HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS

In an essay titled “All the Good Indians,” Native American poet, novelist, and scholar Paula Gunn Allen recalls first reading Momaday's then-new novel. She was a student at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and, as she explains, she was living in an Indianless world: “I was the only Indian I knew. That was around 1967. Sometime in 1968, a package arrived in the mail from my parents. It was a signed copy of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn. I believe that book saved my life.”At the time, she recalls, she thought that in the end of the novel “Abel ran into life, into tradition, into strength.”¹ This hopeful ending is part of what saved the college student; the book enabled her to believe, at least for the moment, that she was not alone, that the world was not without Indians.

Although Allen may well speak somewhat metaphorically or even hyperbolically about the book's saving her life, enabling her to survive, the point she makes is appropriate and certainly sheds light on the novel's place in history. House Made of Dawn broke what had been a long, long silence of Native American novelists. In an overview of American Indian literature, Native American Fiction (1985), Andrew Wiget devotes a little more than one page to the period between Darcy McNickle (Cree/Salish) publishing his novel The Surrounded in 1936 and Momaday publication of House Made of Dawn thirty-two years later. In that space Wiget briefly describes the social and political conditions of American Indians between 1940 and 1970, but he does not mention a single American Indian writer from that period.² Charles Larson alludes to this same lacuna: “there is a gap between American Indian fiction of the thirties and the sixties—more than one of years. The hiatus of the forties and the fifties (decades when no novels by Native Americans were published) represents a philosophical and symbolic break with earlier practices, a turn from assimilation to rejection.”³ In her overview of American Indian literatures, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff cites a few books of nonfiction that were published in the 1940s, but then nothing was published until 1968: “The writer whose work began what is called the renaissance of American Indian literature was N. Scott Momaday.”⁴

One of the most significant historical contributions of Momaday's novel, then, is that it marks the beginning of a literary movement, a Native American literary renaissance. The publication of House Made of Dawn in 1968 and its receiving the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year marked the beginning of national (and indeed an international) recognition of the literature by Native Americans. It seems undeniable that Momaday's early success paved the way for the numerous Native American writers to publish in the 1970s, notably the successful Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), James Welch (Blackfeet), Simon Ortiz (San Juan), Louise Erdrich (Ojibwa), Gerald Vizenor (Ojibwa), and Paula Gunn Allen herself (Laguna/Sioux).

Kenneth Lincoln's study Native American Renaissance serves as a critical focal point for the literary movement. Lincoln argues that despite ties to mainstream Western influences, genres, and themes, “Grounded Indian literature is tribal: its fulcrum is a sense of relatedness.” Lincoln suggests that the literature of this renaissance “is a written renewal of oral traditions translated into Western literary forms. Contemporary Indian literature is not so much new, then, as regenerate: transitional continuities emerging from the old.”⁵ If one follows Lincoln's suggestion, one can readily see Momaday's place at the beginning of such a movement. The use of oral narrative, his retelling of the old in new contexts and genres, along with his use of traditional Western forms such as poetry, the novel, and autobiography, all place Momaday within the movement he is credited with initiating.

The notion of a Native American literary renaissance with Momaday's House Made of Dawn at its beginnings was so well established by the 1990s that Hartwig Isernhagen includes in his list of interview questions this query: “How—if you accept the House Made of Dawn stands at the beginning of a Native American renaissance—do you account for the seminal importance of the work?”⁶ In response to this particular question, Momaday has this to say about his own novel's place in that tradition:

I think, maybe, the answer to that is that it is simply timing, that it appeared at a time when the world was ready for it, in 1968. I think of the publication of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee [1970] about the same time, and those two books contributed to some kind of important change in the publishing world, for one thing. Suddenly the publishing world found that it had an audience it was not aware of. So House Made of Dawn was fortunate in being very early in what has been called “the Renaissance.” That meant a great deal. … And moreover, you know, it was a story authentically set in an Indian community, the characters are Indian, and recognizably so. And all of that came together in a good way—so that's the answer to that.⁷

In response to the same question, Ojibwa writer Gerald Vizenor declares that the publication of House Made of Dawn made an important impact in three ways. First, Momaday has certainly given Native American writers “the contemporary voice that has a kind of courage to speak with complexity and diversity.” Second, in the context of the novel's winning the Pulitzer, Vizenor suggests that it “brought attention to what was thought to have been a nonexistent literature.” Third, it inspired critical studies of Native American fiction. At the same time Vizenor acknowledges the seminal importance of the novel, he remains ambivalent about why American culture recognized it with the Pulitzer Prize: “I'm quite sure that this national, indeed international, enthusiasm for Native American contemporary literature two or three years following the prize … was like a new colonialism.”⁸

Choctaw-Cherokee writer Louis Owens concurs with Vizenor in his own study of Native American literature, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. He problematizes the Pulitzer committee's wording in its announcement of Momaday's award, quoting the juror's words: this novel demonstrates “the arrival on the American literary scene of a matured, sophisticated literary artist from the original Americans.”⁹ Like Vizenor, Owens argues that the statement embodies colonial attitudes that continue to place the “original American” at the margin of a clearly implied Euro-American center. Nonetheless, Owens implies that this recognition of Momaday's first novel clearly marks a seminal moment in American Indian literary history:

