THEMES, IMAGES, ALLUSIONS, AND METAPHORS

House Made of Dawn contains a rich mixture of Jemez, Navajo, and Kiowa, as well as many non-Indian and Western images, allusions, and themes. From the novel's first word, “Dypaloh” (the Jemez word to signal the beginning of a story), the reader enters a complex world where diverse cultures meet, mix, and clash. As a part of this clash, Momaday draws on his own multifaceted heritage of both Native American and European American belief systems and cultural practices while writing his modernist book. As is typical of a modernist novel, House Made of Dawn relies on allusion and reference to myth, legend, religious stories and practices, biography, autobiography, and other works of literary art as a means of giving shape to a philosophy or world view introduced by the work.

The inclusion and combining of these various traditions in the novel suggest only one of the many ways House Made of Dawn is typical of a modernist novel, however. Momaday takes great liberties with conventional notions of plot development, for instance. Because of his use of flashback to narrate events prior to the present action, it is not always immediately clear how one event is separated from or connected to another, or by how much time. This plot device suggests the importance and immediacy of events that may have happened in an adult character's childhood. On a psychological level, the reader must often experience events as the characters themselves experience them; that is, the reader often enters into the consciousness of a particular character and sees the world from his or her perspective. Several narrative devices help Momaday show the reader the world through the partial viewpoint of that character. The reader comes to understand the relevance of certain events only as the character comes to understand them.

Momaday's switching narrators during the telling of the story is another modernist characteristic. It has the effect both of offering multiple perspectives on a single event and of making apparent the limitations of point of view in general. The reader becomes acutely aware of the risks involved in relying on any particular narrator. Other modernist techniques that Momaday uses include reliance on stream-of-consciousness narration, development of psychological depth and psycho-pathologies, use of ambiguity, investigation of existential philosophy, and development of the theory of the absurd and the principle of uncertainty.

One can certainly summarize the plot of House Made of Dawn, but any such summary necessarily leaves out much of what “happens” in the book. Summary fails to include issues such as Abel's identity crisis, which may reflect a crisis of the Pueblo people, of American Indians in general, or even a general crisis in American culture. Summary is incapable of demonstrating how one (including the reader) might be healed through experiencing the narrative as it is presented, and summary also must necessarily fail to adequately present the extremely complex roles one's personal and communal past plays in his or her present moment and sense of self.

Momaday is able to address many such issues through allusion, metaphor, and literary reference from a host of various cultures, genres, and literatures. Indeed, the novel includes themes concerning Navajo, Jemez, and Kiowa cultures, the centrality of landscape to one's sense of self, and the effects of Christianity in native communities. He also includes issues typically associated with Western traditions in literature such as allusion to previous writers (like William Faulkner, for instance) and use of genres such as the novel, letters, and autobiographical narrative. Momaday uses many such motifs to explore personal and cultural disintegration and rehabilitation.

Navajo Night Chant: One of the most important allusions in House Made of Dawn is to Navajo Chantway healing songs and rituals. The novel's title itself comes from the chant:

Tségihi.

House made of dawn,

House made of evening light,

House made of dark cloud …

In addition to providing the title, the Night Chant serves as a means for structuring the entire work. In the opening sentence of the novel Momaday alludes to the “house made of dawn” of this ritual: “There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain …” The chant is also the song Abel sings as he runs in the novel's final sentence: “House made of pollen, house made of dawn” (1, 212). In the novel's pan-Indian environment of Los Angeles, Benally shares the words of this healing ritual with his friend Abel. The Night Chant, which serves as both a healing process and an occasion for religious revival in general among the Navajo, is thus structurally and thematically central to the novel.

Twin motif: Both Jemez and Navajo traditions include stories of twins, and Momaday seems to allude to these traditions in at least two instances. Abel, the reader remembers, has an older brother, who died as a boy; Ben Benally claims a kinship with Abel as soon as he meets him. Although strictly speaking Abel and Vidal are not twins, they do fit the twin archetype for literary purposes; as Susan Scarberry-García suggests, “There are numerous motifs and images that appear in the Stricken Twins myth that are replicated in House Made of Dawn, suggesting that Abel is projected into a specific healing pattern.”¹ Comparison of Momaday's use of Abel and Vidal shows some interesting correspondences, but such a comparison is also problematic in that there are significant differences between the traditional stories and Momaday's presentation of the brothers in the novel. Perhaps the most important contribution to the novel the twin motif makes is that it suggests a principle of multiple selves inherent in Abel's character.

If Abel and Vidal are one set of twins, Abel and Ben Benally are another. Benally recognizes a kinship immediately, noting that he and Abel are alike and somehow related: “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” (153). According to one view that links Abel and Ben, Abel takes on the aggressive characteristics of Monster Slayer, while Ben represents the more peaceful Twin. In this context, as one of the roles of the twins is to rid the world of monsters, Abel fulfills his archetypal function when he kills the albino.²

Bear: Momaday's Kiowa name, Tsoai-talee (Rock-Tree Boy), is derived from the rock formation of Devils Tower in northeastern Wyoming, and he identifies himself with the bear from the Kiowa legend concerning Devils Tower. According to the legend, when the boy turns into a bear, he scars the rock-tree in pursuit of the seven sisters, who have climbed onto it. Momaday relates his connection with the bear: “I'm serious about the bear. I want to know what happened to him. And I identify with the bear because I'm intimately connected with that story. And so I have this bear power. I turn into a bear every so often. I feel myself becoming a bear, and that's a struggle that I have to face now and then.”³ Given this intimacy with the story and the bear, it is no surprise that House Made of Dawn includes several bear stories. Tosamah narrates the Kiowa legend itself, telling of the boy who becomes a bear at the foot of Devils Tower. Angela associates Abel with the bear as she watches him work and later as she makes love with him. At the hospital in Los Angeles, Angela tells a bear and maiden story. Angela's bear story in turn inspires Ben to recount a part of the Mountain Top Chant about Changing Bear Woman and Bear Woman, a story he remembers from his childhood. A final bear story is Francisco's remembering the bear hunt he undertook as a young man. Although each account of the bear serves a somewhat different purpose and alludes to or recalls different legends from Navajo or Pueblo culture, they do have in common a shared symbolism of healing or spiritual renewal.

The immediate context for Tosamah's telling the Kiowa story of the boy who becomes a bear is the Kiowa migration. The boy's transformation in a sense thus symbolizes as it parallels the Kiowa's own transformation from a mountain to a plains culture in the course of that migration. In the larger context, the reader gets Tosamah's tale immediately after Abel has finally managed to get to his feet. Like the Kiowa people, who are on their way “home” to Rainy Mountain, Abel has begun his own long trip home, literally to the apartment where he and Ben live, but also the journey back to Jemez and perhaps even toward spiritual as well as physical health. The full significance or symbolic import of the tale depends to some extent on a reader's knowledge or familiarity with Kiowa culture and history, and fortunately, in this instance, Momaday (through Tosamah) provides some of that background information. It is important to note, for instance, that the transformation of the boy into a bear results in the parallel transformation of the sisters into stars, stars of the Big Dipper in the northern sky that, ironically, the Kiowas must turn their backs on as they head south. Nevertheless, the star-sisters are invaluable: “From that moment, and so long as the legend lives, the Kiowas have kinsmen in the night sky. Whatever they were in the mountains, they could be no more. However tenuous their well-being, however much they had suffered and would suffer again, they had found a way out of the wilderness” (131). Occurring as it does at the center of the book, at the center of the two Los Angeles chapters, and at the center of Abel's story, the transformation story takes on central symbolic importance; it suggests that Abel himself will find his way out of the urban wilderness and out of the mental confusion he has suffered since the beginning of the novel.

