them as prisons where Indians were left isolated, cut off from progress, and dependent on government charity.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration, and particularly his Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, determined that it would be best for Native American groups to take control of their own situations. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 included many provisions leading toward this end: it set up reservation schools that ended the practice of shipping Indian children out to boarding schools; created tribal governing organizations that would deal with the federal government and control order; and encouraged economic development.

After World War II, the resources on Native American reservations became economic assets. Some politicians in the government argued that it was wasteful to allow Indians to keep such valuable property when they were not using it. Support grew for a plan to move Indians off of the reservations, to assimilate them into society. Some Native Americans supported this idea, lured by quick profits to be made from selling the reservations. Yet most recognized this as a blatant attempt by the U.S. government to exploit the Native American population once again.

After Collier resigned in 1945, the Senate pressured his successor, William F. Zimmerman, to devise a plan for moving Indians off of the reservations. In 1947, the Relocation Service Program, with field offices in Los Angeles, Denver, and Salt Lake City, was established. In 1953, Congress passed HCR 108, a bill that removed all special status for Native Americans. Whereas they had previously been exempt from federal, state, and local taxes, HCR 108 made them liable. Reservations became accountable to the jurisdictions of local law enforcement instead of tribal or federal laws, which allowed racial tensions to dominate control issues.

Healthcare facilities on reservations, which had been run by federal agencies, were abruptly turned over to Native American groups. When they were unable to manage, they were shut down, leaving Indians to travel off reservations when they needed medical care. HCR 108, presented as a step toward Indian freedom, has gone down in history as one of the greatest follies in U.S. / Indian relations. In 1970 President Richard Nixon pushed Congress to overturn HCR 108.

Compare & Contrast

1968: The generation of Americans born in the late 1940s and early 1950s is dubbed the Baby Boom generation. Many members of this generation reject the materialistic culture and emphasize spiritual values.

1968: The American Indian Movement addresses the issue of police brutality against Indians in Minneapolis and soon becomes a nationwide organization advocating Indian rights.

1968: After more than a decade of civil rights protests, the fight for equality turns violent on a national scale in the mid-1960s, with race riots in major cities across America.

1968: National awareness increases as television broadcast color footage of the summer’s racial riots and the police actions at the political conventions into people’s living rooms.

Today: The growing number of homes connected to the Internet resembles the postwar growth of television ownership.

Indian Activism in the 1960s

As the Civil Rights movement raised America’s consciousness about the oppression of African Americans, it also raised awareness about the treatment of other groups. For example, the Indian Reform Movement became a popular cause for many American people. Probably the best known activist group, the American Indian Movement (AIM), formed in Minneapolis in 1968 to protest against police brutality. After that, the group went on to lead several high-profile protests. In 1970 they occupied a portion of the land at the base of the Mount Rushmore Memorial.

At the same time, other Native American groups were drawing attention to the government’s neglect of Native American people. One hundred Native Americans took over Alcatraz Island in 1969, offering to buy the former federal prison back from the government for twenty-four dollars in glass beads (the price allegedly paid to Indians for Manhattan Island in 1626).

The most infamous protest was the siege at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The site of a famous massacre of three hundred Indian men, women, and children in 1890, members of AIM and the Sioux nation took hostages in a small hilltop church in Wounded Knee, on the Oglala Reservation, in 1973. The siege attracted international press attention. Two Native Americans were killed during the resulting gunfire, and one hundred were arrested; but as a result, the government promised to hold hearings on Indian rights. After one meeting with representatives from the White House, no further government action regarding Native American rights took place.

Critical Overview

House Made of Dawn did not receive much attention from the mainstream press when it was first published. For one thing, Momaday was relatively unknown in literary circles. Another obstacle was the fact that it had been written by a member of a distinct social minority, and reviewers felt uncomfortable addressing its artistry because they did not want their criticism to seem like criticism of Native American culture: as William James Smith asserted in his review in Commonweal, «it seems slightly unAmerican to criticize an American Indian’s novel.»

Other critics found fault with the writing but suggested that the narrative problems might be necessary in order to capture the Native American mindset. Marshall Sprague, in The New York Times Book Review, thought that the «haze» that surrounds the telling of the story might be a natural byproduct of rendering «the mysteries of a culture different than our own.» When the novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, the novel’s literary merit was called into question less often.

John Z. Bennett, writing in Western American Literature shortly after the Pulitzer was awarded, expressed his concerns that House Made of Dawn would be valued as a social statement rather than for its artistic achievements. Bennett recognized that it used the clichés that are often used in novels about an alienated social group—the «Indian hero’s ruinous journeys into the white man’s world and apparent redemption» upon returning to the ways of his people; the white woman who comes to accept the tribe; the descriptions of ceremonies; and the wise grandparent representing tradition. Still, Bennett found the book a «remarkable synthesis of poetic mode and profound emotional and intellectual intellect.» His concern regarding the overemphasis of the book’s cultural aspect were not very far off, as some reviewers ignored the artistic weaknesses and strengths and focused almost entirely on what it could teach the dominant culture about the Native Americans view of life.

In 1972 Marion Willard Hylton maintained that House Made of Dawn was «the tragic odyssey of a man forcibly removed from the psychic environment and placed within a culture light-years away from the attitudes, value and goals of his former life. His anguished ordeal, heightened by his encounter with a white woman, endows him at last with courage and wisdom….» While Hylton’s analysis of the book is accurate, it also reflects the emphasis on this as a novel primarily about the victimization of Native Americans.

Since the 1970s, critics have accepted the novel as a part of our literary culture. They concentrate on the overall themes and their relationship with one another. For instance, as Martin Schubnell wrote in N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background, the book can be interpreted as an exploration of both tribal and personal identity.

Howard Meredith has credited the book with beginning «a literary tradition of those prose narratives which previously had circulated almost exclusively within specific tribal contexts.» He contends that the time was ripe for these stories to be recorded and published. «He brings American readers to a new sense of maturity through the use of the traditions of America,» Meredith maintained.

Since the publication of House Made of Dawn, Momaday’s literary reputation has rested on his work as a poet and critic, and he has been praised for his ability to blend Kiowa sensibilities with Western literary methods.

Criticism

David Kelly

Kelly is an instructor of Creative Writing and Literature at Oakton Community College and College of Lake County in Illinois. Here, he explores ways that Father Olguin can be a useful character for readers who have trouble understanding House Made of Dawn.

The best approach one can take to an unfamiliar text is to burrow into it at any point of access possible, like a termite forcing an attack upon a tree. I will admit that there is much I find perplexing and uninviting about N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn. At times it seems pointlessly convoluted, while at other parts it seems painfully simplistic. There were some points in my first reading where I wanted to put the book aside, to write it off as a case of weak writing masquerading as a work of substance.

Yet then I see another connection, then another, and the faith rises within me that I might make sense of all of this, if only I knew more about the traditions of the Pueblo Indians or if I had studied Spanish nuance. With that faith in mind, I can walk through this story, looking at it from the inside, by inhabiting the character most like me. I am not a Native American. The culture that is not only described but also actually lived out through the book’s structure is foreign to me. I cannot pretend to know it, and I can’t dismiss it just because it is new.

I can, however, experience it through the eyes of Father Olguin—the man who comes to the reservation just as I have come to Momaday’s world through the book, and tries to understand.

Father Olguin actually turns out to be a very useful guide. Though Mexican, his Catholic training has accustomed him to Western thought; as a result, he is as curious about Native American customs as I would be in his position. At the same time, I find that Father Olguin’s story provides a parallel version of the book’s main story.

Father Olguin is introduced in the same scene as Angela St. John, and it is his connection to the protagonist, Abel, through her that solidifies his position in the story. She appears first, disrupting the natural serenity of the reservation with a car that is noticeable from a great distance.

Father Olguin initially appears as he is dressing for mass. One of the first things we find out about the priest is that he has one bad eye, clouded over with a film and almost closed. In fiction, any abnormality like that has to have a symbolic level, especially when it has to do with something as important as sight. Father Olguin has only half of the vision that he should.

Moreover, Angela is staying at Los Ojos, translated as «The Eyes.» Father Olguin is aware of her from the time that she walks into his church. Certainly, she would have been a curiosity in that setting. Readers could take his curiosity to mean that he is a man of the reservation—that his way of thinking is not like that of the outside world.

This is clearly not what Angela thinks. She approaches him to act as an intermediary between her and the Native American, as if she assumes that Father Olguin is part of both the white and Indian worlds—in other words, a member of neither. Her assumption is correct: he is certainly separated by language from his young acolyte Bonifacio, addressing him in Spanish, and he is not enough part of the community to quickly come up with the name of someone to chop her wood.

It is this function as a middleman between Indian and white societies that makes Father Olguin such an appropriate stand-in for the reader. Rather than being a part of both societies and thereby providing readers with an entrance into each one, he is actually alienated from each and unable to communicate in either environment. The bad news is that this prevents readers from learning much about either world; the good news is that this alienation mirrors what Abel is going through, and it therefore takes us closer to the soul of the story.

Father Olguin’s love for Angela is represented by bees. Bees swarm at the window the first time that her physiological presence «dawns» on him and he considers how her physical features make her «nearly beautiful.» Later, after Abel and Angela have made love (although it is doubtful that the priest could have known about it), and after he himself has taken honey from the beehive, he is able to think about her «without the small excitement that she had so easily provoked on him at first.» He relishes the thought that she will be envious of his having better things to do than sit around thinking of her—this idea might be effective in suppressing his lust, but it raises three or four other cardinal sins that do not seem to bother him.

What Do I Read Next?

At least in Father Olguin we can see the struggle to suppress his feelings; moreover, we can understand them better because Momaday has given his feelings an external symbol—the bees. Knowing Father Olguin helps us know Abel, even though the latter keeps his own internal struggles pushed down much more deeply within him.

When Abel is in Los Angeles, Father Olguin is still present: he is represented in the figure of his opposite, The Right Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah. It is as fair to use Tosamah to read Father Olguin as it is to guess that the shape of one side of a cloth will follow the other, so exact are they in their oppositeness.

The distinction goes beyond the obvious fact that one is a Catholic priest in Native American territory and the other a Native American priest living in the big city. Tosamah has friends, while Father Olguin delegates to his subordinates; Tosamah embraces mysteries while Father Olguin seeks the consolation of solving mysteries; Father Olguin is reticent—like Abel—while Tosamah’s speeches ramble. Readers who have trouble perceiving the connection between Father Olguin and Abel must at least concede how unlike Abel Tosamah is.

Both priests are drawn to the distant past, which is something that Abel is trying to forget. For Tosamah, it is the stories that his grandmother shared with him about the last days of the Kiowa tribe in Montana. Father Olguin studies the same period of time in the journals left by his predecessor, Fray Nicolas. Abel’s grandfather, Francisco, remembers these days, and is in fact mentioned in Fray Nicolas’ journal, where he is represented as evil and dangerous. Abel could possibly avert tragedy in his own life by listening to what the old man has to say and learning from it, but he doesn’t.

Tosamah grew up with stories of the distant past, and so theology comes easy to him. Abel is resistant to the past until the end of the novel. Father Olguin looks to the past to make sense of the present. He steps outside of his role as a priest and takes up the journal with a cigarette and a cup of coffee in his hand, as if whatever he hopes to find is beyond the consolations of religion, in that same very human realm as his attraction to Angela St. John’s body. In the journals he finds a complete person, one who is disabled like he is, as religious as he would like to be, but who is still dissatisfied with himself, writing:

Some days He comes to me in a sourceless light that rises on His image at my bed [and] then I am caught of it [and] shine also as with lightning on me…. He does bid me speak all my love but I cannot for I am always just then under it the whole heft of it [and] am mute against it as against a little mountain heaved upon me [and] can utter no help of the thing that is done to me.

In these words Father Olguin finds comfort because he recognizes himself. They are ideas that Abel might find comfort in too.

In the end, Abel and Father Olguin find their fulfillment. Whatever old Francisco carried within him passes on to Abel at his death. This understanding sends him out to run in the canyon at dawn, as Francisco had done long before. By carrying on this tradition he accepts his past and perhaps himself.

Father Olguin’s enlightenment finally comes in the simple realization that to the Indians, as to death, the question «Do you know what time it is?» is irrelevant. The lesson of his predecessor, the temptation of the flesh, the humbling experience of his crippling illness all lead him toward this moment, just as Abel is guided to it by Angela, the albino, Benally, Tosamah, and all the rest.

Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 2000.

Bernard A. Hirsch

In the following essay, Hirsch analyzes the characters of Martinez, Tosamaah, and Benally and their relationships with the protagonist, noting that for these characters Abel is a symbol of contempt and a reminder of their Native selves.

N. Scott Momaday, referring to his protagonist Abel, has said, «None but an Indian, I think, knows so much what it is like to have existence in two worlds and security in neither.» True as this is of Abel in House Made of Dawn, it is truer still of Martinez, Tosamah, and Benally because they, unlike Abel, try earnestly to conform to Euro-American social values. Indeed, the strong responses Abel generates in each of these characters indicate their perception of something unyielding and incorruptible in him, something which throws into stark relief the humiliating spiritual compromises they have felt compelled to make. In his suffering Abel is both a sorry example and stinging rebuke to them, a warning and a goad, someone both to fear and reverence, for he reminds them of who and what they are—of what they find most contemptible in themselves and most holy. Martinez, Tosamah, and Benally have been spiritually corrupted to varying degrees by the white world, and to the extent that they have, they make Abel their scapegoat and regard him as an evil to be exorcised.