It can indeed be argued that with the appearance of House Made of Dawn, for the first time a novel by an American Indian author—a member of the “aboriginal race”—both portrayed with full power “the drama of the American Indian” (note the implication of theatrical performance, something to be observed from a safe distance) and displayed a talent and sophistication that placed it in the ranks of successful mainstream American novels. … But, most significantly, it seemed that at last, with House Made of Dawn, the work of an author educated in a doctoral program at Stanford University under the tutelage of Yvor Winters, would seem, in fact, to contain the requisite elements of a work assimilable into the modernist canon.¹⁰

Robert Warrior writes that the publication of House Made of Dawn (along with Dee Brown's revisionist history of the 1890 massacre, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee), “brought contemporary American Indian experience and political issues to widespread public attention for the first time since the reform movement of the 1930s.”¹¹ The publication of Momaday's novel—which introduced to a largely non-Indian audience Native American concepts of healing and ritual—coincided with the political movements of the 1960s that were bringing widespread public attention to American Indian experience and political issues. This coincidence of publication and political activism is not to suggest that the novel itself inspired such political action directly; rather, it demonstrates that it is a part of that history, both reflecting and changing it. In a study of the texts people were reading in the 1960s, Philip Beidler identifies what he sees as “one dominant feature of mythic consciousness” from the writings of the era. He argues that there existed “a belief that acts of imagination, inspired modes of thinking and doing, [and the belief that they] might truly change the world.”¹²

House Made of Dawn was an important and integral part of the Indian rejection of the social and political status quo of the decade in relation to government response to American Indian requests for social and economic consideration. Around the time of Momaday's novel, from the late 1960s into the 1970s, there was a resurgence of Indian pride that manifested itself in political action. According to Vine Deloria, Jr., for example, one of the important results of the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 was that it solidified the refusal of the Oglala Sioux “to accept the definitions which the American legal system had used to cover up the status of Indian tribes.” What the Sioux did in their declaration of independence Momaday had done in his novel; they “spoke to the world about freedom for all aboriginal peoples from the tyranny of Western European thought, values, and interpretations of man's experiences.”¹³

In a letter dated 17 September 1968 and addressed to his publisher, Gus Blaisdell at University of New Mexico Press, Momaday quotes Wallace Stegner, who had just sent him a postcard praising House Made of Dawn: “This in the form of an air mail post card, the other day:”

This is only to say that I have read, and wholly admire, your book. It's a poet's novel, which doesn't hurt it. I'm not sure a poet needs a novelist buried in him, but a novelist without a poet buried in him is a cripple. Your work touched and troubled us, as I am sure it was meant to. I hope it does as well as it deserves to.¹⁴

Stegner's response to the novel is indicative of the public response in general. It recognizes the book's artistry and complexity as well as its powerful message. Momaday often receives such acknowledgment for his literary success and for the quality of his writing. The editor of one anthology that includes Momaday writes that the “poetic qualities of Momaday's prose have elicited almost universal praise; his talent for poetry is prodigious, and his experiments with style show his sensitivity to the way that form creates meaning.”¹⁵

As the books, articles, and dissertations devoted to Momaday's novel attest, its place among literary scholars is well established. Among nonacademic readers, the reputation of the novel also seems secure. One indicator of the favorable public response to Momaday is the fact that House Made of Dawn remains in print and continues to be taught in high schools and colleges. The public can also hear House Made of Dawn as a book on tape. The Voice of the West is a video interview that introduces the author of House Made of Dawn to a non-academic audience.

In addition to reaching non-Indian mainstream readers, Momaday's House Made of Dawn has enabled (or empowered) Native American writers to create a fiction that is at once publishable and complex in the way poetry is complex. The novel has thus made several important contributions to literary history. Within a few years after the publication of Momaday's novel, several others by American Indians were published, novels now seen as an important part of a Native American canon by writers who have gained national recognition: Welch's Winter in the Blood (1974), Silko's Ceremony (1977), and Vizenor's Wordarrows and Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart (both 1978), for example. As Welch says in an interview, “We no longer have to apologize for Indian writing. Scott Momaday did great things. House Made of Dawn winning the Pulitzer prize opened many doors. He was an encouragement to many young Indian writers.”¹⁶

The complexity and sophistication of House Made of Dawn (and its winning a major prize) challenged the academic world to take notice. As a result, Native American literary criticism came into its own, as is evident by the many subsequent book-length studies and overviews of American Indian literature by scholars such as Andrew Wiget, Charles Larson, Kenneth Lincoln, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, Louis Owens, James Ruppert, Brian Swann, and Arnold Krupat.