This symbolic importance is augmented by Angela's bear stories in that they provide a frame around the Kiowa story. When Angela first encounters Abel early in the novel, she associates him with the bear; toward the end of the novel, when she visits Abel in the hospital, she again recalls a bear story. This story too infers a symbolic reference to Abel. In her story a “young Indian brave” was “born of a bear and a maiden.” As Angela tells her story, the child “became a great leader and saved his people” (187). In this context, Angela's son, Peter, becomes the symbolic (though certainly not the literal) offspring of Abel, the bear. In its general outline and hopefulness, Angela's story is not unlike the one it inspires Ben to tell.

For Ben's story, Momaday draws on the Navajo legend recorded in the Mountain Top Chant, or Dzil quigi. According to this legend, there are three associations with the bear; first, the people fled from Esdzá shash nadle, Changing Bear Woman, who embodies the evil or harmful aspects of the bear. Second, the old man Bear becomes a young human man and impregnates the elder sister. She gives birth to a female child, who has “tufts of hair in back of its ears and down on its arms and legs” (188). This bear-like child's mother, the one who sings the Mountain Chant, is called Bear Maiden. Third, Bear Maiden's male child grows up to marry a chief's elder daughter, but he impregnates her younger sister, whose child is found by “the Bear.” Thus the bear story has in a sense come full circle. As Susan Scarberry-García has pointed out, Momaday bases this story on recorded Navajo myths: he has “condensed and compressed these stories, connecting them associationally, thematically, and symbolically.” According to Scarberry-García, “these are stories of illness, transformation, and renewed health, as evidenced by recitation connected to chantway performance and by the detailed story patterns themselves.”⁴ In the larger context of Abel's healing, it is important that these bear stories are told in the hospital, the white man's healing lodge, and that Abel hears them shortly before he flees the evils of Los Angeles.

The final bear story is of Francisco's ritual bear hunt, a story he tells shortly before his death. The bulk of the story is about a young human hunter (Francisco) rather than about the prey, and the ritual importance of the hunt is Francisco's initiation. When he returns to the village with the bear he has come of age: “He was a man then, and smeared with the blood of a bear” (204). For this account Momaday relies on Jemez tradition of the bear hunt as recounted ethnographically. According to Elise Crews Parsons in her book The Study of Jemez, “The slayer of a bear is expected on his return to town to stop about a mile out, and to shout as in war. All the men go out with rifle to meet him, each receiving a piece of bear meat which he wraps around the barrel of his rifle.”⁵ Compare Momaday's passage of this important ritualistic moment: “He shouted, and the men came out to meet him. They came with rifles, and he gave them strips of the bear's flesh, which they wrapped around the barrels of their guns” (204). Beyond evidencing Momaday's meticulous use of his source material, this account of the successful hunter returning is important because it suggests the initiation and coming of age of the young man; though it is Francisco's story, by inference it becomes Abel's in that he is the one who will carry the knowledge entrusted to him. In the context of the bear symbolism of the novel, the story is important because it suggests that once again the bear is harbinger of physical renewal and spiritual connectedness: “The men and women were jubilant and all around, and he rode stone-faced in their midst, looking straight ahead” (204).

Bahkyush: If one of the important themes of the novel is survival and renewal, another embedded symbol for that continuance is the history of the Pecos Pueblo and its people. As with his use of the different tribal bear legends, Momaday is meticulous with his historical allusion to the migration of the Pecos people, the Bahkyush as he calls them in the novel. According to Momaday, after suffering raids from “marauding bands of buffalo hunters and thieves” and plague, there were “fewer than twenty survivors” who finally left their home and came to Jemez. Besides the clothes on their backs, they brought with them “four things: a sacred flute; the bull and horse masks of Pecos; and the little wooden statue of their patroness María de los Angeles, whom they called Porcingula” (15, 16). This account jibes with the historical account. In 1838, after suffering from raids by the Spanish and the Comanches and overcoming the plagues that nearly wiped out the tribe, the seventeen survivors of the Pecos Pueblo migrated to Jemez, Walatowa. Abandoned, their own pueblo fell into ruin.

Such historical allusion becomes symbolically or thematically important to the novel. Despite their loses, these people are able to perpetuate their customs, and as Momaday notes, “the ancient blood of this forgotten tribe still ran in the veins of men” (16). Indeed, given the clues from Fray Nicolás's diary and Francisco's remembrances, it is suggested that Abel's great-grandmother was Nicolás teah-whua, the old Bahkyush woman they called a witch. She was thus very much a survivor herself, and by association with her Abel is himself symbolically associated with those who rebound from near extinction, those who survive. On this very subtle level, then, Momaday lays in the theme of survival. If Abel does indeed recover, he will carry on the customs and potentially the bloodline of the ancient Pecos people.

Christianity: Momaday's theme of survival is evident in his literary allusions to bear stories, historical allusions to the Pecos, and allusion to Christianity and its impact on the Pueblo people. He suggests the role of Western religion on these people: “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 earth and sky. … 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” (58).

Perhaps the most obvious biblical allusion is in the naming of the character Abel. Both Abels are shepherds, and both have older brothers. One could even argue that Able is ultimately overcome by his “older brother,” symbolized by white culture and society. The association seems to end here, however. Such an association suggests that the character Abel, like his biblical counterpart, does not survive, and that his final dawn run is a run into death. Momaday says he did not specifically intend any such biblical association, and such a reading seems to work against most of the other, sometimes much more subtle and intricate symbols of the novel, symbols that point toward Abel's survival, for instance.

Tosamah's Saturday sermon is grounded on the opening passage of the Gospel according to St. John: “In the beginning was the word” (John 1.1). Tosamah's text allows Momaday to give voice to his own views of the importance of the word and of language in general. The text is also important symbolically and thematically, however, in that the opening of the gospel is about how the people did not recognize Christ and a man named John was sent to witness the word. It is through the word that Abel is confined by the non-Indian world. At the trial, for instance, the white men misuse the word: “Word by word by word these men were disposing of him in language, their language, and they were making a bad job of it” (102). Here the reader sees the juxtaposition of Tosamah's sermon on the word and the courtroom misuse of language.

As would be expected of a priest, Fray Nicolás makes several biblical allusions, and, not surprisingly, most of them are to the New Testament. One allusion is of particular interest in the context of Nicolás's paternal responsibilities: the priest writes “But if one among thee asks his father for a loaf will he hand him a stone?” (47). The actual passage to which Nicolás alludes is even more pointed: “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father will he give him a stone? (my emphasis).⁶ Here the implication is that the priest might be acknowledging his responsibilities toward a literal son, even though that son (Francisco) seems to deny both him and Christ. Nicolás also alludes to the Nicene Creed with Viviano's mispronunciation of “Mariá virgine et home factus est” ([born of] the virgin Mary and made man).

Melville: In an interview with Camille Adkins, Momaday notes a general stylistic influence Herman Melville had on him: “when Melville writes with all that lyricism at the end of Moby-Dick, that is a function of prose. It approaches poetry at its best. So I try for that myself. I'm always in mind of the lyrical quality.” Despite Momaday's admiration of Melville, he sometimes denies that the whiteness of the whale influenced him in his decision to have the albino embody evil in his own novel:

[Adkins:] Did you have “The Whiteness of the Whale” in mind when you wrote about Abel killing the white man?