This scapegoating is most apparent in the case of Martinez who, Ben tells us, is «a cop and a bad one.» [The critic adds in a footnote: «Most readers assume that Martinez is white, but given his name and the fact that a number of the novel’s Indian characters have Spanish names and/or surnames, it seems more likely that he is at least part Indian or Chicano—if the latter, his situation would nonetheless parallel to a significant extent that of the urban Indians. Moreover, to regard Martinez as white is to reduce him to an overworked stereotype—the sadistic white cop—of the sort that Momaday, in his portrayal of every other white character in the novel, has scrupulously avoided.»] He derives his sense of self from the power and authority vested in him by white society. That power, in his eyes, makes him superior to his «brothers» in the street by enabling him to identify with the oppressor and victimize them at will. He acts out his own version of the American Dream with every Indian he extorts, yet his violent response to Abel’s slight resistance suggests that he has paid a price for the power he enjoys.

Martinez emerges, appropriately enough, from a dark alley as Ben and Abel are returning home from Henry’s bar. Ben meekly complies with Martinez’ order to hold out his hands, and he recalls that his hands «were shaking bad and I couldn’t hold them still.» He had just been paid and he gives Martinez «all I had left.» Martinez then notices Abel:

Martinez told him to hold out his hands, and he did, slowly, like maybe he wasn’t going to at first, with the palms up. I could see his hands in the light and they were open and almost steady. «Turn them over,» Martinez said, and he was looking at them and they were almost steady.

Enraged, Martinez smashes Abel’s hands with his nightstick, but Abel «didn’t cry out or make a sound.» From Benally’s description, we can see that it is Abel’s attitude rather than his actions that engenders Martinez’ wrath. Martinez could not help but notice the contrast between Ben’s involuntary shaking and Abel’s relative steadiness, and this implied slight to his authority threatens him. His response to it indicates just how precarious his sense of self is, and the extreme viciousness of his later beating of Abel further reveals the self-hatred that is the price of the Anglo authority he covets.

By his mere presence Abel threatens the protective illusions so necessary to Martinez’ emotional and psychological survival, and he poses the same threat to Tosamah and Benally. Martha Scott Trimble maintains [in her 1973 N. Scott Momaday] that «the suffering of the urban Indians is … rendered painful to watch because of their reluctance to admit to themselves that they suffer.» They are so reluctant because they have been conditioned by the dominant white culture to regard their very suffering as evidence of their own inferiority. Their suffering is at least as productive of guilt as of rage and therefore they have devised what Trimble calls «strategies» to avoid acknowledging that suffering to themselves. By means of these strategies, they seek not only to adapt to white society but to retain while doing so a sense of themselves as free agents making intelligent decisions. They have chosen, in Ben’s words, to «go along with it» not out of fear or because they have been seduced by the false promise of the white world, but because, they would believe, it makes sense. And as regards Tosamah and Benally, it is indeed painful to watch them disparage that which they most love and most need—their Indianness.

Tosamah, for instance, tries to better his situation by assuming a superior posture toward it—as is apparent in his use of language. In his first sermon, «The Gospel According to John,» Tosamah tries to convince both himself and his congregation that he understands the white man by telling them how the white man conceives of and manipulates language. He says that «the white man deals in words, and he deals easily, with grace and sleight of hand. And in his presence, here on his own ground, you are as children….» Tosamah knows what he is talking about; his assertions are verified by Abel’s experience in Los Angeles and Benally’s explanation of Abel’s language problems. But ironically, Tosamah uses language much as the white man does, and to much the same purpose. In fact, he uses it as Martinez uses fear and violence. Like Martinez, he has carved out a little fiefdom of sorts in the Los Angeles ghetto, and language is his means of controlling it.

By manipulating a variety of verbal styles in «The Gospel According to John,» Tosamah keeps his parishioners off balance, dazzling as much as enlightening them. Through an ever-shifting combination of biblical oratory, street talk, exposition, and the simple, direct narrative style of the storyteller, Tosamah tries to relate to his audience on several levels simultaneously, to establish at once his oneness with and superiority to them. He wants to be perceived as a follow Indian sharing a similar culture and values, as a ghetto brother sharing the hardship of the streets, and as a teacher in both the shamanistic and professorial senses. The sermon is full of insight, but it is a masterpiece of verbal gymnastics as well.

Tosamah is perceptive enough to know that the agonizing conflict within himself also exists to varying degrees in the other urban Indians, and he exploits their insecurity and self-doubt to shore up his own tenuous conception of self. Indeed, his need continually to assert himself over the others is one indication of his sense of inadequacy. Like them, he both loves and fears his Indianness, and this entails a roughly similar ambivalence toward the white man. Tosamah sees through the white man to a significant extent and pointedly ridicules his blindness, but like Martinez he also feels a troubling yet insistent need to identify with his oppressor. This need underlies his use of language to intimidate and manipulate the other urban Indians. But he also feels the same need with regard to his heritage and his people. When Tosamah speaks so lovingly, so evocatively in his second sermon, «The Way to Rainy Mountain,» of his journey to rediscover his Indian self, we cannot doubt his sincerity. This sermon is longer than his first, and it is free of the verbal gamesmanship that characterizes much of «The Gospel.» Still, he needs to be a winner. He sees in his parishioners, and even more clearly in Abel, the fate of Indians in a white world, and he cannot accept such a density. If white society has consigned him, despite his education, intelligence, and talent, to a small, severely limited space, it has at least taught him how to control that space. Like Martinez, he has learned to exalt himself by undermining others. Oppressed, he becomes an oppressor victimizing, as Martinez does, the only people he can—his own.

As Martinez batters Abel’s body, so Tosamah batters his spirit, and Momaday, through his use of narrative structure, stresses the parallel between them. The novel’s second chapter, «The Priest of the Sun,» in effect begins and ends with a sermon by Tosamah. These sermons frame a badly beaten, semiconscious Abel whose murder trial and life in Los Angeles pass in fragments before him. Ironically, Tosamah’s second sermon, which recounts his journey to the land of his people, the Kiowa, to visit his grandmother’s grave, reveals the path to salvation for Abel, tells how he might be made whole again. But Abel is not there to hear the sermon. Indeed, as we later learn from Benally, it was after Tosamah had earlier humiliated Abel that, in Ben’s words, «He went downhill pretty fast …,» decided «to get even with» Martinez, and was beaten half to death by him. Tosamah calls himself «Priest of the Sun,» and he is sufficiently imaginative, sensitive, understanding, and articulate to be that. But he lives his day-to-day life as Coyote, the trickster who is both culture hero and buffoon. Like Coyote, Tosamah has the capacity to bring spiritual gifts to his people, to be a savior of sorts, but his actions are generally self-centered and done in ig-norance—in Tosamah’s case, a self-imposed igno-rance—of their consequences for the world, his people, and himself. Tosamah is quick to take advantage of others to satisfy his own needs, but because he is himself a slave to those needs (emotional and psychological needs as opposed to Coyote’s purely physical ones), he is at times the victim of his own tricks. Coyote is a master of self-deception and, as his own ambivalence toward and treatment of Abel indicates, so is John Big Bluff Tosamah.

Despite his awareness of the beauty and value of his native culture, despite his profound understanding of the nearly overwhelming spiritual problems modern America has created for his people, Tosamah is himself tormented by his Indianness. Abel, in his view, is the incarnation of that Indianness, and as such he fills Tosamah with shame and guilt and reverence. Tosamah, for all his insight into its workings, has been conditioned by the white world and by himself in response to that world to see with two pairs of eyes and the result, at least as regards Abel, is a mélange of contradictory impressions and impulses. For example, Ben remembers Tosamah’s warning him about Abel: «He was going to get us all in trouble, Tosamah said. Tosamah sized him up right away….» Perceptive as he is, Tosamah can sense in Abel the unyielding integrity that will make him especially vulnerable in urban Los Angeles, that will keep him from «fitting in»; and that integrity implicitly confronts Tosamah with his own compromising and compromised self.

When Tosamah speaks of Abel’s trial, he is both ironic and envious. True, the white society that is puzzled by Abel is the target of his irony, and he ostensibly mocks its view of Abel as «a real primitive sonuvabitch» and a «poor degenerate Indian»; but his own view of Abel, as his warning to Benally and his later psychological attack on Abel make clear, parallels to some extent that of the society he ridicules. Consider in this regard his impression of how Abel’s testimony must have sounded to the court:

«‘Well, you honors, it was this way, see? I cut me up a little snake meat out there in the sand.’ Christ, man, that must have been our finest hour, better than Little Bighorn. That little no-count cat must have had the whole Jesus scheme right in the palm of his hand.»

Tosamah’s tone conveys both embarrassment and admiration here, but alone with Ben in the privacy of Ben’s apartment he lets his admiration show. Of the court’s verdict, he says:

«They put that cat away, man. They had to. It’s part of the Jesus scheme. They, man. They put all of us renegades, us diehards, away sooner or later…. Listen here, Benally, one of these nights there’s going to be a full red moon, a hunter’s moon, and we’re going to find us a wagon train full of women and children. Now you won’t believe this, but I drink to that now and then.»

If Ben «won’t believe this» it is because the sentiments Tosamah here expresses hardly parallel his actions, and Tosamah knows it. He seeks to identify with Abel, referring to «us renegades, us diehards,» and to the white man as «they,» but merely to wish now and again for vengeance is an empty gesture. No doubt Tosamah’s desire to avenge himself on those who have poisoned his spirit is sincere, but the courage, the spirit of defiance he recognizes in Abel, lies dormant within his own heart. Ben, as he does throughout the novel, undercuts Tosamah’s pretentiousness, telling us that «He’s always going on like that, Tosamah, talking crazy and showing off….»

Seeing Abel through white eyes, Tosamah finds him embarrassing. Though Tosamah ridicules Anglo cultural arrogance and the stereotypes that feed it, Abel—alcoholic, at times violent, and inar-ticulate—seems to him to lend credence to the stereotypes; thus Tosamah, educated and articulate as he is, feels misrepresented, degraded by association. This is the «trouble» of which he warns Benally. Seeing Abel through Indian eyes, Tosamah cannot help but admire him as a kind of modern-day warrior who refuses to give in meekly to the torment and tribulations of urban Indian life. But if Tosamah as an Indian is vicariously elevated by Abel’s integrity, he is at the same time humbled by the lack of his own. Viewed from either perspective, then, white or Indian, Abel engenders in Tosamah self-contempt so strong that it is beyond enduring; he is anathema to the illusory conception of his own superiority that is Tosamah’s primary means of emotional and psychological survival. Therefore, because of the guilt he feels, a guilt stemming from a profound sense of his own inadequacy, he projects upon Abel his own diminished sense of self.

Tosamah needs to tear Abel down and one evening, during a poker game at his place, the opportunity presents itself. In a seemingly expansive mood Tosamah, Ben tells us, was «going on about everything … and talking big.» Ben, seeing that this talk bothers Abel, wants to leave, but Abel, already drunk and becoming more so, ignores him. Ben recalls,

I guess Tosamah knew what he was thinking too, because pretty soon he started in on him, not directly, you know, but he started talking about longhairs and the reservation and all. I kept wishing he would shut up, and I guess the others did, too … because right away they got quiet and just started looking down at their hands, you know—like they were trying to decide what to do. I knew that something bad was going to happen.

Abel, too drunk to seriously threaten Tosamah, lunges impotently toward him, and the others, to relieve their own discomfort, laugh at his futility. Ben tells us that the laughter «seemed to take all the fight out of him. It was like he had to give up when they laughed; it was like all of a sudden he didn’t care about anything anymore.» Abel’s response to the laughter indicates that, though perhaps not consciously aware of it, he attacked Tosamah not merely to avenge a personal insult but to avenge all the Indians at the table and back home, to avenge the honor of his people. Tosamah, who «doesn’t come from the reservation» himself, has made the others ashamed of what they are, and when they try to dispel their shame by projecting it onto Abel, Abel’s rage loses its foundation and he feels empty and alone. Ben remembers «that he was hurt by what had happened; he was hurt inside somehow, and pretty bad.» Tosamah, the Priest of the Sun of the Holiness Pan-Indian Rescue Mission, has lost sight of the needs of his people in pursuit of his own isolated ends and in so doing, as his attack on Abel symbolically suggests, he has violated the very essence of his own Indianness. By shaming his people he has done the white man’s work.

Unlike Tosamah, Benally is compassionate towards Abel; he is, from the time of their first meeting, instinctively protective of him. He trains Abel for his new job, introduces him around, and though he has very little himself, readily shares his home, his food, and his clothing. Most important of all, he shares with Abel, and Abel alone, his dearest possession—his native religion. It is Ben’s honest, profound spirituality that sets him apart from the other urban Indians. As has often been noted, Ben is the one who has the vision during the peyote ceremony, and whereas Tosamah’s understanding of his native culture seems at times largely intellectual, Ben «lives his religion on a level deeper than the intellect, the level of spirit and emotion» [Carole Oleson, «The Remembered Earth: Momaday’s House Made of Dawn,» South Dakota Review II, No. 1 (Spring 1973)]. Yet there are definite similarities between Ben and Tosamah as well, and to ignore them is to obscure considerably the scope and horror of the spiritual compromises white society, for its own material and psychological convenience, requires of Indians.

Sincere as his religious beliefs are and sensitive as he is, Benally has compromised himself almost as severely as Tosamah has, and this is most apparent from the contradictions in his narrative. Ben is trying earnestly to sell himself on the American Dream in a vain effort to convince himself that the life he feels compelled to live is in fact better and ultimately more fulfilling than the life he knew on the reservation. His pathetic monologue on the wonders of Los Angeles is a case in point:

It’s a good place to live…. Once you find your way around and get used to everything, you wonder how you ever got along out there where you came from. There’s nothing there, you know, but the land, and the land is empty and dead. Everything is here, everything you could ever want. You never have to be alone.

But for all practical purposes Ben, until Abel comes, is alone. He has drinking buddies, true, but no one with whom he can share what is most important to him. Moreover, the «radios and cars and clothes and big houses» which, Ben says, «you’d be crazy not to want» and which are «so easy to have» have managed to elude him. He lives in a leaky, dilapidated slum tenement, gets his clothes second-hand, and is a cipher in the plant where he works. He willfully mistakes the racist ridicule of his co-workers for good-natured kidding and the pseudo-amiable hustle of the salespeople in the stores for friendliness. The extent and cost of his self-deception, however, are most painfully revealed in his comments about the land.