At the same time that House Made of Dawn served as an instance of a complex modernist novel written by a Native American, demanding a critical response, it also introduced the non-Native American audience—the mainstream American audience—to American Indian issues, settings, and worldviews while also challenging simple stereotypes. In response to a question about how in one's writing one might “encounter (counter? subvert?) ethnic stereotypes that are current in the culture at large,” Momaday says “By telling the truth. … I think it's true that probably the best way that you can deal with those stereotypes is simply to provide the truth, and then the stereotypes fall away.” Momaday also admits that at times he uses “the stereotypes against the perpetrators of crimes as they've used them against me and have for generations succeeded. They fail to see the Indian, they see him in their own terms, and of course it's a false view. So I take the false view and throw it back.”¹⁷ By challenging simple stereotypes to the large non-Indian audience that his novel reaches, Momaday's work makes its mark on history. Momaday's characters are not “Indians in aspic,” to use Michael Dorris's terminology.¹⁸ They are not frozen in the nineteenth century; they are not necessarily stoic or immutable. Momaday has introduced twentieth-century American Indians to twentieth-century readers.

Several critics have argued that House Made of Dawn is a novel about healing. According to Susan Scarberry-García, one may recognize “that the powers of the natural world and of Native American Literature are inseparable.” The object, suggests Scarberry-García, “is to unite the sources of healing in the land with the intrinsic healing power in House Made of Dawn.”¹⁹ Using Scarberry-García's argument as a point of departure, James Ruppert maintains that the movement of non-Native readers toward an understanding of Native American metaphysics and epistemology (specifically Kiowa, Pueblo, and Navajo in this context) and hence toward a Native American worldview “is beneficial for them and the future of cross-cultural interactions.”²⁰ If we agree that historical change comes about as a result of common people's thoughts, beliefs, and daily actions on a local level, then we can appreciate that Momaday's novel reaches out to Native American and non-Native readers alike, sharing cultures and healing techniques and thereby bringing these groups closer together on epistemological levels. As Momaday himself says, “the Indian has an understanding of the physical world and of the earth as a spiritual entity that is his, very much his own. The non-Indian can benefit a good deal by having that perception revealed to him.”²¹ That, insists Momaday, is one of the most valuable contributions his writing can make to history.

In her 1987 essay, “Bringing Home the Fact: Tradition and Continuity in the Imagination,” Paula Gunn Allen returns to a discussion of the novel that in the summer of 1968 saved her life. A novel, in general, she argues, is “an act of the imagination struck in coherence, a whole that signifies something about life and mind. The imaginative construction of personhood is the best, and perhaps the only kind of life, as N. Scott Momaday suggests when he writes that 'an Indian is an idea which a given man has of himself.'” In her responses to the novel, Allen has come full circle. From her first reading as a student at the University of Oregon to her response as a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, House Made of Dawn, she writes, is “an act of the imagination designed to heal.”²²

Notes

1. Paula Gunn Allen, “All the Good Indians,” in The '60s Without Apology, edited by Sohnya Sayres, et al (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 227.

2. Andrew Wiget, Native American Literature (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985), pp. 80-82.

3. Charles R. Larson, American Indian Fiction (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), p. 67.

4. LaVonne Ruoff, American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990), p. 76. There were actually a few works by Native Americans written and published during these two, almost three, decades, but nothing of much import on a national level and only one novel. As Ruoff mentions, Louis Marie Hunter published a history, The Shinnecock Indians, in 1950, for example. In 1967, the year before Momaday's novel, Dallas Chief Eagle published his historical novel recounting the plains wars culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, Winter Count.

5. Kenneth Lincoln, Native American Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 8.

6. Hartwig Isernhagen, “N. Scott Momaday and the Use(s) of Modernism,” in Aspects of Modernism, edited by Andreas Fischer (Tuebingen, Germany: Narr, 1997), p. 23.

7. Hartwig Isernhagen, Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong: Conversations on American Indian Writing (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), p. 35.

8. Ibid., p. 96.

9. Quoted in Louis Owens, Other Destinies (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), p. 90.

10. Louis Owens, Other Destinies, p. 91.

11. Robert Warrior, Tribal Secrets (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 37.

12. Philip D. Beidler, Scriptures of a Generation: What We Were Reading in the '60s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 2.

13. Vine Deloria, Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (New York: Delta, 1974), pp. 80-81.

14. N. Scott Momaday to Gus Blaisdell, 17 September 1968, Bancroft Library.

15. Sandra Fehl Tropp and Ann Pierson D'Angelo, Essays in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 405.

16. Joseph Bruchac, “I Just Kept My Eyes Open: An Interview with James Welch,” in Survival This Way (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987), p. 319.

17. Isernhagen, Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong, pp. 43, 44, 45.

18. Michael Dorris, “Indians in Aspic,” New York Times, 24 February 1991. Op. Ed. IV, 17:1.

19. Susan Scarberry-García, Landmarks of Healing (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), p. 16.

20. James Ruppert, “Intricate Patterns of the Universe,” chapter 3 of Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), p. 43.

21. Joseph Bruchac, Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, p. 190.

22. Paula Gunn Allen, “Bringing Home the Fact: Tradition and Continuity in the Imagination,” in Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 563, 571. Allen quotes Momaday, “The Man Made of Words,” in Literature of the American Indian, edited by Abraham Chapman (New York: New American Library, 1975), p. 96.