[Momaday:] Not consciously, no. There's a strong strain of albinism at Jemez. The white man was an albino; that's all.⁷

In a letter to Frances McCullough, his editor at Harper and Row, however, he does suggest the connection between his character and Melville's whale. In reference to the albino, he writes “in fact he is neither white nor a man in the usual sense of those words. He is an embodiment of evil like Moby Dick, an intelligent malignity.”⁸ The use of the “white man” as an embodiment of evil does indeed echo Melville's use of the white whale in Ahab's monomaniacal pursuit of evil: “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me,” recalls the novel's protagonist and narrator, Ishmael. Even more pointed, however, is Ishmael's consideration of the albino in the chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale”: “What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men—has no substantive deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?”⁹ Several themes associated with Momaday's depiction of the albino are evident here. As a Pueblo Indian himself, the albino is hated by Abel—his kith and kin. Momaday takes pains to describe him as physically strong and agile. The reader knows from his performance that he is an expert horseman. Yet, he is at the same time seen as almost inhuman, definitely an outsider, and in this sense is like the man Melville describes.

In another nod to Melville, one can argue, as does Matthais Schubnell, that Momaday draws on Melville's short novel, Billy Budd. In this work the protagonist, Billy Budd, is caught up in shipboard politics and is ultimately executed, after having killed a fellow seaman, Claggart, who falsely accuses Billy of inciting mutiny. According to Schubnell, “Claggart, the albino's counterpart in Melville's story has 'an evil nature,' is referred to as a 'snake,' and has a 'pallid' complexion as the outer manifestation of his depraved character. Moreover, the story is permeated with homosexual innuendo. Both Billy and Abel are inarticulate, both react violently in their respective crisis, and both are victimized.”¹⁰ Unlike Billy, who is executed for lashing out at his accuser, Abel survives his punishment, and the argument that Abel is victimized, or that he is a victim of the evil that the albino represents (as is Billy), is one that needs to be made and substantiated.

Momaday makes other frequent use of literary allusion, sometimes openly and obviously, but at other times only subtly. One particular example of obvious use is in the opening scene of “The Priest of the Sun,” when Abel lies on the beach. An allusion here is to the nineteenth-century poet Edward Lear and one of his nonsense poems, “The Owl and the Pussycat.” As is typical of the genre, the poem is full of nonsense, in this case about an owl and a cat who sail to sea, decide to get married, and then look for a ring. The final stanza describes the wedding feast on an island. It closes with these lines:

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

Compare this passage with Momaday's passage: The silver-sided fish “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.” The somewhat frivolous tone of the poem and the genre of nonsense verse itself stand in stark contrast to the seriousness of Abel's position, lying severely beaten beside the sea. Like the poem, however, Momaday's paragraph's here suggest the absurdity of man's predicament and the marriage of unlike things.

Another obvious literary allusion is to The Stranger (L'Étranger, 1942) by Albert Camus. Like Camus's protagonist, Meursault, Abel has been convicted of murder, and both characters are essentially voiceless throughout their respective trials, and they remain unrepentant. Abel maintains 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” (102-103). According Matthais Schubnell, Momaday acknowledges that he had the French writer in mind when he wrote about Abel's trial. In the context of Abel's feelings of alienation, powerlessness, and purposelessness, Camus is a fitting model for Momaday, in that he also explores the concept of the absurd in his writings. The concept of the absurd applies to contemporary literature in which human beings are severed from their roots and thus living in meaningless isolation. In this state, as exemplified by Abel, such a character is unable to establish a meaningful relationship between himself and his social, cultural, or physical environment. Indeed, the entire “Priest of the Sun” section of House Made of Dawn suggests the literature of the absurd by its use of illogic, inconsistency, and nightmarish mood.

A much looser allusion might be to poet Hart Crane, whose work Momaday knew and admired. He was especially alert to the interest Crane had in what Momaday calls the “clash between the pastoral and the technological.”¹¹ The embodiment of this clash for Momaday is most evident in the war scene in which Abel confronts the enemy tank as it comes over the hill: “through the falling leaves, he saw the machine. It rose up behind the hill, black and massive, looming there in front of the sun. … For a moment it seemed apart from the land” (25). Abel's confrontation here can be seen as emblematic of the American Adam's century-long confrontation with the machine. As Leo Marx writes in 1964, for “more than a century our most gifted writers have dwelt upon the contradiction between rural myth and technological fact.”¹² In this context both Crane and Momaday can be seen to continue this American literary tradition of questioning the place of the machine in the garden.

Momaday also makes clever use of his own autobiography. Tosamah's Sunday sermon, “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” was published in January of 1967, about sixteen months before the publication of House Made of Dawn. In its context in the Reporter, the account of the Kiowa migration, Aho's life, and Momaday's connection to that history appear autobiographical. In this sense Momaday's use of his own published autobiographical essay as a part of a character's text is self-referential and playful. Such allusion to his own writings is one of the ways in which Momaday presents his character Tosamah as a trickster, a kind of shape-shifter, continually playing tricks on his audience, tricks which often end up backfiring on the trickster figure.¹³

Epistolary Tradition: Momaday makes use of the epistolary tradition in literature with the inclusion of the journal entries and the letter Fray Nicolás writes. One of the effects of using journal or diary entries and letters is to lend credence or a sense of actual fact to the circumstances of the plot, in this case, Nicolás's nineteenth-century experiences at Jemez Pueblo. As Father Olguin reads these letters, the reader is introduced to background material presumably necessary for a full understanding of the present moment or present action of the novel. Another advantage of using the journal entries is that it allows Momaday to offer a different perspective without intruding as a narrator himself. It also lends immediacy and verisimilitude in that in the context of the novel the reader perceives the journal entries to be real, actual historical documents, and as such they present an actual history as Nicolás recorded it.

SUMMARY OF THEMES IN HOUSE MADE OF DAWN

Momaday began working out ideas for House Made of Dawn as early as 1963, when he published his first short story, “The Well,” in Ramparts. As Matthais Schubnell has pointed out, the early story “contains a number of the themes and prototypes of some of the characters which were to reappear in the novel.”¹⁴ Like Abel, the protagonist of the short story, a man named Hobson, returns home to his reservation (after a twelve-year absence) and attempts to find a meaningful place for himself. He searches unsuccessfully both the cultural and physical landscapes for something he can recognize and feel a sense of connection with, but both the physical and cultural landscapes seem to have changed on him. Like Abel in House Made of Dawn, Hobson lacks the ability to express himself, and perhaps, therefore, he is unable to enter into the tribal ceremonials. As in the novel, the story's protagonist is subject to drunkenness and violence. Indeed, the only person or thing that Hobson can relate to, finally, is the old witch woman, Muñoz, a character who anticipates the woman referred to as a witch, Nicolás teah-whau, in House Made of Dawn.