Ben’s narrative is punctuated at several points by contrapuntal remembrances which rise unbidden in his mind, memories of growing up on the reservation, on «the land south of Wide Ruins where I come from,» on the land he still loves. These recollections are full of precise, beautiful, and evocative details which belie his remark that «the land is empty and dead.» The land he recalls is rich with vitality and meaning; it is the sacred center of all life and being. He remembers childhood on the land:

And you were little and right there in the center of everything, the sacred mountains, the snow-covered mountains and the hills, the gullies and the flats, the sundown and the night, everything—where you were little, where you were and had to be.

The vision of the land inherent in his memories is that which contemporary America requires him to abandon, and he tries to do just that. After all, «That’s the only way you can live in a place like this [Los Angeles]. You have to forget about the way it was, how you grew up and all.» The need to «go along with it» is a recurrent motif in Ben’s narrative, and all that gives his life meaning must be subordinated to it:

If you come from the reservation, you don’t talk about it much; I don’t know why. I guess you figure that it won’t do you much good, so you just forget about it. You think about it sometimes, you can’t help it, but then you just try to put it out of your mind … it mixes you up sometimes….

But Abel does not let Ben «forget about it.» He is to Ben what he is to Tosamah, the incarnation of all that is Indian within him, and Ben intuitively apprehends this. He remarks:

We were kind of alike, though, him and me. After a while he told me where he was from, and right away I knew we were going to be friends. We’re related somehow, I think.

Abel’s mere presence evokes his memories of home, and the first of Ben’s «flashbacks» occurs as he recalls their first real conversation. Ben’s history resembles Abel’s in certain respects, and his memories [according to Lawrence J. Evers in his «Words and Place: A Reading of House Made of Dawn, » Western American Literature XI, No. 4 (February 1977)] «reveal a sense of place very like that Abel groped for on his return to Walatowa.» What is especially sad about these memories is that they convey a sense of wholeness and security that contrasts sharply with the fragmented, fear-ridden, tenuous existence Ben now endures. He appears to regain a modicum of that sense with Abel, however; Ben knows that his most precious treasures are safe with him:

«House made of dawn.» I used to tell him about those old ways, the stories and the signs, Beauty-way and Night Chant. I sang some of those things and told him what they meant, what I thought they were about.

Abel is wonderfully receptive, as Ben knew he would be, and «would want me to sing like that.» And Abel, Ben fears, is the only one who would. Just as Tosamah finds «longhairs» like Abel an embarrassment to him in the white world, so is Benally, within the context of that world, embarrassed by his own best impulses—and that world includes the other urban Indians. He tells of a night when he and Abel, along with the others, are drinking and having fun on a hill overlooking the city:

I started to sing all by myself. The others were singing, too, but it was the wrong kind of thing, and I wanted to pray. I didn’t want them to hear me, because they were having a good time, and I was ashamed, I guess. I kept down because I didn’t want anybody but him to hear.

Only with Abel does Benally feel good about being an Indian; only with Abel can he free his spirit in song and prayer, and see past and future merge into an all-inclusive present. When Abel is in the hospital recovering from his beating, Ben, to comfort him, makes up a plan about going home, about «going out into the hills on horses and alone. It was going to be early in the morning, and we were going to see the sun coming up.» There, they would «sing the old songs,» sing «about the way it used to be, how there was nothing all around but the hills and the sunrise and the clouds.» Ben at first did not take his plan seriously, but Abel «believed in it» and «I guess I started to believe in it, too.» Dream and waking reality come together for Ben in Abel’s presence, albeit briefly, and the deepest impulses of his spirit are vindicated in Abel’s existence. In that respect Abel is truly a blessing for Benally. But they live in a world uncongenial to these impulses, a world contemptuous of vision and song, and in that world Abel also becomes an agonizing problem for Ben.

Ben’s Indianness can find expression only through his religion and his friendship with Abel, and in a world hostile to Indians both, Ben feels, must be sheltered and protected. This is one reason why he tries to shepherd Abel as he does at the factory and why he takes him into his home. That Ben truly believes he is acting in Abel’s best interest is undeniable, and in a very real sense he is. Abel sorely needs the kind of support Ben provides, and if Tosamah’s attempt to isolate Abel is a denial of his own Indianness, Ben’s generous inclusion of Abel in his own life is a wonderfully rich expression of his. Moreover, by telling Abel of the old traditions and teaching him the old songs, Ben not only provides him with necessary spiritual sustenance in a world unresponsive to spiritual need, but prepares him for his return to Walatowa to try again, this time more successfully, to find himself in the life of his people. But Ben’s concern for Abel is motivated by fear as well as by compassion. Tosamah feared that Abel «was going to get us all in trouble,» and so does Ben. He speaks to Abel of things Indian, for, as we have seen, his own spirit requires as much, but throughout his narrative he emphasizes repeatedly Abel’s inability to «get along.» He understands why Abel has difficulty adjusting and implies that he himself has faced similar obstacles, but he never questions the need to accommodate oneself to the white man’s world, and that is why he eventually loses patience with Abel. Abel’s problems, in Ben’s view, go beyond those which confront every relocated Indian, severe as these problems may be. What Tosamah recognizes as Abel’s unyielding integrity Benally sees as sheer obstinacy; or rather, the sustaining illusion he has constructed about the «good life» in Los Angeles demands that he see it as such. After all, Abel has a steady job, a place to live, drinking buddies—everything he needs, Ben would believe, to make it in urban America. Yet despite these advantages, he persists in being a trial to those who care for him.

Abel scares Ben. He scares him when he subtly defies Martinez in the alley and he scares him during Tosamah’s harangue about «longhairs and the reservation.» In both instances his actions threaten to undermine Ben’s illusions by confronting him with the truth that life in urban America is incompatible with his identity as an Indian. Benally, as Carole Oleson has said, has whitened himself considerably by removing his religion from his daily life. He retains the songs and traditions within himself, and that is good, but he also compromises the old religion by confining it like a retarded child whom the family loves but of whom they are ashamed. Like Angela St. John, whose affair with Abel in Walatowa puts her in touch, if only temporarily, with her body’s potential for joy and wonder, he turns off his own light, as it were, denies his own intuitive wisdom in a futile attempt to avoid emotional and psychological conflicts which might prove irreconcilable. And like Father Olguin, Benally also preaches the white man’s re-ligion—not in the form of Christianity, as Olguin does, but in its true aspects of materialism and conformity; like both Olguin and his predecessor, Fray Nicolás, he would convert the Indian to a new and alien faith for, like them, he needs converts to vindicate his own. Thus it is that when Abel ultimately proves «unregenerate,» the usually mild Benally, possessed by anger but more by fear, loses patience:

He wouldn’t let anybody help him, and I guess I got mad, too, and one day we had a fight … he was just sitting there and saying the worst thing he could think of, over and over. I didn’t like to hear that kind of talk, you know; it made me kind of scared, and I told him to cut it out. I guess I was more scared than mad; anyway I had had about all I could take.

As with Martinez and Tosamah earlier, Ben knew «something bad was going to happen and … didn’t want any part of it.» At this point Abel goes to look for Martinez, but even after he is gone and Ben cools off, Ben nonetheless maintains that «It had to stop, you know; something had to happen.»

Benally, then, like Tosamah, is a priest whose saving message, because he has divorced his religion from his everyday life, has an ironic as well as a revelatory dimension. It is especially ironic that despite his deeper, more sincere spirituality, Ben lacks Tosamah’s awareness of the redemptive potential of the old ways of seeing and knowing. As the «Night Chanter,» Ben, as we have seen, is essential to any hope Abel has for recovery, but Ben himself does not see the sharing of himself and his religion in this way. The road to recovery he consciously charts, as we have also seen, involves passively assimilating the values and accommodating oneself to the demands of white America, even at the cost of one’s heritage and identity. Thus the role of «Night Chanter» assumes a second, and contrary, meaning. Though with the best intentions, Benally also, and quite unknowingly, chants the dark night of the soul, the tortured, fragmented, solipsistic state of being that Los Angeles comes to symbolize in the novel. Through the distorting lens of his own desperate need for some sense of meaning to his life, Ben sees an urban paradise, and it is this vision that he consciously advances as salvation.

Though it exists to differing degrees in each of them and, given their enormously diverse natures, manifests itself in various ways, Martinez, Tosamah, and Benally all share a single quality: self-contempt. Each is ashamed of being what he is, of being an Indian, and that is why Abel, when he is relocated in Los Angeles, becomes a kind of sacrifice to their fear and desperation. A «longhair» from the reservation, he is, among other things, a constant reminder to them of how they are perceived by the dominant culture and of that which has made them wretched. They have been made to feel, against all logic and common sense, that their suffering is somehow deserved because of what they are; thus each of them projects his own diminished sense of self upon Abel and responds to that self in his own way. Martinez tries to obliterate it through violence, Tosamah tries to disassociate himself from it, and Benally tries to remake it to fit the white world he inhabits. The issue is agonizingly complicated, however, because the very Indianness within them which they have been taught to hate is that which they intuitively love. Tosamah and Benally especially know in their very depths that fulfillment and wholeness lie in the realization and free expression of their Indian selves. Tosamah has made a long journey to the land of his people to rediscover his Indianness, and Ben hoards the old songs like treasure within his heart. Therefore, their self-contempt is further intensified by a profound sense of guilt stemming from their perceived inability to live their Indianness, by what they themselves see as a personal betrayal of their heritage and of themselves. However, though it saddens him, Momaday does not condemn the urban Indians for feeling as they do. Their self-hatred is in fact his most telling indictment of a modern America which relentlessly tries to compel its native peoples to barter dignity and self-respect for material, emotional, and psychological survival.

Source: Bernard A. Hirsch, «Self-Hatred and Spiritual Corruption in House Made of Dawn,» in Western American Literature, Vol. XVII, No. 4, Winter, 1983, pp. 307-20.

Vernon E. Lattin

In the following excerpt, Lattin emphasizes Momaday’s presentation of the failure of Christianity in the Indian culture and the desire of the latter for a renewed reverence for the land in its mythic vision of wholeness.

The Native American novel House Made of Dawn … presents the failure of Christianity. Further, its mythic vision of existence becomes an alternative not only to Christianity but to modern civilization based on secular, technological structures….

Father Olguin reveals the inadequacies of Christianity for the Indian. Although attempting to live within the Indian community, he meets only with isolation and failure because he cannot understand the Indian…. Near the end of the novel, awakened from sleep by Abel’s announcement that his grandfather is dead, Father Olguin can only complain about being disturbed. After Abel leaves, the priest illuminates the irrelevance of Christianity for the Indian by crying out after Abel in the darkness: «I can understand … I understand, do you hear?… I understand. Oh God. I understand—I understand!» Olguin and his religion have never understood the Indian culture, and Christianity is but a futile cry.

Also in House Made of Dawn, a Native American, the Rev. J. B. B. Tosamah, Pastor and Priest of the Sun, is a more complex religious figure than Father Olguin. Living in Los Angeles among urban Indians, Tosamah represents the religious confidence man in his most subtle form: he is both critic and supporter of the white way; he is both priest and medicine man; he is both friend and foe. Ultimately, he is a religious sham, speaking the truth but never the whole truth. His full name reveals and hides him: he is «The Right Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah.»

[Tosamah] tries to span two religions and cultures; neither Christian nor pagan, he remains isolated from himself and his tribal past. A sacred vision emerges in the novel when Abel discovers himself and when … he returns home through his grandfather and his racial memory. His quest takes him through the typical monomythic pattern of descent and death, through «loneliness and fear» … until he is able to return to the reservation and join the ancient religious ritual, the run against evil and death…. [He] will be able to accept his place in the universe and defeat the fear that has dominated his life.

Abel’s fear arises from unconscious recognition of individual, racial, tribal, and religious extinction. He cannot see the continuity, the oneness of life, because of his fragmented existence…. Like the Bahkyush tribe, which was almost destroyed by marauders and then by the plagues, he makes a «journey along the edge of oblivion,» a journey which takes him through the white man’s war, a series of brief sexual encounters, prison, and finally near-death from a brutal beating by a Los Angeles policeman. Out of their suffering, the Bahkyush acquired a tragic sense, a «dignity and bearing» which made them holy, «medicine men … rainmakers and eagle hunters.» During the depth of his despair, close to extinction, Abel likewise discovers some religious truths and acquires a holy vision that returns him to himself and his tribal past.

His final vision results from pagan realities of which he has gradually become aware. During the feast of Santiago, which takes place in the Middle, «an ancient place,»… the sacred center, the «axis munde,» Abel is forced to confront his fear, his enemy in the form of a huge, grotesque Albino….

[The resulting struggle between them] reenacts the spiritual confrontation between creative and destructive elements that has been going on forever. At the end of the battle, Abel appropriately kneels down to watch the white man die. During the later trial, when the white world disposes of Abel with «their language,» Abel’s defender, Father Olguin, speaks of the «psychology of witchcraft» and of «an act of imagination,»… unable to recognize the religious significance of Abel’s act. Abel understands, however: «They must know that he would kill the white man again, if he had the chance, that there could be no hesitation whatsoever. For he would know what the white man was, and he would kill him if he could.»

Abel’s quest also takes him back to a reverence for all existence and for the land which supports this existence. Elsewhere Momaday has written of modern America’s need to come to accept the land, to develop an «American Land ethic … not only as it is revealed to us immediately through our senses, but also as it is perceived more truly in the long turn of seasons and of years. And we must come to moral terms.» One of the major themes of House Made of Dawn is that the people will return in a new dawn to this ancient way, throwing off the invasion and conquests of the white people and their religious vision. The narrator speaks in the novel of a prehistoric civilization that «had gone out among the hills for a little while and would return; and then everything would be restored to an older age, and time would have returned upon itself and a bad dream of invasion and change would have been dissolved in an hour before the dawn…. In part, this explains the significance of the chant «House Made of Dawn» …: it is a prayer for a return, a rebirth of the old way….

