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For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement. An overview of Momaday's career, including his attempts to use varied storytelling techniques to bring the Kiowa vision of reality to a broader public. I used to tell him about those old ways, the stories and the songs, Beautyway and Night Chant. I sang some of those things, and I told him what they meant, what I thought they were about. And every day before dawn he went to the fields without hope, and I watched him, sometimes saw him at sunrise, far away in the empty land, very small on the skyline turning to stone even as he moved up and down the rows. Yet, the whiteness of the albino suggests something more terrible than evil to Abel.
Martinez
That rejection is a major cause of Abel's second futile and self-destructive confrontation with evil in the person of Martinez, a sadistic Mexican policeman. The pattern of the second confrontation is a repetition of the first. Just as Abel kills the albino at Walatowa after he has failed to find community there, so too he goes after Martinez, also perceived as a snake (culebra), after he has failed utterly to find community in Los Angeles. Implication of Anglo society in this failure is again explicit and powerful, as Abel has been sent to Los Angeles by the government on its Relocation Program after serving time in prison for killing the albino.
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The narration then shifts to the first-person perspective of Ben Benally, who is Abel’s friend and roommate after Abel is released from prison and relocated to Los Angeles. After meeting each other at work in a factory, Ben tries to help Abel adjust to urban life. Unfortunately, Abel’s reserved nature and occasionally violent temper prevent him from making a life for himself the way Ben has done. An appalling number of them are dead; they died young, and they died violent deaths. (He was the best runner I ever knew.) One man was murdered, butchered by a kinsman under a telegraph pole just east of San Isidro. A good many who have survived this long are living under the Relocation Program in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, etc.
Religion, Ceremony, and Tradition
"It was a hard thing," Francisco tells us, "to be the bull, for there was a primitive agony to it, and it was a kind of victim, an object of ridicule and hatred." Hard as that agony was, Abel as Francisco before him might have borne it with the support of his community. Separated from that community, he acts individually against evil and kills the white man. Abel's genealogy, the nature of his illness, and its relation to the auditory motifs mentioned above are further defined in the seven fragments of memory he experiences as he walks above the Cañon de San Diego in the first dawn following his return. At the same time these fragments establish a context for Abel's two prominent encounters in Part I with Angela Grace St. John and with the albino Juan Reyes Fragua. Tosamah is perceptive enough to know that the agonizing conflict within himself also exists to varying degrees in the other urban Indians, and he exploits their insecurity and self-doubt to shore up his own tenuous conception of self. Indeed, his need continually to assert himself over the others is one indication of his sense of inadequacy.
Characters
Falling Action — Following the murder, Abel is convicted and sent to prison. His time in incarceration further alienates him from his identity and roots. Upon release, he moves to Los Angeles, where he becomes further estranged from his culture, struggling with alcoholism and aimlessness in an urban environment that is indifferent to his plight. With 198 pages, House Made of Dawn was conceived first as a series of poems, and then replanned as stories, and finally shaped into a novel. It is based largely on Momaday's firsthand knowledge of life at Jemez Pueblo.
At the feast, contes-tants ride horses toward a rooster that is buried up to its neck in the ground, trying to reach down and pull it out. The winner is an albino on a black horse, who takes the rooster over to Abel and beats him with it. Although not commercially successful, it received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969. After that, Momaday moved to the University of California at Berkley, where he designed a graduate program in Indian Studies. He has published several books of poetry, short stories, and essays. In addition, Momaday has often displayed his drawings and paintings in galleries throughout the country.
Indian Activism in the 1960s
At the end of the novel, beside his grandfather's deathbed, [Abel] is for six mornings reminded of all that is; and within these six dawns of his grandfather's dying he is reunited with his individual, racial, and religious self…. He wouldn't let anybody help him, and I guess I got mad, too, and one day we had a fight … he was just sitting there and saying the worst thing he could think of, over and over. I didn't like to hear that kind of talk, you know; it made me kind of scared, and I told him to cut it out. I guess I was more scared than mad; anyway I had had about all I could take. Only with Abel does Benally feel good about being an Indian; only with Abel can he free his spirit in song and prayer, and see past and future merge into an all-inclusive present. But they live in a world uncongenial to these impulses, a world contemptuous of vision and song, and in that world Abel also becomes an agonizing problem for Ben.
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He seeks to identify with Abel, referring to "us renegades, us diehards," and to the white man as "they," but merely to wish now and again for vengeance is an empty gesture. No doubt Tosamah's desire to avenge himself on those who have poisoned his spirit is sincere, but the courage, the spirit of defiance he recognizes in Abel, lies dormant within his own heart. Ben, as he does throughout the novel, undercuts Tosamah's pretentiousness, telling us that "He's always going on like that, Tosamah, talking crazy and showing off…." Enraged, Martinez smashes Abel's hands with his nightstick, but Abel "didn't cry out or make a sound." From Benally's description, we can see that it is Abel's attitude rather than his actions that engenders Martinez' wrath. Martinez could not help but notice the contrast between Ben's involuntary shaking and Abel's relative steadiness, and this implied slight to his authority threatens him. His response to it indicates just how precarious his sense of self is, and the extreme viciousness of his later beating of Abel further reveals the self-hatred that is the price of the Anglo authority he covets.
He is participating in a ritual his grandfather told him about—the race of the dead. Abel is at this point vaguely conscious of what he needs to be cured. He needs words, ceremonial words, which express his relation to the cultural landscape in which he stands.
Abel was the land and he was of the land; he was a long-hair and from that single fact stemmed the fearsome modern dilemma explored by N. Abel is an Indian of the American Southwest, a member of a culture for whom Nature is the one great reality to which men's lives are pegged, the only verity upon which men may rely. Within this massive concept lie all the religion, all the mores and ethics, all the spiritual truth any man may require. Momaday describes the tragic odyssey of a man forcibly removed from this psychic environment and placed within a culture light-years away from the attitudes, values, and goals of his former life. His anguished ordeal, heightened by his encounter with a white woman, endows him at last with courage and wisdom; he comes to know who he is and what he must do to maintain that identity. Abel's fear arises from unconscious recognition of individual, racial, tribal, and religious extinction.
Scott Momaday, belonging to the Kiowa tribe, weaves a narrative that’s deeply rooted in Native American culture, presenting a mesmerizing exploration of identity, belonging, and the powerful ties to ancestral land. An American classic, House Made of Dawn is at once a tragic tale about the disabling effects of war and cultural separation, and a hopeful story of a stranger in his native land, finding his way back to all that is familiar and sacred. Heralded as a major landmark in the emergence of Indigenous American literature, the novel won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The war has traumatized Abel, and he drinks so heavily that he barely recognizes his grandfather when he returns to his grandfather’s farm. He stays with Francisco, his grandfather, and visits the local priest, Father Olguin. Through the priest, Abel meets Angela, a young white woman who has come to the area to visit the local mineral springs. After Abel does chores for Angela, such as chopping wood, she initiates a romantic affair with him.
A white woman named Angela St. John employs Abel to cut wood for her at her house near the reservation. She is struggling with her own mental health issues surrounding her pregnancy, and she finds herself at once irritated and aroused by Abel’s stoic demeanor. Around the same time, Abel is ritually beaten during a ceremony by an albino man. Abel later stabs the albino man to death, though the narrator provides no insight into Abel’s reasoning. And Momaday was widely praised for the novel's rich description of Indian life.
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