One scene in particular, suggests Schubnell, “anticipates Abel's slaying of the albino in House Made of Dawn.” One of the antagonists (not Hobson) stabs the witch, Muñoz: “Hobson saw the low gray arc as the blade flashed across the old woman's middle.”¹⁵ As in House Made of Dawn, a man stabs a person thought to embody evil. Perhaps even more striking in similarity is, in the paragraph that follows, the description of the murder. In the story Hobson walks away from the woman who has just been stabbed and looks at the sky: “The bright jagged line between the hills and the dark clouds was almost gone, but he could see one patch of pure color where there was a saddle on the skyline. There, like a small pool of water, was eternity.”¹⁶ In a different context in the novel, Abel informs Father Olguin of Francisco's death and, like Hobson, he walks south: “A single cloud lay over the world, heavy and still. It lay out upon the black mesa, smudging out the margin and spilling over the lee. But at the saddle there was nothing. There was only the clear pool of eternity.”¹⁷

The story and novel also have structural similarities, specifically the use of flashback. Like Abel, Hobson recalls scenes from his past, and one passage in particular serves as an example of how Momaday continued to work thematically from one work to another. Like the young man Hobson, Abel recalls having herded sheep near an old woman's shack: Muñoz in the story, Nicolás teah-whau in the novel, and in both instances said to be a witch. Momaday takes a description of Hobson's childhood and uses it to describe one of Abel's boyhood experiences: “He knew even then that it was only the wind, but it was a stranger sound than any he had ever known. And at the same time he saw the hole in the ground where the wind dipped, struck, and rose. It was larger than a rabbit hole and partly concealed by the choke cherry which grew beside it. The moan of the wind grew loud. It filled him with dread. For the rest of his life it would be for him the particular sound of anguish.”¹⁸ With the exception of one word, ground changed to rock, Momaday uses this passage verbatim in the novel. Thus early in his career one can see how he works out a particular theme; he thus retells a story that shares the similar theme about the ubiquity of evil in these characters' lives.

If the presence and pursuit of evil is one theme that pervades Momaday's novel, another, according to Matthias Schubnell, is Abel's problem of identity. According to this reading, Abel lacks a sense of harmony with his environment and culture even before he leaves Jemez the first time. His experience in the war exacerbates but does not initially cause his confusion. Beginning with Benally's introducing him to the Night Chant, argues Schubnell, Abel begins a rehabilitation process which is set against a background of “initiation ceremonies and religious patterns.”¹⁹ In this context Schubnell identifies what he sees as important symbols. The killing of the albino “is a symbolic representation of the cultural conflict which Abel is trying to resolve.”²⁰ If this killing represents an emotional and cultural nadir for the protagonist, an important representation of his road toward recovery is, ironically, his being beaten by Martinez. The beating, argues Schubnell, “represents the initiatory mutilations which are frequent features of rites of passage.”²¹ By means of the beating, then, Abel can begin his progress toward recovery.

Running: In a letter to Frances McCullough, Momaday suggested that running was one of the fundamental or underlying subjects of the novel: “The other day someone asked me what my novel was about, and I said, 'It is about an Indian who runs.' And I couldn't think of any better way to put it.”²² If Abel is the “Indian who runs,” his running echoes or mirrors Francisco's running the same ceremonial race when he was young. Like Abel, Francisco forces himself to run through pain, beyond pain, and if the reader can judge by Francisco's victory, Abel's run can also be seen as hopeful. The running motif is linked with Abel's search for identity insofar as his final dawn run is his ultimate discovery of himself in the context of his cultural heritage. In that the novel begins and ends with the scene of the dawn run, running is also clearly fundamental to the structure of the novel.

The theme of running is also closely related to the theme of evil in the novel. Momaday describes what he calls the runners after evil, and in addition to the literal dawn run—a ceremonial rite associated with the spring and the clearing of the irrigation ditches at Jemez Pueblo—Momaday includes a symbolic run of purgation. Abel recalls or envisions such a run as he lies on the beach: “he could see them in the distance, the old men running after evil, their white leggings holding in motion like smoke above the ground. They passed in the night, full of tranquillity, certitude. There was no sound of breathing or sign of effort about them. They ran as water runs.” (103). Only at the end of the novel does the reader discover more precisely what or who these runners are. Francisco tells the story:

“they heard the footsteps running. It was faint at first and far away, but it rose and drew near, steadily, a hundred men running, two hundred, three, not fast, but running easily and forever, the one sound of a hundred men running. “Listen,” he said, “It is the race of the dead, and it happens here.” (206).

Like so much else in the novel, the literal and the symbolic forms of running are so intricately and inextricably intertwined that they share characteristics of each other. In the full context of the novel, Abel's literal run becomes a symbolic chasing after evil, of finding place in community, and of finding one's own self. Abel's run becomes one of purgation and spiritual renewal.

The word: If John Big Bluff Tosamah's sermon on the word is in one sense an allusion to the Christian tradition of Christ as the embodiment of the word, in another sense it provides Momaday a vehicle for giving voice to his own feelings about the place and importance of language in his culture: Tosamah “gave me … a chance to say some things that I wanted to say about language. … He was fascinated by language, took it upon himself to deal in language, to be a spokesman of a kind; to represent his culture in language. And so I took advantage of him in that way.”²³ Tosamah's argument in the sermon is that John, as a representative of the white man, abused and debased language: “He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in upon him. He is sated and insensitive” (95). For the Kiowa people in general and for Tosamah's grandmother Aho in particular, in contrast, language was “cherished and revered” (97). According to Tosamah (read Momaday) they treated language differently; they were more economical, more serious. Their reverence grew out of need. For his grandmother Aho, for instance, argues Tosamah, “words were medicine; they were magic and invisible”; they made possible the stories (96). In the context of the oral tradition, the spoken word is the means through which culture, knowledge, and language itself is propagated. One must know to speak and speak correctly for the stories that make up Kiowa culture, for instance, are “always but one generation from extinction” (97).

Because the spoken word is critical, part of Abel's sickness is thus symbolized by his inability to speak. He tries to speak to his grandfather, “but he could not say the things he wanted” (58). “He had not got the right words together.” Similarly, at his murder trial, Abel tells his story once then refuses to speak further. The lawyers, in contrast, have apparent control of language, and in this symbolic context, control of him; they dispose “of him in language, their language” (102). Tosamah's sermon recalls this very notion of the use (or misuse) of language. Through his adding, dividing, and multiplying language, the white man, claims Tosamah, “subtracts the Truth”: “Now the white man deals in words, and he deals easily, with grace and sleight of hand” (94).

Tosamah also tells his auditors that “the simple act of listening is crucial to the concept of language” (94). Thus here again the Priest of the Sun suggests an important motif in Abel's healing. Although early in the novel, there are several instances of his inability to listen—to Francisco, to the old Bahkyush man, to Angela—by the end he is able to listen to his grandfather's stories. This ability suggests the literal importance of the word and points symbolically and thematically toward Abel's healing.