At the end of the novel, beside his grandfather’s deathbed, [Abel] is for six mornings reminded of all that is; and within these six dawns of his grandfather’s dying he is reunited with his individual, racial, and religious self….

Finally, Abel’s life blends with his grandfather’s death, and he takes up the past and runs onward…. [As] Abel joins the ancient race against evil and death, he unites himself with his sacred past. He also completes the circle of the novel, which begins and ends with his running; he completes the circle of the history of the American continent, which began with this original pagan religion, survived the Christian polemics and onslaught, and now returns to its origin; and he completes the infinite circle itself, the circle of life which all ancient people recognized and accepted. With such knowledge, the reader recognizes that the running at the end of the novel, with Abel breathing a song, is both beginning and end….

[Momaday has] created a new romanticism, with a reverence for the land, a transcendent optimism, and a sense of mythic wholeness. [His] reverence for the land can be compared to the pastoral vision found in most mainstream American literature, but the two visions contain essential differences. In Norris’s The Octopus, for example, the wheat remains, a symbol of the vitalistic force moving everything, but this vision of cyclically renewed life is unconvincing, overshadowed by the railroad’s evil….

[Many] white heroes fail or are unconvincing because their relationship to the land has been more fantasy than history and because they are conquerors and violators. Their vision must then remain either an anomaly or forlorn and tragic. This is even more true of modern Americans, whose experience as a nation, as Momaday has said, is a repudiation of the pastoral ideal, an uprooting of man from the land, and a consequent «psychic dislocation … in time and space.» In contrast, Abel … can return and rediscover, because [he has] a land vision that preceded the white conquerors. Abel’s grandfather, a farmer and holy man who lives by the organic calendar [is] … able to sustain the shock of civilization and technology and preserve and transmit the land vision that [he has] never violated as [an individual] or as a people. The bad dream of violation may not end, but Abel … can transcend the nightmare, and like the Bahkyush tribe, [he] can return to the land….

[Momaday is] willing to face the «silence of the transcendent» in the modern world. Rejecting the phenomonological limitation of writers like Beckett and Kafka, where the dissolution of the hero’s quest is the form, [he creates] an optimistic fiction with the protagonist returning to wholeness and mythic vision and transcending the limitations of both society and time…. This quest can be contrasted with postmodern works like Pynchon’s V, in which Herbert Stencil’s quest is undercut by a denial of form and meaning in the universe, or with Gravity’s Rainbow, in which the hundreds of characters, appearing and disappearing, deny the possibility of individual, personal transcendence. Abel’s … pagan vision, however, is a way of viewing the world as a religious whole: it is belief. This sacred transcendence is also different from attempts at secular transcendence in novels like Humboldt’s Gift or the popular Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. [Moreover, Momaday’s novel is a form of rediscovery, an attempt] to return to the sacred art of storytelling and myth-making that is part of Indian oral tradition. [It is an attempt] to push the secular mode of modern fiction into the sacred mode, a faith and recognition in the power of the word which «comes from nothing into sound and meaning … [and] gives origin to all things.»

This rediscovery of the land, of mythic vision, and of the sacred word offers modern America not only a kind of fiction seldom seen, but, if [Annette Kolodny in her The Lay of the Land] is correct in her analysis of America’s failure to deal with the environment and in her assessment that the twentieth century demands a new pastoral vision offering «some means of understanding and altering the disastrous attitudes toward the physical setting that we have inherited from our national past,» then perhaps the mythic vision and land ethic of those people our nation so brutally conquered are appropriate and even necessary at this time.

Source: Vernon E. Lattin «The Quest for Mythic Vision in Contemporary Native American and Chicano Fiction,» in American Literature, Duke University Press, Vol. L, No. 4, January, 1979, pp. 625-40.

Lawrence J. Evers

An American critic and educator, Evers has authored several books on Native American songs and has served as president of the Association for Study of American Indian Literatures. In the following essay, he examines Momaday’s focus on language, landscape, and Native American rituals and narratives in House Made of Dawn.

Native American oral traditions are not monolithic, nor are the traditions with which Momaday works in House Made of Dawn—Kiowa, Navajo, and Towan Pueblo. Yet there are, he suggests [in «A Conversation with N. Scott Momaday,» Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Magazine 2, No. 2 (1976)], «common denominators.» Two of the most important of these are the native American’s relation to the land and his regard for language.

By imagining who and what they are in relation to particular landscapes, cultures and individual members of cultures form a close relation with those landscapes. Following D. H. Lawrence and others, Momaday terms this a «sense of place» [in his «A Special Sense of Place, » appearing in Viva, Santa Fe New Mexican, (7 May 1972)]. A sense of place derives from the perception of a culturally imposed symbolic order on a particular physical topography. A superb delineation of one such symbolic order is offered by Tewa anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz in his study The Tewa World from which the following prayer is taken:

Within and around the earth, within and around the hills, within and around the mountains, your authority returns to you.

The Tewa singer finds in the landscape which surrounds him validation for his own song, and that particular topography becomes a cultural landscape, at once physical and symbolic. Like Kosahn, Momaday’s grandmother, the native American draws from it «strength enough to hold still against all the forces of chance and disorder» [» An American Land Ethic,» Sierra Club Bulletin 55 (February 1970)].

The manner in which cultural landscapes are created interests Momaday, and the whole of his book The way to Rainy Mountain may be seen as an account of that process. During their migration journey the Kiowa people «dared to imagine and determine who they were…. The journey recalled is among other things the revelation of one way in which these traditions are conceived, developed, and interfused in the human mind.» The Kiowa journey, like that recounted in emergence narratives of other tribes, may be seen as a movement from chaos to order, from discord to harmony. In this emergence the landscape plays a crucial role, for cultural landscapes are created by the imaginative interaction of societies of men and particular geographies.

In the Navajo emergence narrative, for example, First Man and First Woman accompanied by Coyote and other actors from the animal world journey upward through four underworlds into the present Fifth World. The journey advances in a series of movements from chaos to order, and each movement takes the People toward greater social and symbolic definition. The cloud pillars of the First World defined only by color and direction become in the Fifth World the sacred mountains of the four directions, the most important coordinates in an intricate cultural geography. As with the Tewa and the Kiowa, that cultural landscape symbolizes the Navajo conception of order, the endpoint of their emergence journey. Through the emergence journey, a collective imaginative endeavor, the Navajos determined who and what they were in relation to the land.

The extraordinary interest in geography exhibited in Navajo oral literature then may be seen as an effort to evoke harmony in those narratives by reference to the symbolic landscape of the present world. Significantly, a major test theme in Navajo oral literature requires identification of culturally important geographic features. Consider the Sun’s test of the Hero Twins in one of the final episodes in the emergence narrative [as recounted in Ethelou Yazzie’s 1971 Navajo History]:

He asked them to identify various places all over the surface of the earth. He asked, «Where is your home?» The boys knew where their home was. They pointed out Huerfano Mountain and said that was where they lived. The Sun next asked, «What mountain is that in the East?»

«That’s Sis Naajiní (Blanca Peak),» replied the boys.

«What mountain is down here below us?»

«That’s Tsoodzi (Mount Taylor),» said the boys.

«What mountain is that in the West?»

«Now, what mountain is that over in the north?»

«Those are the Dibé Nitsaa (La Plata Mountains).»

Because all the boy’s answers were correct, the Sun said goodby to them as they were lowered down to the earth at the place called Tó Sidoh (Hot Springs).

Through their knowledge of the Navajo cultural landscape the Twins proved who and what they were to the Sun.

The pattern of the emergence narrative—a journey toward order symbolized by a cultural landscape—is repeated in Navajo chantway rituals. A patient requires a chantway ritual when his life is in some way out of order or harmony. In order for that harmony to be restored he must be taken through a ritual re-emergence journey paralleling that of the People. It is important to note the role of the singer and his ritual song here, for without songs there can be no cure or restoration of order. Through the power of the chanter’s words the patient’s life is brought under ritual control, and he is cured.

We come round, then, to another of the «common denominators» Momaday finds in oral traditions: attitude toward language. Of Kiowa oral tradition Momaday writes [in The Way to Rainy Mountain]: «A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.» It is this concept, remarkably like one text version of the Navajo origin giving «One Word» as the name of the original state of the universe, which forms the center of Tosamah’s sermon on St. John’s gospel in the novel [House Made of Dawn]. But more germane to our discussion of oral tradition generally is the related notion that «by means of words can a man deal with the world on equal terms.» It is only through words that a man is able to express his relation to place. Indeed, it is only through shared words or ritual that symbolic landscapes are able to exist. So it is that the Tewa singer, the Navajo chanter, and the Kiowa «man of words» preserve their communities through their story and song. Without them there would be no community. One contemporary Navajo medicine man [Curley Mustache] suggests that loss of ceremonial words will signal the end of the world: «The medicine men who have knowledge in the Blessing Way (Hozho ji) will all evidently be lost. The words to the song will vanish from their memory, and they will not know how to begin to sing.»

In this context we can better appreciate Abel’s dilemma in House Made of Dawn. As Momaday suggests [in «A Conversation with N. Scott Momaday»]: «One of the most tragic things about Abel, as I think of him, is his inability to express himself. He is in some ways a man without a voice…. So I think of him as having been removed from oral tradition.»

House Made of Dawn opens and closes with the formulaic words which enclose all Jemez pueblo tales—dypaloh and qtsedaba, placing it consciously in that oral tradition. As many oral narratives, the novel is shaped around a movement from discord to harmony and is structurally and thematically cyclic. The prologue is dominated by the race, a central theme in the novel as Momaday has suggested [in an interview appearing in Puerto del Sol 12 (1973)]:

I see [House Made of Dawn] as a circle. It ends where it begins and it’s informed with a kind of thread that runs through it and holds everything together. The book itself is a race. It focuses upon the race, that’s the thing that does hold it all together. But it’s a constant repetition of things too.

[Elsie Clews Parsons tells us in the 1925 The Pueblo of Jemez] that racing is a conspicuous feature of Jemez ceremonialism. The winter race Abel runs in the prologue and at the end of the novel is the first race in the Jemez ceremonial season, an appropriate ceremonial beginning. But the race itself may be seen as a journey, a re-emergence journey analogous to that mentioned in connection with Navajo and Kiowa oral tradition. Indeed, the language echoes a Navajo re-emergence song sung in the Night Chant, from which the title of the book is taken.

These journey and emergence themes begin to unfold in the following scene as Francisco goes in his wagon to meet the bus returning Abel to Walatowa after WWII. The wagon road on which he rides is parallel to the modern highway on which Abel rides. The two roads serve as familiar metaphors for the conflicting paths Abel follows in the novel, and Momaday reinforces the conflict by parallel auditory motifs as well. As the wagon road excites in Francisco memories of his own race «for good hunting and harvests,» he sings good sounds of harmony and balance. At the same time the recurrent whine of tires on the highway is constantly in the background until «he heard the sharp wheeze of the brakes as the big bus rolled to a stop in front of the gas pump….» The re-emergence theme is suggested in the passage by the presence of the reed trap—recalling the reed of emergence, and the fact that Abel returns «ill.» He is drunk, of course, but he is also ill, out of balance, in the manner of a patient in a Navajo chantway.

Abel’s genealogy, the nature of his illness, and its relation to the auditory motifs mentioned above are further defined in the seven fragments of memory he experiences as he walks above the Cañon de San Diego in the first dawn following his return. At the same time these fragments establish a context for Abel’s two prominent encounters in Part I with Angela Grace St. John and with the albino Juan Reyes Fragua.

Abel’s genealogy is complicated. He did not know who his father was. «His father was a Navajo, they said, or a Sia, or an Isleta, an outsider anyway,» which made Abel «somehow foreign and strange.» The ties Abel does have to Walatowa are through his mother whose father, Francisco—both sacristan and kiva participant—is the illegitimate son of the consumptive priest Fray Nicolas V. Through Francisco, Abel is a direct descendant of the Bahkyush, a group of Towan-speaking pueblos who immigrated to Jemez in the mid-nineteenth century. He is a «direct [descendant] of those men and women who had made that journey along the edge of oblivion,» an experience which gave them a «tragic sense.» Abel, as his Bahkyush ancestors, is on just such a «journey along the edge of oblivion» in the novel.

Abel’s journey in Part I is a journey of return to Walatowa and his illness is most explicitly related to a WWII experience. At the end of his seven memory fragments in the first dawn of his return Abel recalls:

This—everything in advance of his going—he could remember whole and in detail. It was the recent past, the intervention of days and years without meaning, of awful calm and collision, time always immediate and confused, that he could not put together in his mind.

In the confusion of war among soldiers who recognized him only as a «chief» speaking in «Sioux or Algonquin or something,» Abel lost both the sense of place which characterized his tribal culture and the very community which supports that sense of place. «He didn’t know where he was, and he was alone.» Incredibly, he doesn’t even recognize the earth: «He reached for something, but he had no notion of what it was; his hand closed upon the earth and the cold, wet leaves.»

Mechanical sounds are associated with Abel’s disorientation. The «low and incessant» sound of the tank descending upon him reaches back in the novel to the «slow whine of tires» Francisco hears on the highway and looks ahead to the sound of Angela’s car intruding on his vision in the first dawn above the valley as it creeps along the same highway toward the Jemez church. These are the same mechanical sounds Abel tried «desperately to take into account» as the bus took him away to the war—again on the same highway. They are the sounds that reminded him as he left the pueblo to go to war that «the town and the valley and the hills» could no longer center him, that he was now «centered upon himself.»