Landscape: In addition to describing the fundamental importance of a person's relationship with language, House Made of Dawn incorporates the motif that a person's sense of self is intimately and reciprocally involved with the landscape. Indeed, language and place are intimately connected in the world of House Made of Dawn. Tosamah makes this relationship explicit in his Sunday sermon:

There are things in nature which engender an awful quiet in the heart of man; Devils Tower is one of them. Man must account for it. He must never fail to explain such a thing to himself, or else he is estranged forever from the universe. (131)

With this passage Tosamah fuses the notion of one's sense of the landscape and the importance of language. One must account for the landscape with language, Tosamah says, and in this sense two fundamental concepts of a human's existence are intertwined thematically. Readers can see this theme of knowing oneself through one's relationship to the earth at work in House Made of Dawn when Francisco makes this clear to his grandsons when they are still boys: “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” (197). According to Robert Nelson, Abel's healing depends ultimately upon his coming to terms not only with the sky power represented by the eagles, but also and as importantly with his relationship with the earth, very specifically with the snake medicine, that is, with the earth power.²⁴

THE RELATIONSHIP OF MOMADAY'S THEMES TO HIS LIFE

In response to a question about interpretations of his work and about the power of his subconscious in his writing, Momaday says that:

When a man is writing, he is operating on two levels: he writes out of his consciousness and out of his subconscious. And very many times he will not, after the fact, know all about his writing. Sometimes, a reader who is very perceptive, can indicate to the writer that he was doing things that he was not aware he was doing. It's not that he was doing them accidentally, but he was doing them without being conscious of doing them. … in connection with House Made of Dawn, I have read things that people have written about it and they've been, in some cases, very perceptive. … It came as a kind of revelation to me, until, thinking about it long enough, I realized that that's what was really going on in my mind, but it wasn't at the conscious level when I was doing it. It just came out of me, and it had to have a source within me.”²⁵

In this context, it is important to look at several of the ideas and motifs in House Made of Dawn as integral themes in the author's life. At the same time, however, the reader must remember that Momaday's fiction (like his actual autobiography) relies on the author's imagination, his imaginative recreation of a history of people and events. With this caveat in mind, one can productively associate several of the novel's themes with the author's life.

Perhaps foremost among these themes is Momaday's insistence on the importance and centrality of the land to a person's sense of self and well-being. Momaday believes firmly in the sacredness of the land in general and in the special regard for particular places sacred to him personally or to a culture with which he identifies. “Where words and place come together, there is the sacred,” he writes in his collection of essays, The Man Made of Words (111). According to Momaday, one's existence has everything to do with one's relationship with the land. In the same essay in which he writes about one's imagining who one is, he also writes that “We Americans need … to imagine who and what we are with respect to the earth and sky. I am talking about an act of the imagination essentially, and the concept of an American land ethic.”²⁶ Momaday argues here that a person's relationship to the landscape is central to the identity that person imagines. In his essay “Native American Attitudes to the Environment,” Momaday makes the connection between self and landscape more explicit: the American Indian is “someone who thinks of himself in a particular way and his idea comprehends his relationship to the physical world.”²⁷

One of the central images of House Made of Dawn is of course that of dawn itself. From Navajo tradition, he recalls the sacred Tségihi, “place among the rocks,” the sacred ground, the place of the sun's house. With Benally's mention of this “place,” it becomes a potential site of healing for Abel. In his essay “Sacred Places,” Momaday writes that a “prayer from the Night Chant of the Navajo begins with homage to Tsegi!, ‘place among the rocks,’ place of origin. It would be impossible to imagine an invocation of greater moment or power, or a word or concept more elemental.”²⁸

Rainy Mountain in southwestern Oklahoma is another sacred place for Momaday, as well as for Tosamah in the novel. The “knoll” represents many things: it is the homeland of the Kiowas; it is the place near where Momaday's (Tosamah's in the novel) grandmother, grandfather, and other relatives are buried; it is the place from which one can “see to the end of the world” (112). It is the place from which Momaday sees “to the center of the world's being” (120). In an essay “The Homestead on Rainy Mountain Creek” Momaday recalls his childhood:

I can still hear the singing and the laughter and the lively talk floating on the plain, reaching away to the dark river and the pecan grove, reaching perhaps to Rainy Mountain and the old school and cemetery.

“Home. Homestead. Ancestral home.”²⁹

Another fundamentally important place for Momaday is Devils Tower, mentioned by Tosamah in the novel as a place encountered by the Kiowa during their migration toward Rainy Mountain. In accounting for such a natural wonder, the Kiowas, says Momaday through his character Tosamah, made a legend. The legend tells of the seven sisters who were chased by their brother, who had become a bear. The sisters fled “to the stump of a great tree, and the tree spoke to them.” As they climbed the tree, the bear scored the bark, but could not reach the girls, who were bourne up into the sky, becoming the stars of the Big Dipper. This legend is important to Momaday in several ways. This rock tree gives him his Kiowa name, “Tsoai-talee,” Rock-tree Boy. It becomes a place on earth through which he and his ancestors have “kinsmen in the night sky.” It is also the place through which Momaday identifies with the bear.

Momaday declares his identification with the bear in relation to his name and also as a sort of totem; he becomes the bear at times. Just how central and appropriate this naming is becomes apparent when Momaday talks about the bear's role in his second novel. The Ancient Child (1989) he says, “is about the boy who turns into a bear, and in a sense I am writing about myself. I'm not writing an autobiography, but I am imagining a story that proceeds out of my own experience of the bear power. It is full of magic. But sometimes the bear is very difficult.”³⁰ Despite the difficulties, Momaday recognizes his close association: “I am a bear. I do have this capacity to become a bear.”³¹ Not surprisingly, then, the bear makes several appearances in House Made of Dawn.

Another important motif of House Made of Dawn is the suggestion that the priests, Fray Nicolás and Father Olguin, ultimately remain outsiders at Jemez Pueblo. This theme of not belonging applies in another and much starker way to Abel himself. Like some of the other themes identified here, this notion of “outsider” has resonances with Momaday's life. In the final section of the novel, Momaday describes Father Olguin as essentially reconciled to his position in the pueblo; “he had come to terms with the town,” but at the same time, adds the narrator, there was still the matter “of certain exclusion, the whole and subtle politics of estrangement” (194). Similarly, Fray Nicolás comments on his exclusion in the context of not being a part of the Pueblo celebrations, even when they involve Christian deities: “Mind well Thy Patrons Little One for I am excluded from Thee. Now the chanting & the drums & I have no part of it” (49). Such exclusion is to be expected of a non-Pueblo priest in a Pueblo community. The theme of exclusion takes on added significance when one compares it with the author's own sense of exclusion. In The Names, Momaday recalls that from some of the ceremonies, the “secret dances,” for instance, he and his parents were excluded: “My parents and I kept then to ourselves, to our reservation of the day school, and in this way, through the tender of our respect and our belief, we earned the trust of the Jemez people, and we were at home there.”³²

If on the one hand the priests are excluded from the life of the pueblo, Abel is excluded from both the pueblo and from the pan-Indian life in Los Angeles. The theme of his inability or unwillingness to fit in is perhaps paralleled by the priests' inabilities, but the exclusion of Abel plays a much more important part in the novel: “His return to town had been a failure … he had tried to pray, to sing, to enter into the old rhythm of the tongue, but he was no longer attuned to it” (58). Just as clearly, Abel remains an outsider in Los Angeles. As Benally and Tosamah recognize, “You could see that he wasn't going to get along around here” (148). Literal examples of his not fitting in are his losing his job, getting severely beaten by Martinez, and giving up his relationship with Milly. Abel is thus excluded, and he remains an outsider both when he is at Jemez Pueblo and in Los Angeles. As a child Momaday noticed the ways in which he and his parents were excluded from the life of the pueblo, and he also notices his exclusions from the world, one represented by his cowboy friend Drum Hadley. In the essay “Dreaming in Place,” Momaday describes an incident that made his exclusion momentarily apparent to him. His friend Drum nods to a stranger; Momaday assumes they are old acquaintances, but no, says Drum: “I never saw him before. But he is a vaquero, a real one, and there is a look about such men.” Momaday ponders this moment: “I was nearly overcome with something like loneliness, a sense of exclusion and disaffection. It was a strange moment for me, the moment of truth and exile, as it were. I was an Indian among cowboys.”³³ Out of this feeling of exclusion he creates his priests and Abel as outsiders, as men enduring a form of exile.

MOMADAY AND THE THEMES OF THE ERA

In its use of Native American themes, structures, and allusions, House Made of Dawn breaks new ground as a novel. At the same time, however, and although it is set in 1945 and 1952, House Made of Dawn is in many ways a novel of the 1960s, and its author is concerned with and influenced by many of the issues that define that politically and socially turbulent decade. He uses the novel form itself, for example, and he expresses many of the concerns and engages in many of the themes of other novelists of the 1960s. Prevalent among these are concerns about the legitimacy of certain types of authority; civil and human rights; attitudes toward capitalism and labor relations; U.S. involvement in foreign wars; ecology and environmentalism; a turn to non-Western, non-Christian belief systems; and concerns with social revolution; and the relationship of art and politics.

Primary among Momaday's themes is the importance of the oral tradition, the importance of storytelling, the importance, in short, of the word. The 1960s, according to Philip Beidler in his study of written texts of the 1960s, were marked by printed texts that helped make “conjunctions of belief and event actually come about.” That is, “the '60s Generation of Youth, for perhaps the last time in history, truly envisioned itself as a generation looking for the Word.” One of the results of the generation's ability to synthesize different occult fascinations “with the indigenous orientalism of Native American myth, ritual, and magic” resulted in:

a true people's priesthood … mixing their sacred texts high and low into a total myth of consciousness. … they fixed the nation's attention one last time on the idea that words could still be holy. …

Here, then, was the site of the textual action, quite literally serving as platform and agenda for the youth-culture across a vast array of political constituencies … Everywhere they waited, looking for the Word. Everywhere they rushed to embrace the latest sacred texts, scriptures for a generation.³⁴

As Momaday's character Tosamah attests, the word is the truth; the word is holy. Through the word Abel's enemies try to destroy him. It is also through the word, the words of the Night Chant, for instance, that Abel attempts to heal himself. The theme of the importance of the word is at the thematic center of House Made of Dawn, just as Beidler argues it was at the center of the youth culture of the 1960s. There are, of course, other important themes of the era evident in the novel, and these themes are in many instances reflections of the turbulence of the decade out of which the novel came.

The era will always be associated with the United States' involvement in the undeclared war in Vietnam and the protest against that war on college campuses across the nation. The decade is important is other ways as well. It became the decade—one hundred years after the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation—in which important civil rights acts were signed into law. It was the decade in which other oppressed and under-represented groups began finding voices, particularly African Americans, women, and American Indians. It was a decade in which attitudes toward labor and capitalism changed from the high confidence of the late 1940s and 1950s, and it was a decade in which a significant percentage of the population became aware of the incredible environmental degradation that had been going on for decades. It was a decade in which millions of Americans began to question central political authority and engage in peaceable demonstrations in ways that they had not before, most notably in civil rights marches and anti-war demonstrations.

Throughout the 1960s the United States was getting ever deeper into its international conflict in Vietnam. In 1965 President Johnson increased troop strength by 125,000, and that year the U.S. engaged in its first major offensive. As the conflict escalated, there were massive anti-war demonstrations across the United States beginning especially in 1967. In 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, there were over five hundred thousand American soldiers in Vietnam, and there were student riots across the United States. Although Momaday's novel (written during these very years, from 1966-1968) is clearly not an overtly political response to the war in Vietnam, he was teaching at the Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses, which were especially active with student protests and demonstrations during these years. Abel (who was transformed into a Vietnam veteran in the film adaptation of the novel) constitutes a statement about the devastating affects of war on a personal, individual level.

Although House Made of Dawn was conceived of and written at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, there is no surface anti-Vietnam sentiment in the novel itself. Granted, it is written about a different era and has different concerns, but nevertheless there is an important scene in which Abel, as a soldier, is confronted with the enemy. According to a character who saw him, Abel danced wildly, incomprehensibly, dangerously in front of the tank as it came over the hill and nearly ran over him. The symbolism of the scene is pointed. On the one hand, Abel's dance, cursing, and gesturing demonstrate how ineffectual he is against the machine—be it the tank itself, the war machine in general, or the culture that sent him to fight its war in the first place. He cannot stop the tank, cannot recover the dead lying on the battle field. His gestures, actions, and attitudes are ultimately futile; the war is much, much larger than he is. The scene implies this futility, on the one hand. On the other hand, however, the tank itself is impotent. The gunners turn on the man dancing and fire, but they cannot hit him, stop him, any more than he can stop them. The war machine itself, goes the suggestion, is just as futile as the rebellious individual, and in this sense, the novel is a symbolic reflection of the unwinnable, somewhat purposeless, and much-protested Vietnam War than of World War II.

In a fascinating and ironic turn of the tables, the scene with Abel and the tank also clearly echoes, while it reverses, the plot of the westerns of the 1950s and 1960s popular culture. In movie after movie from this era the Indian was depicted as the enemy, the one who does the war dance, and the one who is in turn shot and killed by the “good guys” in U.S. Calvary blue or wearing the white hats of the cowboys. Beginning with Stagecoach (1939), the genre came of age with The Searchers (1956), which catapulted outlaw and Indian killer John Wayne to stardom, Two Rode Together (1961), and Duel at Diablo (1966). These movies depicted the American Indians as clear antagonists, doomed to death by Hollywood. From the mainstream point of view, the vanquished Indian was symbolic of the would-be military might and dominance of the United States in Europe, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. In the scene in House Made of Dawn, though, the tank is no more effective than the Indian.

As Vietnam was the biggest foreign policy issue of the decade, civil rights reform was certainly one of the most important domestic issues of the era. Indeed, by the early 1960s the civil rights movement was just gearing up. In 1954 in Brown vs. Board of Education the Supreme Court ruled that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal. In 1955 Rosa Parks became a national symbol for equal rights for having sat in the “white” section of a segregated city bus. In 1960 four African American students demanded the right to sit and be served at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. In August of 1963 some 250,000 people, demanding that their needs be addressed, marched on Washington, D.C. where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his now famous “I Have a Dream” speech. In 1964 Congress finally enacted important legislation, the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, prohibited discrimination on the job, and gave the attorney general the power to enforce school desegregation. The following year Congress passed the Voting Rights Act (1965), which reformed registration practices and suspended the use of literacy tests as a means of eligibility.

Spokespersons for other equal rights movements also found their voices during the 1960s. Women's rights, for instance, were also an issue during the era. As early as 1953, French writer and activist Simone de Beauvoir had published The Second Sex, in which she argued that women were treated as second-class citizens. With The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan successfully challenged the myth that women were simply happy housewives or mistresses. She argued that they suffered from lack of equality in educational and career opportunities. As a result of the popularity of her book and the perceived need for political organization, Friedan founded the National Organization for Women in 1964. In some ways banking on the success of the civil rights movement led by African Americans and equal rights movements led by women, many Native Americans began their own struggles for civil rights. Most of the actions that made national headlines were late in the sixties or in the early seventies. The Alcatraz takeover, for example, came in 1969; the occupation of Wounded Knee was not until 1973. An American Indian rights movement was visible during the earlier part of the decade and would have been known by Momaday. Because of protest by American Indians throughout the decade, for instance, Congress finally passed the Indian Civil Rights Act, which includes a Bill of Rights for Native Americans, on 11 April 1968, just two months before the publication of House Made of Dawn.