That Angela Grace St. John, the pregnant wife of a Los Angeles physician who comes to Walatowa seeking a cure for her own ailments, will become an obstacle in Abel’s re-emergence journey is first suggested by the extensive auditory motifs of Part I. Yet her perceptions of his problems and of the Indian world generally have earned the sympathy of some readers. Perhaps her most seductive perception is that of the significance of the corn dancers at Cochiti Pueblo:

Their eyes were held upon some vision out of range, something away in the end of distance, some reality that she did not know, or even suspect. What was it that they saw? Probably they saw nothing after all,… nothing at all. But then that was the trick, wasn’t it? To see nothing at all,… nothing in the absolute. To see beyond the landscape, beyond every shape and shadow and color, that was to see nothing. That was to be free and finished, complete, spiritual…. To say «beyond the mountain,» and to mean it, to mean, simply, beyond everything for which the mountain stands of which it signifies the being.

As persuasive as Angela’s interpretation of the Cochiti dancers may seem, it is finally a denial of the value of the landscape which the novel celebrates. Angela’s assumption that the Cochiti dancers possess a kind of Hindu metaphysics which rejects phenomena for noumena is a projection of her own desires to reject the flesh. Her attitude toward the land is of a piece with her attitude toward her own body: «she could think of nothing more vile and obscene than the raw flesh and blood of her body, the raveled veins and the gore upon her bones.» We become almost immediately aware of the implications of that denial she craves in two following scenes: the corre de gaio and Abel’s second reflection on the Cañon de San Diego.

We view the corre de gaio through Angela who again projects feelings about her own existence on the ceremony. For Angela the ceremony like herself is «so empty of meaning … and yet so full of appearance.» Her final impression of the ceremony is sexual. She senses some «unnatural thing» in it and «an old fascination returned upon her.» Later she remarks of the ceremony: «Like this, her body had been left to recover without her when once and for the first time, having wept, she had lain with a man.» In the albino’s triumph and Abel’s failure at the corre de gaio she finds sexual pleasure.

The etiological legend of Santiago (St. James) and the rooster is told by Fr. Olguin appropriately enough for his «instinctive demand upon all histories to be fabulous.» The legend explains the ceremonial game which follows in the novel. Just as the sacrifice of the rooster by Santiago produced cultivated plants and domesticated animals for the Pueblo people, so too does ritual re-enactment of the sacrifice promote fertility at Walatowa. While ethnographers suggest that the corre de gaio is of relatively minor ceremonial importance in Pueblo societies, in the context of the novel the rooster pull affords Abel his first opportunity to re-enter the ceremonial functions of the village. It is, we are told, the first occasion on which he has taken off his uniform. Though the ceremony itself seems efficacious, as rain follows in the novel, Abel is «too rigid» and «too careful» at the game and fails miserably.

Abel’s failure at the rooster pull demonstrates his inability to reenter the ceremonial life of the village, as he realizes in his second reflection at dawn, July 28, 1945. The section opens with an explicit statement of the relation of the emergence journey and the landscape: «The canyon is a ladder to the plain,» and is followed by a description of the ordered and harmonious existence of life in that landscape. Each form of life has its proper space and function in the landscape, and by nature of that relation is said to have «tenure in the land.» Similarly, «man came down the ladder to the plain a long time ago. It was a slow migration….» Like the emergence journeys of the Kiowa and the Navajo mentioned earlier, the migration of the people of Walatowa led to an ordered relation to place which they express in their ceremonial life. As Abel walks in this landscape in the dawn he is estranged from the town and the land as well. «His return to the town had been a failure» he realizes because he is no longer attuned to its rhythms. He has no words to express his relation to the place. He is «not dumb,» but «inarticulate.»

Despite his inarticulateness, the rhythm and words are still there «like memory, in the reach of his hearing.» We recall that on July 21, seven days before, «for a moment everything was all right with him.» Here however,

He was alone, and he wanted to make a song out of the colored canyon, the way the women of Torreón made songs upon their looms out of colored yarn, but he had not got the right words together. It would have been a creation song; he would have sung lowly of the first world, of fire and flood, and of the emergence of dawn from the hills.

Abel is at this point vaguely conscious of what he needs to be cured. He needs a re-emergence. He needs words, ceremonial words, which express his relation to the cultural landscape in which he stands. He needs to feel with the Tewa singer quoted earlier his authority return to him. But here out of harmony with himself and his community he needs most of all the kind of re-emergence journey offered in a Navajo chantway.

Significantly, the passage closes, as did the dawn walk of July 21, with an emblem of Angela St. John intruding on Abel’s vision: «the high white walls of the Benevides house.» The house itself is another symbol of Angela’s denial of the land or more particularly the landscape of the Cañon de San Diego. In contrast to Francisco and the other native residents of Walatowa who measure space and time by reference to the eastern rim of the canyon, Angela measures hers in relation to this «high, white house:»

She would know the arrangement of her days and hours in the upstairs and down, and they would be for her the proof of her being and having been.

His re-entry into the village spoiled, Abel turns not to the ceremonial structure of the pueblo for support but to Angela. And it is the Benevides house, not the land, which provides «the wings and the stage» for their affair. Abel’s first sexual encounter with Angela is juxtaposed in the novel with Francisco’s encounter with the albino witch in his cornfield. Indeed, Angela, who «keened» to the unnatural qualities of the albino during the corre de gaio, echoes the auditory symbols of evil mentioned earlier. Just as Nicolas teah-whau «screamed» at him, and the moan of the wind in the rocks frightened him earlier, as Angela and Abel make love «she wanted to scream» and is later «moaning softly.»

Earlier in his life Abel found physical regeneration through a sexual experience with Fat Josie. His affair with Angela has just the opposite effect. Lying physically broken on the beach in Part II Abel reflects:

He had loved his body. It had been hard and quick and beautiful; it had been useful, quickly and surely responsive to his mind and will…. His body, like his mind, had turned on him; it was his enemy.

The following couplet in the text implicates Angela in this alienation:

Angela put her white hands to his body. Abel put his hands to her white body.

Later Abel tells Benally that «she [Angela] was going to help him get a job and go away from the reservation, but then he got himself in trouble.» That «trouble» derives in part from Abel’s separation from his land.

Auditory symbols follow Abel directly from his affair with Angela to the climactic scene of Part I, the killing of the albino. Just before the murder the albino laughs «a strange, inhuman cry.» Like the sound of Nicolas teah-whau it is «an old woman’s laugh» that issues from a «great, evil mouth.» At the very scene of the murder the only sound that breaks the silence is «the moan of the wind in the wires.»

That Abel regards the albino as evil, as a witch (sawah), is clear enough even without the explicit statements of Father Olguin, Tosamah, and Benally later. Moreover, it is clear at the time of the murder that Abel regards the albino as a snake. He feels «the scales of the lips and the hot slippery point of the tongue, writhing.» But that Abel is «acting entirely within the Indian tradition» when he kills the albino is wrong.

Abel’s compulsion to eradicate the albino-snake reveals an attitude toward evil more akin to the Christian attitude of Nicolas V.: «that Serpent which even is the One our most ancient enemy.» The murder scene is rife with Christian overtones. The killing takes place beneath a telegraph pole which «leaned upon the black sky;» during the act «the white hands still lay upon him as if in benediction,» and after the albino’s death «Abel knelt» and noticed «the dark nails of the hand seemed a string of great black beads.» Abel appears to kill the albino then as a frustrated response to the White Man and Christianity, but he does so more in accordance with Anglo tradition than Indian tradition. Indeed, he has been trained in the Army to be a killer.

We recall here that the murder takes place squarely in the middle of the fiesta of Porcingula, the patroness of Walatowa, and that a central part of the ceremony on that feast is a ritual confrontation between the Pecos bull and the «black-faced children, who were the invaders.» Parsons describes the bull-baiting at Jemez during the fiesta of Porcingula, August 1, 1922, as follows:

An hour later, «the Pecos bull is out,» I am told and hasten to the Middle. There the bull-mask is out playing, with a following of about a dozen males, four or five quite young boys. They are caricaturing Whites, their faces and hands painted white; one wears a false mustache, another a beard of blond hair. «U.S.A.» is chalked on the back of their coat or a cross within a circle…. They shout and cry out, «What’s the matter with you boy?» or more constantly «Muchacha! Muchacho!»…

The bull antics are renewed, this time with attempts of his baiters to lasso. Finally they succeed in dragging him in front of their house, where he breaks away again, to be caught again and dragged into the house. From the house a bugler steps out and plays «Wedding Bells» and rag-time tunes for the bullbaiters to dance to in couples, «modern dances,» ending up in a tumble. Two by two, in their brown habit and sandaled feet, four of the Franciscan Fathers pass by. It grows dark, the bugler plays «taps» and this burlesque, reaching from the Conquistadores to the Great War, is over for the night.

The very day then that Abel kills the albino the community from which he is estranged could have provided him with a way of ritually confronting the white man. Had his return not been a failure, he might have borne his agony, as Francisco had «twice or three times,» by taking the part of the bull. «It was a hard thing,» Francisco tells us, «to be the bull, for there was a primitive agony to it, and it was a kind of victim, an object of ridicule and hatred.» Hard as that agony was, Abel as Francisco before him might have borne it with the support of his community. Separated from that community, he acts individually against evil and kills the white man.

Momaday forces us to see the murder as more complicated and subtle in motivation despite Benally’s sympathetic reflections on the realities of witchery, Tosamah’s reference to the murder as a legal conundrum, and Abel’s own statement that the murder was «not a complicated thing.» Death has not been a simple thing for Abel to cope with earlier in the novel, as shown by his emotional reactions to the deaths of the doe, the rabbit, the eagle, as well as the deaths of his brother Vidal and his mother. More to the point is the fact that the White Man Abel kills is, in fact, a white Indian, an albino. He is the White Man in the Indian; perhaps even the White Man in Abel himself. When Abel kills the albino, in a real sense he kills a part of himself and his culture which he can no longer recognize and control. That that part should take the shape of a snake in his confused mind is horribly appropriate given the long association of the Devil and the snake in Christian tradition and the subsequent Puritan identification of the American Indians as demonic snakes and witches in so much of early American literature. In orthodox Pueblo belief the snake and the powers with which it is as-sociated are accepted as a necessary part of the cosmic order: «The Hebres view of the serpent as the embodiment of unmitigated evil is never elaborated among the Pueblos; he is too often an ally for some desired end» [Hamilton A. Tyler, Pueblo Gods and Myths, 1964].

Yet, the whiteness of the albino suggests something more terrible than evil to Abel. As the whiteness of the whale does to Ishmael, it suggests an emptiness in the universe, a total void of meaning. It is an emblem complementary to Angela’s philosophizing over the Cochiti dancers. The albino confronts Abel with his own lack of meaning, his own lack of a sense of place.

This reading is reinforced by the poignant final scene in Part I. Francisco stands alone in his corn field demonstrating the very sense of place Abel has lacked on his return. We recall that in this very field Francisco too had confronted evil in the shape of the albino, but that he responded to the confrontation very differently:

His acknowledgement of the unknown was nothing more than a dull, intrinsic sadness, a vague desire to weep, for evil had long since found him out and knew who he was. He set a blessing upon the corn and took up his hoe.

Because of Abel’s act, Francisco is for the first time separated from the Walatowa community. He stands muttering Abel’s name as he did in the opening of the chapter, and near him the reed trap—again suggesting the reed of emergence—is empty.

Part II of the novel opens with Abel lying broken, physically and spiritually, on the beach in Los Angeles. Like the helpless grunion with whom he shares the beach, he is out of his world. Abel’s problem continues to be one of relating to place. As in Part I at Walatowa he fails to establish a sense of place in Los Angeles because of a failure to find community. Not only is he separated from other workers at the factory, but even Tosamah and the Indian men at the Silver Dollar reject Abel. That rejection is a major cause of Abel’s second futile and self-destructive confrontation with evil in the person of Martinez, a sadistic Mexican policeman. The pattern of the second confrontation is a repetition of the first. Just as Abel kills the albino at Walatowa after he has failed to find community there, so too he goes after Martinez, also perceived as a snake (culebra), after he has failed utterly to find community in Los Angeles. Implication of Anglo society in this failure is again explicit and powerful, as Abel has been sent to Los Angeles by the government on its Relocation Program after serving time in prison for killing the albino.

On the beach Abel «could not see.» This poverty of vision, both physical and imaginative, is akin to the inability of one-eyed Father Olguin to «see» and is related to Abel’s prison experience: «After a while he could not imagine anything beyond the walls except the yard outside, the lavatory and the dining hall—or even walls, really.» Yet it is by the sea that Abel gains the insight required to begin his own re-emergence. For the first time he asks himself «where the trouble had begun, what the trouble was,» and though he still cannot answer the question consciously, his mind turns again to the mechanical auditory images noted earlier:

The bus leaned and creaked; he felt the surge of motion and the violent shudder of the whole machine on the gravel road. The motion and the sound seized upon him. Then suddenly he was overcome with a desperate loneliness, and he wanted to cry out. He looked toward the fields, but a low rise of the land lay before them.

The bus takes Abel out of a context where he has worth and meaning and into a context where «there were enemies all around.» From the cultural landscape of the Cañon de San Diego to the beach where «the world was open at his back,» Abel’s journey has taken him, as his Bahkyush ancestors, to «the edge of oblivion»: «He had been long ago at the center, had known where he was, had lost his way, had wandered to the end of the earth, was even now reeling on the edge of the void.» On the beach, then, Abel finally realizes that «he had lost his place,» a realization accompanied by the comprehension of the social harmony a sense of place requires. Out of his delirium, as if in a dream, his mind returns to the central thread of the novel, the race, and here at last. Abel is able to assign meaning to the race as a cultural activity:

The runners after evil ran as water runs, deep in the channel, in the way of least resistance, no resistance. His skin crawled with excitement; he was overcome with longing and loneliness, for suddenly he saw the crucial sense in their going, of old men in white leggings running after evil in the night. They were whole and indispensable in what they did; everything in creation referred to them. Because of them, perspective, proportion, design in the universe. Meaning because of them. They ran with great dignity and calm, not in hope of anything, but hopelessly; neither in fear nor hatred nor despair of evil, but simply in recognition and with respect. Evil was. Evil was abroad in the night; they must venture out to the confrontation; they must reckon dues and divide the world.