If the Indian occupation of Wounded Knee represents a kind of culmination of American Indian activism that postdates the action and writing of Momaday's novel, two earlier public policy issues do play an important role. In 1950 the newly appointed commissioner at the Bureau of Indian Affairs enthusiastically supported a policy of termination. He closed reservation schools and had Indian children placed in boarding schools where he thought they could be better assimilated. Termination became official policy in March of 1953. The results of termination were in many ways disastrous for the terminated tribes. The Menonminees, for example, were given less than four years to create their own schools, health facilities, and other services. As a result of the short time period for adjustment, their hospital was forced to close, they lost many of their fishing and hunting grounds, and infant mortality rose to two hundred percent of the national average. Unemployment rates soared, and one-third of the tribe tested positive for tuberculosis.

In conjunction with termination came the policy of relocation, in which reservation Indians were encouraged (offered incentives) to move from the reservations to the cities. The Bureau of Indian Affairs promised transportation, job training, a year's health-care package, help with lodging, and a one-month subsistence allowance. Navajos, for instance, were encouraged to leave their reservation, and many came to Los Angeles. As it turned out, only about 25,000 of the estimated 100,000 people who left the reservations between 1945 and 1958 got any federal assistance at all. Perhaps as few as 3,000 found permanent jobs, and perhaps as many as 75,000 returned to their reservations by the end of the 1950s. By these measures, termination and relocation were failures. In these terms Abel's experience in Los Angeles reflects Momaday's characterization of the relocation policies instituted by the United States government. Abel is given a job for which he is clearly unsuited; he must room with Benally because nothing else is made available; he has no protection from the unscrupulous and corrupt policeman Martinez. Of course, Abel leaves Los Angeles after just a short stay. Benally too promises to return home eventually.

In addition to struggles between tribal people and the United States government, there were internal tribal struggles as well. A group of young educated intellectuals who took issue with the elder's entrenched political interaction with the United States government, especially with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, formed the National Indian Youth Council in 1961. Their agenda was to gain national attention, which they did by raising issues over fishing rights in the northwest in the early 1960s, for instance. This group owed much to the civil rights movement and to African American nationalism (in sobriquets such as Red Power and Red Muslim, for example), but despite these borrowings, as Indian historian Robert Warrior explains, they did seek “to define their own ideology from the specific history and experiences of American Indian people.”³⁵

Another intertribal issue, one that is of particular importance in the context of House Made of Dawn, concerns the Navajo Tribal Council and the Native American Church. In 1959 the tribal council went to court in an effort to enforce a ban on the use of peyote as a part of the church's religious practice. The court upheld the ban, arguing in part that the federal court did not have jurisdiction over tribal matters and could not interfere. Hence, the First Amendment right guaranteeing the freedom to practice religion did not apply in this instance. In 1964, in a similar case, the California Supreme Court ruled that members of the Native American Church did have the right to practice their religion, including the sacramental use of peyote. Not until 1978, however, would the United States pass the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Disregarding the law, Tosamah and his followers participate in a ceremonial use of peyote. Though he has been criticized for depicting the details of the peyote cult as Tosamah practices it, Momaday got all his information from a published source. Indeed, he copied some material almost verbatim and thus revealed nothing about the sacrament that was not already available in print.

Besides issues concerning civil and religious rights, the 1960s witnessed a revaluation of the principles of capitalism. According to Charles Molesworth in an essay on “Culture, Power, and Society,” the postwar era witnessed a change in attitude towards labor and capital. This new attitude toward labor challenges the long-sustained mainstream's privileging of labor and money making over free time. Whereas in earlier decades the working people's faith in labor and capital subordinated any notion of free time, the 1960s saw a movement in which free time became privileged; people actually turned away from work in order to enjoy free time. This denial of capital's preeminence and dominance threatened the status quo of capitalism's assumption that labor and capital were at the root of existence. The 1960s witnessed the emergence of an anti-work ethic that liberated its adherents from the oppression of a culture in which labor not only controls one's time, but also one's thoughts and actions.

Ben Benally demonstrates a 1950s version of this mistrust of capitalism. His skepticism is evident in his comments on the consumer scene in Los Angeles. According to him, everybody is busy getting and spending, and he recognizes that there is some appeal in this consumer industry: “You see how it is with them, how they get along and have money and nice things, radios and cars and clothes and big houses. And you want those things; you'd be crazy not to want them. And you can have them, too; they're so easy to have. You go down to those stores, and they're full of bright new things. …” Although Benally here suggests that things of the material culture are desirable and available to him, at another point he suggests that it is not as simple as they would have you believe. Indeed, because everything goes by too fast, he feels left out: “you want to do it, because you can see how good it is. It's better than anything you've ever had; it's money and clothes … but you don't know how to get into it; there's too much of it and it's all around you and you can't get hold of it because it's going on too fast” (158). Even though Benally is afraid that going home is not an option either, his sublimated desire to return to the reservation—“you felt good out there, like everything was all right and still and cool inside of you” (169)—is a repudiation of the capitalistic society thriving at the heart of Los Angeles.

Abel also embodies a repudiation of the culture's faith in labor and the blind trust in capitalism. He realizes that the work he does at the carton factory where he has been placed is essentially meaningless, especially so in that the corrupt policeman Martinez is very likely to take his pay anyway. When Abel chooses to walk out on the job, he chooses free time over labor and capital. Momaday is not necessarily subscribing to the 1960s notion of “Tune in, turn on, and drop out,” however. Although Abel does show that he can and will work when he chops wood Angela, for instance, he does not work in the fields with his grandfather and others. He observes them from a distance then walks away. The suggestion is that Abel chooses free time over the tyranny of a steady job.

According to the editors of The '60s without Apology, the decade ushered in an era that emphasized the importance of ecology and conservation: “Ecotopias do not exclude aspects of the other perspectives, but the emphasis is not in the end on the provision of material plenty: it is instead on the rational rearticulation of human social relations and our collective relation to nature.”³⁶ Certainly in the context of human responsibility toward the natural world, Momaday can be seen to share concerns with other writers and thinkers of the era; like them, he laments the environmental degradation that is so prevalent across the United States. Momaday's fellow 1969 Pulitzer Prize winner, Rene Dubos (So Human an Animal, 1968), laments the way Americans have mistreated the environment. Dubos is concerned with more than just air pollution, oil spills, and urban waste; in his prize-winning book he articulates what many writers and intellectuals were concerned about throughout the 1960s: “All thoughtful persons worry about the future of the children who will have to spend their lives under the absurd social and environmental conditions we are thoughtlessly creating; even more disturbing is the fact that the physical and mental characteristics of mankind are being shaped now by dirty skies and cluttered streets, anonymous high rises and amorphous urban sprawl, social attitudes which are more concerned with things than with people.”³⁷ Momaday articulates a similar concern when he describes what he calls a Native American attitude toward the land: “the Native American ethic with respect to the physical world is a matter of reciprocal appropriation: appropriations in which man invests himself in the landscape, and at the same time incorporates the landscape into his own most fundamental experience.”³⁸ Momaday argues that the technological revolution has uprooted the people from the soil: “We have become disoriented, I believe; we have suffered a kind of psychic dislocation of ourselves in time and space.” Because of this dislocation, Momaday argues that we must “formulate an ethical idea of the land … I believe, moreover, that it is absolutely necessary to do so.”³⁹ In House Made of Dawn this theme of the need for human's to maintain an ethical idea of the land is fundamental. Momaday expresses this human connection with the land in the context of other animals: “man, too, has tenure in the land; he dwelt upon the land twenty-five thousand years ago, and his gods before him” (58).