We recall that as Abel killed the albino «the terrible strength of the hands was brought to bear only in proportion as Abel resisted them» (emphasis added). The murder is an expression of Abel’s disharmony and imbalance. As Abel here realizes «evil is that which is ritually not under control» [Gladys A. Reichard, Navajo Religion: A Study of Symbolism, 1974]. In the ceremonial race, not in individual resistance, the runners are able to deal with evil.

Tosamah’s description of the emergence journey and the relations of words and place serve as a clue to Abel’s cure, but the role he plays in Abel’s journey appears as ambiguous and contradictory as his character. He is at once priest and «clown.» He exhibits, often on the same page, remarkable insight, buffoonery, and cynicism. He has then all the characteristics of Coyote, the trickster figure in native American mythologies. Alternately wise and foolish, Coyote in native American oral tradition is at once a buffoon and companion of the People on their emergence journey. As Coyote, a member of «an old council of clowns,» the Right Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah speaks with a voice «full of authority and rebuke.» As Coyote, «he likes to get under your skin; he’ll make a fool out of you if you let him.» Note how Momaday describes Tosamah:

He was shaggy and awful-looking in the thin, naked light; big, lithe as a cat, narrow-eyed, suggesting in the whole of his look and manner both arrogance and agony. He wore black like a cleric; he had the voice of a great dog.

The perspective Tosamah offers Abel and the reader in the novel derives not so much from his peyote ceremonies, for which Momaday seems to have drawn heavily on La Barre’s The Peyote Cult, but rather from the substance of the two sermons he gives. The second sermon, «The Way to Rainy Mountain,» which Momaday has used in his book by the same title and several other contexts, addresses the relation of man, land, community, and the word. In it Tosamah describes the emergence of the Kiowa people as «a journey toward the dawn» that «led to a golden age.» It was a journey which led the Kiowa to a culture which is inextricably bound to the land of the southern plains. There, much in the manner of Abel looking over the Cañon de San Diego in Part I, he looks out on the landscape at dawn and muses: «your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.» By making a re-emergence journey, Tosamah is able to feel a sense of place.

That coherent native relation to the land described so eloquently by Tosamah is counter-pointed in the novel not only by Abel’s experiences but also by the memories of Milly, the social worker who becomes Abel’s lover in Los Angeles. Milly, like Tosamah, is from Oklahoma. There her family too had struggled with the land, but «at last Daddy began to hate the land, began to think of it as some kind of enemy, his own very personal and deadly enemy.» Even viewed in the dawn her father’s relation to the land was a despairing and hopeless one:

And every day before dawn he went to the fields without hope, and I watched him, sometimes saw him at sunrise, far away in the empty land, very small on the skyline turning to stone even as he moved up and down the rows.

The contrast with Francisco, who seems most at home in his fields, and with Tosamah, who finds in that very landscape the depth of his existence, is obvious. The passage also recalls Angela’s denial of the meaning of the land and Abel’s own reflections on «enemies.»

In his first sermon in the novel, Tosamah addresses the crucial role of words and the imagination in the reemergence process. The sermon is a bizarre exegesis of St. John’s gospel which compares Indian and Anglo attitudes toward language. As participants in oral traditions, Indians, Tosamah tells us, hold language as sacred. They have a childlike regard for the mysteries of speech. While St. John shared that sensibility, he was also a white man. And the white man obscures the truth by burdening it with words:

Now, brothers and sisters, old John was a white man, and the white man has his ways. Oh gracious me, he has his ways. He talks about the Word. He talks through it and around it. He builds upon it with syllables, with prefixes and suffixes, and hyphens and accents. He adds and divides and multiplies the Word. And in all of this he subtracts the Truth.

The white man may indeed, Tosamah tells us, in a theory of verbal overkill that is wholly his own, «perish by the Word.»

Words are, of course, a problem for Abel. On the one hand, he lacks the ceremonial words—the words of a Creation song—which properly express his relation to community and place. He is inarticulate. On the other, he is plagued by a surfeit of words from white men. The bureaucratic words of the social worker’s forms effectively obscure his real problems. At the murder trial, he thinks: «Word by word by word these men were disposing of him in language, their language, and they were making a bad job of it.» Again when Benally takes him to the hospital after the beach scene bureaucratic words get in the way. Indeed, Benally perceives Abel’s central problem as one of words, as he equates finding community with having appropriate words:

And they can’t help you because you don’t know how to talk to them. They have a lot of words, and you know they mean something, but you don’t know what, and your own words are no good because they’re not the same; they’re different, and they’re the only words you’ve got…. You think about getting out and going home. You want to think that you belong someplace, I guess.

Tosamah perceives a similar dislocating effect of words on Abel, though he relates it to religion. Scorning his inarticulateness and innocence, he sees Abel as caught in «the Jesus scheme.» Beyond his sermons, there is a special irony in the fact that Tosamah doesn’t understand Abel and his problems, for he is described several times in Part II as a «physician.» Though they put Abel’s problems in a broader and clearer perspective, Tosamah’s words are of little use to Abel.

Part III is told from the point of view of Ben Benally, a relocated Navajo who befriends Abel in Los Angeles. Roommates in Los Angeles, Ben and Abel share many things in their backgrounds. On his one visit to Walatowa, Benally finds the landscape there similar to that in which he grew up. Like Abel he was raised in that landscape without parents by his grandfather. Benally even suggests that he is somehow related to Abel since the Navajos have a clan called Jemez, the name of Abel’s pueblo. Moreover, we recall that Abel’s father may have been a Navajo, and that Francisco regards the Navajo children who come to Walatowa during the Fiesta of Porcingula as «a harvest, in some intractable sense the regeneration of his own bone and blood.» This kinship gives Benally special insight into Abel’s problems and strengthens his role as Night Chanter.

Benally’s childhood memories of life with his grandfather near Wide Ruins reveal a sense of place very like that Abel groped for on his return to Walatowa.

And you were little and right there in the center of everything, the sacred mountains, the snow-covered mountains and the hills, the gullies and the flats, the sundown and the night, everything—where you were little, where you were and had to be.

Moreover, this sense of place gives him words: «you were out with the sheep and could talk and sing to yourself and the snow was new and deep and beautiful.»

In Los Angeles, however, Benally’s sense of place is lost in his idealism and naïveté. Return to the reservation seems a pale option to the glitter of Los Angeles. «There would be nothing there, just the empty land and a lot of old people, going no place and dying off.» Like Milly, Benally believes in «Honor, Industry, the Second Chance, the Brotherhood of Man, the American Dream….» Theirs is a 50’s American Dream of limitless urban possibilities. Benally believes you can have anything you want in Los Angeles and that «you never have to be alone.» Yet in the very scene following his reflection on this urban cornucopia, we find Benally excluded even from the community of The Silver Dollar, counting his pennies, unable to buy a second bottle of wine. Idealism obscures Benally’s vision, even as Tosamah’s cynicism obscures his.

Nevertheless, Benally is the Night Chanter, the singer who helps restore voice and harmony to Abel’s life. In the hospital having realized the significance of the runners after evil, Abel asks Benally to sing for him:

«House made of dawn». I used to tell him about those old ways, the stories and the songs, Beautyway and Night Chant. I sang some of those things, and I told him what they meant, what I thought they were about.

The songs from both the Beautyway and the Night Chant are designed to attract good and repel evil. They are both restorative and exorcising expression of the very balance and design in the universe Abel perceived in the runners after evil. Ben’s words from the Night Chant for Abel are particularly appropriate, since the purpose of the Night Chant is to cure patients of insanity and mental imbalance. The structure and diction of the song demonstrate the very harmony it seeks to evoke. Dawn is balanced by evening light, dark cloud and male rain by dark mist and female rain. All things are in balance and control, for in Navajo and Pueblo religion good is control. Further note that a journey metaphor is prominent in the song («may I walk …») and that the restorative sequence culminates with «restore my voice for me.» Restoration of voice is an outward sign of inner harmony. Finally, note that the song begins with a culturally significant geographic reference: Tségihi. One of its central messages is that ceremonial words are bound efficaciously to place. No matter how dislocated is Benally or idiosyncratic his understandings of Navajo ceremonialism, the songs he sings over Abel clearly serve a restorative function.

Angela also visits Abel in the hospital and offers him words. She tells Abel the story her son likes «best of all.» It is a story about «a young In-dian brave,» born of a bear and a maiden, who has many adventures and finally saves his people. Benally marvels at the story which reminds him of a similar story from the Mountain Chant told to him by his grandfather. Yet unlike the Navajo legend and the Kiowa bear legend told by Tosamah earlier, both etiological legends tied firmly to cultural landscapes, Angela’s story is as rootless as a Disney cartoon. Abel seems to realize this, if Benally does not, for he does not respond to Angela. Benally «couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He had turned his head away, like maybe the pain was coming back, you know.» Abel refuses to play Angela’s game a second time.

Part IV opens with a description of a grey, ominous winter landscape. Olguin is reflecting on his seven years’ service at Walatowa. He claims to have grown «calm with duty and design,» to have «come to terms with the town.» Yet he remains estranged from the village; it is not his place. He measures his achievement in the language of commerce, noting with his predecessor Nicolas V. what good works «accrued to his account.» Like Angela who was offended that Abel «would not buy and sell.» Olguin seeks to at least make good the «investment» of his pride.

Whereas Abel looks to Benally’s Night Chant for restoration Olguin seeks and claims to find restoration from the journal of Nicolas. In that same journal we recall Nicolas V. himself sought restoration of his Christian God:

When I cannot speak thy Name, I want Thee most to restore me. Restore me! Thy spirit comes upon me & I am too frail for Thee!

The passage leaves off in a fit of coughing and seems a singularly ineffectual request.

At the same time Abel sits with his dying grandfather. Though Francisco’s voice had been strong in the dawn, it now grows weaker and fades as it has on each of the six days since Abel’s return to Walatowa. The few words Francisco does speak, in Town and Spanish, juxtapose in the manner of Parts I and II the memory fragments which Abel seeks to order in his own mind. Francisco is here, as Momaday suggests [in the 1973 Puerto del Sol interview], «a kind of reflection of Abel.» The passage translates:

Little Abel … I’m a little bit of something … Mariano … cold … he gave up … very, very cold … conquered … aye [exclamation of pain], Porcingula … how white, little Abel … white devil … witch … witch … and the black man … yes … many black men … running, running … cold … rapidly … little Abel, little Vidal … What are you doing? What are you doing?

As the seventh dawn comes these words grow into coherent fragments in Francisco’s memory and serve as a final statement of the realizations about the relation of place, words, and community Abel has had earlier in the novel.

Each of the fragments is a memory of initiation. In the first Francisco recalls taking Abel and Vidal to the ruins of the old church near the Middle to see «the house of the sun.»

They must learn the whole contour of the black mesa. They must know it as they knew the shape of their hands, always and by heart…. They must know the long journey of the sun on the black mesa, how it rode in the seasons and the years, and they must live according to the sun appearing, for only then could they reckon where they were, where all things were in time.

This is the sense of place Abel lost in «the intervention of days and years without meaning, of awful calm and collision, time always immediate and confused.» As he is instructed to know the shape of the eastern mesa like his own hands, it is appropriate that in the corre de gaio the albino should first attack his hands, that in the murder scene (and Abel’s memory of it) hands should be so prominent, and finally that as he lies on the beach after Martinez’s brutal beating of his hands, Abel should think of Angela’s effect on him in terms of hands. The relation to place taught him by Francisco is broken by each, as are his hands. Now through Francisco’s memory Abel is retaught his ordered relation to place and how it is expressed in «the race of the dead.» Abel similarly participates in Francisco’s memories of his initiation as a runner (in the race against Mariano), as a dancer (from which he gained the power to heal), as a man (with Porcingula, «the child of the witch»), and as a hunter (as he stalks the bear).

All signs then point to a new beginning for Abel as he rises February 28, the last day of the novel. His own memory healed by Francisco’s, for the first time in the novel he correctly performs a ceremonial function as he prepares Francisco for burial and delivers him to Father Olguin. He then joins the ashmarked runners in the dawn. Momaday comments on that race in his essay «The Morality of Indian Hating» [in Ramparts 3 (1964)]:

The first race each year comes in February, and then the dawn is clear and cold, and the runners breathe steam. It is a long race, and it is neither won nor lost. It is an expression of the soul in the ancient terms of sheer physical exertion. To watch those runners is to know that they draw with every step some elemen-tary power which resides at the core of the earth and which, for all our civilized ways, is lost upon us who have lost the art of going in the flow of things. In the tempo of that race there is time to ponder morality and demoralization, hungry wolves and falling stars. And there is time to puzzle over that curious and fortuitous question with which the people of Jemez greet each other.

That very question—»Where are you going?»—must ring in Abel’s ears as he begins the race. The time and direction of his journey are once again defined by the relation of the sun to the eastern mesa, «the house made of dawn.» Out of the pain and exhaustion of the race, Abel regains his vision: «he could see at last without having to think.» That vision is not the nihilistic vision of Angela—»beyond everything for which the mountain stands.» Rather, Abel’s «last reality» in the race is expressed in the essential unity and harmony of man and the land. He feels the sense of place he was unable to articulate in Part I. Here at last he has a voice, words and a song. In beauty he has begun.

Source: Lawrence J. Evers, «Words and Place: A Reading of House Made of Dawn,» in Western American Literature, Vol. XI, No. 4, February, 1977, pp. 297-320.

Martha Scott Trimble

Trimble is an American educator and critic. In this excerpt, she briefly analyzes some major themes and symbols in House Made of Dawn.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Source: Martha Scott Trimble, N. Scott Momday, Boise State College, 1973.