SIMILAR THEMES IN OTHER LITERATURE

An important characteristic or theme of post-World War II fiction in the United States, as pointed out by Richard Ohmann, is that “social contradictions were early displaced into images of personal illness” in many of the novels that were to become canonical.⁴⁰ A look at Ohmann's main argument demonstrates that House Made of Dawn (though Ohmann himself does not mention the book in his essay) is indeed concerned with many of the same issues and themes. Like most protagonists in these precanonical texts of the era, Abel experiences a personal crisis of some sort as an adolescent and certainly again as an adult. One example is that through some sort of misunderstanding or inability to function within the Eagle Watchers Society he kills the eagle he has captured. As an adult, he kills the albino and later evidently tries to revenge himself by attacking Martinez.

Primary among the antagonists in such fiction is society itself. For Abel this antagonist can be seen as a combination of the war culture, the society in Los Angeles, and perhaps even the Catholic church at Jemez. Each of these various aspects of society acts as “a hostile force, threatening to diminish or annihilate one's “real” self.”⁴¹ Furthermore, any given aspect of this hostile society has the power to cause or to define sickness. In the courtroom scene, for example, Father Olguin's words about why Abel killed the albino suggest a culture that the court (emblematic of the non-Indian worldview) cannot understand. The priest makes a sincere effort to describe this cultural difference, but his words fall on deaf ears:

I believe that this man was moved to do what he did by an act of the imagination so compelling as to be inconceivable to us.

Yes, yet, yes. But these are the facts: he killed a man—took the life of another human being. … He committed a brutal and premeditated act which we have no choice but to call by its right name. (101-102).

Its “right name,” of course, is murder, and it is for murder that Abel is tried and imprisoned. Momaday's suggestion is that in a Pueblo context, Abel would not be condemned or punished for destroying evil as he did when he killed the albino: “A man kills such an enemy if he can” (103).

Like other precanonical novels, House Made of Dawn exploits the new freedom of representing sexual encounters, but descriptions of these encounters tend not to be erotic, and the encounters are often contaminated by bad social relations. In House Made of Dawn, for instance, there is an overwhelming lack of emotion or feeling concomitant with the sexual act, especially between Abel and Angela. Momaday, in fact, associates the sex act with non-human animals and thereby negates or counters their human erotic quality. Angela thinks of the bear and badger. When Abel is with Milly, his “nostrils flared to the odor of her body, and he was brutal with her” (109).

Despite the illness of their protagonists, most of these novels offer some sort of hope of a recovery, hope for a better way of life. Furthermore, most often “such visions of wholeness linger in memory,” and they “point us toward the past.”⁴² If one sees Abel's concluding dawn run as salutary, for example, it is in part because by its very nature it is a return to a Pueblo custom, one that had been performed ritualistically and soundly in the past, in a world before debilitating contact with Europeans or European Americans. This recovery, moreover, if it happens at all, typically happens despite some would-be intermediaries—such as Tosamah, for example, or the United States prison and relocation systems. That is not to say, however, that the protagonist heals himself completely by himself. He might receive the help of some particular intermediary, for instance. In the case of House Made of Dawn, that intermediaries may well be Francisco, the old, long-haired man from Jemez Pueblo who recalls his own youth and his own passage into adulthood, and Benally, the Night Chanter with his stories of Navajo healing and of home.

Typically in these novels, the apparent healing tends to be problematic in two ways. First, it is never complete. The healing remains ambiguous; the reader cannot be certain that the protagonist is indeed completely recovered. As many readers of Momaday's novel contend, it is not clear whether or not Abel is running toward health and wellness or toward death. Second, even if the protagonist is moving toward physical and mental health, his cure is at best merely an individual one. The cure does nothing for, and ultimately says nothing about, the social and material causes of the illness in the first place. If social contradictions cause personal illness or are represented by personal illness, the individual's personal health (especially if that healing is ambiguous) are inevitably separate from the society that caused them. Even if Abel is well, finally, nothing has changed in Los Angeles, certainly, nor at Jemez Pueblo either for that matter. Thus the sense of hopefulness evident in Abel's dawn run is allayed or tempered by the reader's realization that all is not necessarily well in the community or for the people of that community.

Notes

1. Susan Scarberry-García, Landmarks of Healing: A Study of ‘House Made of Dawn’ (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), p. 27.

2. Joseph Deflyer, quoted in Scarberry-García, p. 21.

3. Bettye Givens, “A MELUS Interview: N. Scott Momaday—A Slant of Light,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 90.

4. Susan Scarberry-García, pp. 67, 70.

5. Parsons, The Pueblo of Jemez, p. 62., quoted in Scarberry-García, p. 76.

6. Holy Bible, Luke 11:11-12.

7. Camille Adkins, “Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations, pp. 218, 219, 226.

8. N. Scott Momaday to Frances McCullough, 8 December 1967, Bancroft.

9. Herman Melville, “The Whiteness of the Whale” (Chapter 42), in his Moby Dick, or The White Whale (New York: Signet Classic, 1961), pp. 189, 192.

10. Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), p. 122.

11. Schubnell, “An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 72.

12. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 354.

13. Momaday makes a similar move in his novel The Ancient Child (New York: Doubleday, 1989) when he has the character Grey reading from Momaday's book The Names.

14. Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday, p. 94.

15. N. Scott Momaday, “The Well,” Ramparts, vol. 2.1 (1963): p. 52.

16. Ibid., p. 52.

17. N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York: Harper, 1968; rpt. Perennial Library, 1989): p. 211.

18. Momaday, “The Well,” p. 50.

19. Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday, pp. 101-102.

20. Ibid., p. 121.

21. Ibid., p. 126.

22. N. Scott Momaday to Frances McCullough, 6 July 1966, Bancroft.

23. Wm. T. Morgan, Jr., “Landscapes: N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 50.

24. See Robert M. Nelson, Place and Vision: The Function of landscapes in Native American Fiction (New York: Lang, 1993), pp. 41-89.

25. Lee Abbott, “An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations, p. 30.

26. N. Scott Momaday, “An American Land Ethic,” in The Man Made of Words, p. 47.

27. N. Scott Momaday, “Native American Attitudes toward the Environment,” in Seeing with a Native Eye, edited by Walter Holden Capps (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 80.

28. N. Scott Momaday, Man Made of Words, pp. 115-16.

29. The Man Made of Words, p. 166.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., p. 15.

32. The Names, p. 147.

33. The Man Made of Words, p. 211.

34. Philip D. Beidler, Scriptures for a Generation: What We Were Reading in the '60s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), pp. 11.

35. Robert Warrior, Tribal Secrets (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 30.

36. Sohnya Sayres, et al, editors, The '60s without Apology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 7.

37. Rene Dubos, So Human an Animal (New York: Scribners, 1968), p. xi.

38. N. Scott Momaday, “Native American Attitudes toward the Environment,” in Seeing with a Native Eye: Essays on Native American Religion, edited by Walter Holden Capps (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 80.

39. N. Scott Momaday, The Man Made of Words (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), p. 48.

40. Richard Ohmann, “The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975,” Critical Inquiry 10.1 (September 1983): p. 212.

41. Ibid., p. 213.

42. Ibid., p. 216.