Marion Willard Hylton

In the following essay, Hylton presents a thematic analysis of House Made of Dawn, relating «the tragic odyssey of a man forcibly removed from [the Native American] psychic environment and placed within a culture light-years away from the attitudes, values, and goals of his former life.»

Abel was the land and he was of the land; he was a long-hair and from that single fact stemmed the fearsome modern dilemma explored by N. Scott Momaday in House Made of Dawn. Abel is an Indian of the American Southwest, a member of a culture for whom Nature is the one great reality to which men’s lives are pegged, the only verity upon which men may rely. Within this massive concept lie all the religion, all the mores and ethics, all the spiritual truth any man may require. To shatter the concept is to shatter the man. Momaday describes the tragic odyssey of a man forcibly removed from this psychic environment and placed within a culture light-years away from the attitudes, values, and goals of his former life. His anguished ordeal, heightened by his encounter with a white woman, endows him at last with courage and wisdom; he comes to know who he is and what he must do to maintain that identity.

In the Indian view, the universe or Nature is a great cosmological unity characterized by a harmony and oneness of all living things. Religion is not a thing apart from life, it is life itself. Oral communication is minimal; words are not needed between people sharing a common culture whose limitations and capabilities are known to all. Abel growing up in this timeless tradition is endowed with an understanding that transcends the ordinary limits of the word: «the boy could sense his grandfather’s age, just as he knew somehow that his mother was soon going to die of her illness. It was nothing he was told, but he knew it anyway and without understanding, as he knew already the motion of the sun and the seasons.»

After four centuries of Christianity, the essential way of life is unchanged. The people still pray to the old deities in their own language. They have assumed the names and some of the habits of their enemies but have kept their own souls and their own secrets: «in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.» Evil spirits as well as good are a part of the pantheon, and Momaday uses both in the unfolding of his remarkable novel. Slowly, by means of fragmentary glimpses into the lives of Abel, Ben, Francisco, and others, Momaday leads to an understanding not only of the Indian’s dilemma in the modern world, but of Abel’s particular torment and what brought it about.

Francisco, Abel’s grandfather, has lived all his life on the reservation, within and a part of this culture. The important events of his life are totally alien to outsiders: the ritual killing of the bear to symbolize the coming of age, the marks of pollen made above the eyes of the bear, the arduous period of instruction preliminary to his participation in a sacred ceremony, and the healing powers he later acquires as a result of his growing «understanding.» In many ways, Abel and his grandfather are much alike and only a very careful reading of some passages will make clear which of them is being referred to.

One is reminded that the diminutive of Abel, «Abelito», is much like «Abuelito», the affectionate term for grandfather. The resemblance is not accidental, of course; in a sense, his close attachment to his grandfather and the old ways is the burden Abel must struggle with during the course of the novel.

Abel is not a superficial human being. His suffering is profound and moving, as is the catharsis wrought by that suffering. In a striking passage describing the shoes Abel wears when he leaves the reservation, Momaday points up the differences in attitude: «they squeaked when he walked. In the only frame of reference he had ever known, they called attention to themselves, simply, honestly … but now and beyond his former frame of reference, the shoes called attention to Abel. They were brown and white and they were conspicuously new and too large … they shone; they clattered and creaked … and they were nailed to his feet. There were enemies all around, and he knew that he was ridiculous in their eyes.» Years later, after a stint in the army, he returns, reeling drunkenly from the steps of the noisy bus into the arms of his weeping grandfather: «everything in advance of his going—he could remember whole and in detail. It was the recent past, the intervention of days and years without meaning, of awful calm and collision, time always immediate and confused, that he could not put together in his mind.» Fully twenty-four hours elapse before Abel begins to realize where he is, both geographically and culturally. Not until he walks out, just before dawn, to a high and distant hill where he sees the vast beauty of the valleys and remembers incidents from his youth, does a kind of peace come to him. But it does not last. Less than two weeks later, during the feast of Santiago, an evil spirit reveals himself to Abel, who, acting entirely within the Indian tradition, kills him.

The albino or, significantly, the white man, has been seen earlier as a figure of evil when Francisco heard whisperings from the corn and was afraid; after he left, the albino emerged or rather seemed to materialize from the green leaves. Since corn is life itself to the Indian, to hear an evil spirit breathing in the corn is a dangerous thing. A snake, or culebra, is likewise a symbol of evil, and when the albino threatens to turn into a snake, Abel’s course is clear. Significantly, after his years in prison his attitude is unchanged. «They must know,» Ben says, «that he would kill the white man again, if he had the chance … for he would know what the white man was, and he would kill him if he could. A man kills such an enemy if he can.»

Abel’s real suffering and purgation begin after he leaves prison and wanders to Los Angeles. There he meets Ben, Milly, and Tosamah. Ben, like Abel, has been raised on the reservation but has managed to make an adjustment of sorts. Ben can compromise; he is willing to overlook evil or un-kindness and is able to see good in most situations: «You know, you have to change. That’s the only way you can live in a place like this. You have to forget about the way it was, how you grew up and all … You wonder how you can get yourself into the swing of it, you know?… And you want to do it, because you can see how good it is … it’s money and clothes and having plans and going someplace fast.» Because Ben wants to be a part of it, he is willing to live on the fringe of white society, like a child outside a candy store window. When he speaks, one can clearly hear the voice of a lonely man: «this place is always cold and kind of empty when it rains,» «you never have to be alone. You go downtown and there are a lot of people all around and they’re having a good time.» Ben has not yet admitted to himself that he is only an outsider; he feels the American Dream is his, too, and he is committed to pursuing it. «I could find someplace with a private bathroom if I wanted to, easy. A man with a good job can do just about anything he wants.»

Tosamah (John Big Bluff Tosamah) is a very different sort of man. Like Ben he acknowledges his heritage but is not chained to it like Abel. «Priest of the Sun» is a key section for understanding the Indian concept of «The Word» as opposed to the Christian. Tosamah begins by stating in Latin, «In Principio erat Verbum.» Caught up in the mystery of the words, he continues, «in the darkness … the smallest seed of sound … took hold of the dark-ness and there was light; it took hold out of the stillness and there was motion forever … it scarcely was; but it was and everything began.» But at this point, his voice and attitude abruptly switch from that of a priest to that of a huckster, as he tells how this mystery was corrupted by a Christian interpretation: «But it was more than the Truth. The Truth was overgrown with fat; the fat was John’s god and God stood between John and the Truth … and he said, ‘In the Beginning was the Word …’ and man, right then and there he should have stopped … Old John was a white man and the white man builds upon [the word], he adds and divides and multiplies the Word and in all of this he subtracts the Truth.» Tosamah’s bitterness can be heard in his parting words to his «parishoners»: «Good night and get yours.»

Tosamah, the Priest of the Sun, is as much an outsider in white society as Father Olguin is in Indian society. The dry, mechanical Mass which Father Olguin conducts contrasts interestingly with the peyote ritual at which Tosamah presides, where the mysticism each participant comes to feel is translated into a moving and spontaneous prayer without the embarrassment of spoken prayer; it is part of the old tradition. The tears of one of the participants are not despised, they are accepted; weeping is no disgrace if the occasion calls for weeping. The Mass has the bread, the wine, the incense, the bell; the peyote ritual has the peyote buttons, the prayer sticks, the «makings,» and the drummer. The Indian’s ritual marking is with pollen, and the priest’s with ashes. Tosamah reverts to a caricature of American speech in explaining the impact of peyote: «that little old woolly booger turns you on like a light, man. Daddy peyote is the vegetal representation of the sun,» recalling the transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

Where the Indian view is at one with Nature, one might say the Catholic view, as typified by Father Olguin and Angela Grace St. John, exists in spite of Nature; the basic difference would seem to doom in advance any hope of accord. Reflecting the missionary zeal which is characteristic of his faith, Father Olguin tries over the years to enlarge his small flock and to urge his parishioners away from the old ways. In the end, he comes to recognize tacitly that some old and final cleavage still exists which he can never bridge. He tries, however, to make the legal authorities understand, as best he can, what prompted Abel to kill the albino. Once again we see the clash of the two cultures: «I believe that this man was moved to do what he did by an act of imagination so compelling as to be inconceivable to us…. Yes, yes, yes. But these are the facts: he killed a man—took the life of another human being…. Homicide is a legal term, but the law is not my context; and certainly it isn’t his…. Murder is a moral term. Death is a universal human term.»

Both the parole officer and the Relocation people attempt to keep Abel out of trouble, but his problems only deepen. «They have a lot of words,» as Ben says, «and you know they mean something but you don’t know what … Everything is different and you don’t know how to get used to it.» Ben understands Abel’s plight, and is compassionate. Tosamah understands and is contemptuous.

Ben and Milly literally keep Abel alive in his darkest hours. Where he has understanding based on knowledge, she has understanding based on love. «She was a lot like Ben. She believed in Honor, Industry, the Second Chance, the Brotherhood of Man, the American Dream and him—Abel; she believed in him.» She also loved him; she gave him money, a place to stay, and ministered to his needs out of love. On a few rare occasions, she could even make him laugh. But Milly is gentle and vulnerable. And Abel is possessed by an evil spirit. They are drawn together by their awful loneliness, but it is not enough. All her experience had been a getting away from the land where his had been a returning. At the height of his suffering, her name echoes through his mind; only her name, and a question mark. Sadly, the name is remembered, but not the identity.

Abel sinks ever deeper in the white world’s web. One night, too drunk and helpless to answer Tosamah’s taunts, he sets out to seek some kind of release, to kill the evil spirit, the culebra, that has brought about his misery. Instead of exorcising the evil, he undergoes a mortal combat (presumably at the hands of Martinze, the sadistic cop) that leaves him broken and near death. «He had lost his place. He had long ago been at the center, had known where he was, had lost his way, had wandered to the end of the earth, was even now reeling on the edge of the void … The sea reached and waned, licked after him and withdrew, falling off forever in the abyss.»

Abel, badly beaten and lying on the beach, is unable to see because of his swollen eyes. We remember that Father Olguin’s vision is also poor and that the albino masks his weak sight with small dark glasses. All, in one way or another, «see» with difficulty. The albino’s vision is clouded by evil, Fa-ther Olguin’s by his Christian beliefs, and Abel’s by not accepting his birthright. If Abel’s suffering suggests that of Oedipus, then we might say that the grunion form a chorus, and it is no mean comparison. Momaday’s evocation of the grunion metaphor seems singularly appropriate for the situation. They, like Abel, belong to the natural order of things; they respond from the tradition of centuries, only to fall victim to the wanton ways of the white man. Abel, too, has been beaten by an evil spirit of the white world and must somehow get back to his own environment in order to survive. «His body was mangled and racked with pain. His body, like his mind, had turned on him; it was his enemy.» He has tried to do what seemed to him must be done: extirpate evil. But he has failed; in the white man’s world, right and wrong are not the same, and the old values somehow do not apply. He remembers seeing, in his youth, the old men running after evil. Here, it is not the same. He knows at last that he must survive beyond his pain, and return to the life he understands.

Abel has indeed, «lost his place.» A reason for his particular suffering lies in the ancient Indian belief that all secrets, even those of sorcery and evil, are divulged during sexual intercourse. Abel had lain with a woman, Angela Grace St. John, and both were altered by the experience.

When Angela comes to live at Los Ojos (The Eyes), she is a distant, disturbed woman. Her attitudes are as far as possible from the Indian’s. She keeps herself coldly apart from human contact and «would have her bath and read from the lives of the saints.» She despises her body and the child growing within her: «She could think of nothing more vile and obscene than the raw flesh and blood of her body, the ravelled veins and gore upon her bones. And now the monstrous fetal form, the blue, blind, great headed thing growing within and feeding upon her … at odd moments she wished with all her heart to die by fire, fire of such intense heat that her body should dissolve in it all at once.» To the suggestion of disharmony is added the hint of evil: Abel would not bargain, hence, «it remained for her to bring about a vengeance.»

Their coming together is an epiphany for each of them; she draws from him a kind of vision she has never experienced before, a «knowingness» of who she is, and of her relationship to other living things and to life itself. But the evil spirit which has hitherto clouded her days now descends upon him. «Angela put her white hands to his body. Abel put his hands to her white body.»

Father Olguin is the first to sense the change in her. He has seen her as an ally with whom he can share his world of words; a fellow outsider in the Indian world. But «she listened through him to the sound of thunder and of rain that fell upon the mountains miles away,… she had a craving for the rain … ‘Oh, my God’ she said, laughing, ‘I am heartily sorry … for having offended Thee.'» Her laughter horrifies him almost as much as her confession.

When the sky darkens and the storm breaks, Angela no longer fears nor shrinks from Nature: she «stood transfixed in the open door and breathed deep into her lungs the purest electric scent of the air. She closed her eyes, and the clear aftervision of the rain, which she could still hear and feel so perfectly as to conceive of nothing else, obliterated all the mean and myriad fears that had laid hold of her in the past.» From that moment on, evil stalks Abel’s steps; the disharmony and alienation that had characterized Angela’s life now infects his.

Not until years later, when she visits Abel in the hospital and, in effect, releases him, does the evil finally begin to ebb. As she speaks of her son, Peter, and the Indian tales he loves to hear, Ben remembers the stories told by his grandfather who spoke from the legends of his heritage. Abel understands; he does not speak, nor refer to her visit afterwards. Hearing Angela and seeing how she has changed has at last made clear to him just how and why he has lost his way.

House Made of Dawn is an intricately structured novel, and difficult to analyze. Time, for the Indian, is conceived not as a rigidly divided set of days, months, and years, but as experience and wisdom and knowledge, occurring today or yesterday or many yesterdays ago. Memory is the only immortality. Through memory history is transmitted from generation to generation. Memory, too, presents the novel; events from Francisco’s past, or from Abel’s, Ben’s, or Tosamah’s, are juxtaposed with events of the present moment, giving the reader a dimensional montage of thought and attitude.

Few of us suffer from our pasts as Abel must suffer. The Abel who comes back to the reservation to tend his dying grandfather is broken in body but healed in spirit. Wordlessly, he attends the last hours until death, then dresses the body according to the ancient ways. Summoned at night, the priest, significantly, is indignant over the time: «Good Heavens, couldn’t you have waited until—Do you know what time it is?» By then, Abel indeed knows what time it is as far as his life is concerned, and he knows, too, that the particular hour of the day or night is of no consequence. Father Olguin, for all his good intentions, understands the Indian no better than his late nineteenth-century predecessor, Fray Nicholas, who, we learn from the old journal, was called on a similar occasion only after the Indian rites had been performed on a body.

After a long and bitter odyssey and much suffering, Abel has come home. He knows at last where he belongs in the scheme of things. During the long vigil before Francisco’s death, he begins once again to feel a peace and a kinship with his heritage: «it was the room in which he was born, in which his mother and his brother died. Just then, and for moments and hours and days, he had no memory of being outside of it.» When Abel leaves the mission, rubs himself with ashes, and goes on to join the other dawn runners, he is not only assuming his role as male survivor of his family, but also completing the final phase of his own spiritual healing. As he runs, as he becomes a part of the orderly continuum of interrelated events that constitute the Indian universe, Abel is the land, and he is of the land once more.

Source: Marion Willard Hylton, «On a Trail of Pollen: Momaday’s House Made of Dawn,» in Critique, Vol. XIV, No. 2, 1972, pp. 60-69.

Sources

Bennett, John Z., review, in Western American Literature, Volume V, Number 1, Spring, 1970, p. 69.

Meredith, Howard, «N. Scott Momaday: A Man of Words,» in World Literature Today, Vol. 64, No. 3, Summer, 1990, pp. 405-07.

Schubnell, Matthias, «The Identity of Crisis: House Made of Dawn,» in N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background, University of Oklahoma Press, 1985, pp. 109-39.

Smith, William James, review, in Commonweal, Vol. LXXXVII, September 20, 1968.

Sprague, Marshall, «Anglos and Indians,» in The New York Times Book Review, June 9, 1968.

Willard Hylton, Marion, «On a Trail of Pollen: Momaday’s House Made of Dawn,» in Critique, Vol. XIV, No. 2, 1972.

For Further Study

Mayhill, Mildred, The Kiowas, University of Oklahoma Press, 1962.

Mayhill presents a well-documented sociological account of the Kiowa people.

Nelson, Robert M., The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction, Lang Publishers, 1993.

Examines works by Momaday, Silko, and Welch.

Nelson Waniek, Marilyn, «The Power of Language in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn,» in Minority Voices, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1980, pp. 23-8.

Addresses the importance of language in the novel.

Scarberry-Garcia, Susan, Landmarks of Healing: A Study of House Made of Dawn, University of New Mexico Press, 1990.

A rare book-length consideration of the novel that touches upon all of the varied theories, offering an excellent overview of critical opinion.

Sharma, R. S., «Vision and Form in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn,» in Indian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, January 1982, pp. 69-79.

Discusses the roles of vision and narrative form in the novel.

Zachrau, Thekla, «N. Scott Momaday: Towards an Indian Identity,» in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1979, pp. 39-56.

An overview of Momaday’s career, including his attempts to use varied storytelling techniques to bring the Kiowa vision of reality to a broader public.

Cite this article
Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

House Made of Dawn/Allusions and References

Contents

Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science [ edit | edit source ]

American Indians and World War II [ edit | edit source ]

Some 25,000 American Indians served in the military during World War II. Described as the first large-scale exodus of indigenous peoples from the reservations since the defeat of their ancestors by whites in the 1800s, the international conflict was a turning point in American Indian history. Men of native descent, drafted into the military like other American males, enjoyed full integration into the armed forces. Their fellow soldiers often held them in high esteem, in part since the legend of the tough Indian warrior had become a part of the fabric of American historical legend. White servicemen sometimes showed a lighthearted respect toward American Indian comrades by calling them «chief.»

The resulting increase in contact with the world outside of the reservation system brought profound changes to American Indian culture. «The war,» said the U.S. Indian commissioner in 1945, «caused the greatest disruption of Indian life since the beginning of the reservation era,» affecting the habits, views, and economic well-being of tribal members (Bernstein, p. 131). The most significant of these changes was the opportunity—as a result of wartime labor shortages—to find well-paying work. Yet there were losses to contend with as well. Altogether, 1,200 Pueblo Indians served in World War II; only about half came home alive.

Postwar readjustment [ edit | edit source ]

American Indian veterans encountered varying degrees of difficulty in re-entering tribal life after World War II, depending on the individual and the tribe. Some tribes gave their veterans a hero’s welcome; others treated them as if they had been sullied by their contact with whites. The Zuni Pueblo insisted that their servicemen be cleansed in a purifying rite before reinitiating contact with tribal members; on the other hand, the Navajo viewed their veterans as a positive force, whose service and contact in the war portended progress for the tribe. Meanwhile, with peace came a diminished respect from the outside world. Having been treated as equals and esteemed as warriors during the war, the Indians now felt acutely the sudden loss of their former status once they removed their uniforms, returning once again to second-class status in the eyes of many whites.

Though assimilation into the general population may have seemed a relatively easy matter for urban Indians—in contrast to those remaining on the reservations—often the opposite was true. Many urban Indians came to identify more strongly than before with their «Indianness» and tended to form American Indian enclaves in the city, with members from different tribes banding together in pan-Indian groups that gave rise to new mixtures of traditions. In the novel Abel moves from Jemez to Los Angeles, where he meets both Ben Benally, a Navajo, and John Big Bluff Tosamah, a Kiowa. Elements of all three indigenous peoples—the Jemez, Navajo, and Kiowa—manifest themselves in the novel. Though the main character Abel hails from Jemez, for example, the title House Made of Dawn is drawn from Navajo lyrics that he learns from Ben in the city.

Relocation [ edit | edit source ]

House Made of Dawn reaches back, through the words of Reverend Tosamah, to the late 1800s, a time of defeat for buffalo-hunting tribes such as the Kiowa. Their Chief Satanta was arrested and kept under close guard in Texas. The government sought to restrict other Kiowas to an area within ten miles of Fort Sill (Oklahoma) by the end of 1874. But a large number rebelled, taking refuge, along with some Comanches, in Palo Duro Canyon (Texas), where they intended to live off the buffalo as in the past. They erected tepees in the canyon and amassed winter supplies, until U.S. troops stormed the tepees and slaughtered a thousand of the rebels’ ponies. Forced to surrender, the rebels were disarmed and those identified as ringleaders were imprisoned. Three years later, his people defeated, Satanta committed suicide, throwing himself out of his prison hospital window.

From the late 1800s until well into the twentieth century, the Kiowa and other native groups were subject to a series of reversals in Indian policy at the hands of the U.S. government. After forcing most indigenous peoples of the southeastern United States and Plains region into so-called Indian Territory in the 1830s, federal policy then restricted them to smaller swaths of land as white settlers began populating what would become the states of Nebraska and Kansas. Next came the Dawes Act of 1887, which attempted to break up reservations by allotting 160-acre parcels to individual Indian families—many of which were sold to whites. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, however, ended allotment, restored tribal lands to indigenous peoples, and did an about-face by promoting the survival of reservations. This benevolent attitude was reversed with the relocation and termination policies of the early 1950s, which attempted to eliminate tribes as political entities. Much of House Made of Dawn takes place in 1952, the year the government adopted a widespread relocation program that offered incentives for American Indians to move off the reservations and into cities. The inducements usually included bus tickets as well as the initial costs of food, shelter, and job training. The relocation policy dovetailed with the government’s aim of ending the special identity of Indians and assimilating them into the general population. This goal became official in 1953 with the adoption of the termination policy. Its ultimate intention was to sever ties between the federal government and tribal entities, and thus eliminate the separate status of the «Indian.»

Of most relevance to House Made of Dawn is the relocation policy. It responded to concerns about American Indian soldiers and war production workers who grew accustomed to earning wages in wartime and then returned to reservations where there were few wage positions to fill. The relocation policy, however, proved far from successful, as portrayed in the novel. Abel’s attempt at city living is a dismal failure, as was the case for many real-life Indian veterans. In fact, his postwar path—returning to Jemez, moving to a city, then coming back to the reservation—was far from uncommon: «Even though most Indians initially returned [to the reservations]; many became quickly discouraged and left, only to reappear months later after unsuccessful attempts to readjust to life in the non-Indian world» (Bernstein, p. 133). Sooner or later, at least one third of the relocated moved back to the reservation.

Jemez [ edit | edit source ]

By 1728 the Jemez had re-established their village at the Jemez River, naming it Walatowa, which meant «Village of the Bear.» They survived for the next century before being joined in 1838 by twenty survivors of the expiring Pecos Pueblo, called «Bahkyula» by the Indians («Bahkyush,» a term used in House Made of Dawn, designates the people of the Pecos Pueblo). One of the immigrants, Francisco Kota, had two daughters, the first of whom married an albino, Juan Reyes Fragua, a real-life source for the albino character in the novel. Excerpts from the diary of a Roman Catholic missionary appear in the novel, mentioning a child born to «Manuelita & Diego Fragua. It is what is called an albino whiter than any child I have seen before. It is given a name Juan Reyes» (Momaday, House Made of Dawn, p. 50).

The sun dance and the peyote religion [ edit | edit source ]

The Kiowa observe the Sun Dance rite, a renewal ceremony performed in the past to settle quarrels, celebrate the harvest, maintain a plentiful buffalo population, and to bring about victory in battle, success in marriage, and healing of the sick. Wooden skewers were inserted into the folds of skin in the chest or the back of participants. A leather rope was fastened at one end to the skewer and at the other to the top of the Sun Lodge, so that the dancers dangled in mid-air until the skewers broke their flesh free. The federal government first outlawed the Sun Dance in 1881; it would be revived on the Great Plains in the late 1950s, just a few years after the novel takes place.

Also closely tied to the Kiowa Indians is the peyote religion, preached by John Big Bluff Tomasah in the novel. It is a religion rooted in belief in the supernatural origin of the hallucinogenic peyote cactus and in its ability to induce miracles. The Kiowas used peyote before they settled on their reservation in the 1870s, but it took several more decades for its usage to spread to other tribes. The religion gained enough adherents in Oklahoma and Nebraska to form a loose inter-tribal association in 1906 and then to incorporate as the Native American Church in 1918. Over the next few decades, the movement spread to the Southwest and the West Coast, with various Kiowas distinguishing themselves as some of the religion’s leaders. In the novel, Tosamah promotes the faith, which involves eating the peyote buttons and experiencing their hallucinatory effect. The aim is to gain new vision, and «the curative power of Peyote is the vital point» (Stewart, p. 332).

The night chant [ edit | edit source ]

The title of the novel, House Made of Dawn, is drawn from lyrics in a Navajo ceremony—the Night Chant. In Navajo healing, the Night Chant ceremony is administered as a cure for most types of head ailments, including mental disturbances. The ceremony, conducted over several days, involves purification, evocation of the gods, identification between the patient and the gods, and the transformation of the patient. Each day entails the performance of certain rites and the creation of detailed sand paintings. On the ninth evening a final all-night ceremony occurs, in which the dark male thunderbird god is evoked in a song that starts by describing his home:

In the house made of the dawn,

In the house made of the evening light

The medicine man proceeds by asking the god to be present, then identifying the patient with the power of the god and describing the patient’s transformation to renewed health with lines such as «Happily I recover/Happily my interior becomes cool» (Sandner, p. 90). The same dance is repeated throughout the night, usually forty eight times. Altogether the Night Chant ceremony takes about ten hours to perform, and it ends at dawn.

Events in history at the time the novel was written [ edit | edit source ]

Self-determination [ edit | edit source ]

By the late 1960s, when the novel was written, the U.S. government had reformed Indian policy yet again. After the dismal failure of attempts to legislate assimilation and tribal termination, a new policy of self-determination for indigenous peoples was adopted. It aimed to preserve the distinct status of the separate American Indian peoples and to make them independent of federal control—while still providing them with federal support. Self-determination would become official policy in 1970. During the previous decade, in which the civil rights movement grew in force and acceptance, there arose widespread concern for minorities. The movement at first had little impact on American Indians; after generations of broken treaties and policy reversals, most tended to distrust any leader who promised a better way of life through government intervention. Moreover, in the early sixties, leaders of the civil rights movement promoted desegregation and empowerment of the individual—concepts contrary to Indian goals, which involved community empowerment and segregation from the mainstream. Eventually, though, the civil rights movement would have a strong impact on Indians and their push for fair treatment under the law. This was evident as early as 1964, when the National Indian Youth Congress adopted the techniques of black civil rights leaders, filing lawsuits against what the activists argued were discriminatory practices.

Jemez runners [ edit | edit source ]

As much as 70% of the 1,890 Jemez Indians were living on their reservation lands in the early 1970s. Though by then an increasing number were switching to wage-earning work rather than agriculture, the residents continued to raise chili peppers, corn, and wheat, to speak their native language, and to maintain customary practices.

Running, an old Jemez pastime and ceremonial activity, grew even more popular than it had been before World War II. Prior to the advent of television at Jemez, tales of running feats had been a major form of entertainment on winter nights. Races continued to hold their ceremonial place as the years passed, their purpose being to assist the movement of the sun and moon or to hasten the growth of crops, for example. At the same time, they became a popular secular sport. The year 1959 saw the first annual Jemez All-Indian Track and Field Meet, won by runners from Jemez seven times in the first ten years. A Jemez runner, Steve Gachupin, won the Pike’s Peak Marathon in 1968, the year the novel was published, setting a record by reaching the top in just 2 hours, 14 minutes, 56 seconds.