Table Of Content
Francisco was instrumental in raising Abel, and has been his only relative since his mother died when he was five. As such, he holds an important place in Abel's life and acts as a role model for the confused young man. The albino (also called The White Man) is a mysterious but important person in this story. He is frequently called "the white man." At the feast of Santiago, the albino beats Abel in a competition, humiliating him.
N. Scott Momaday
Just as Nicolas teah-whau "screamed" at him, and the moan of the wind in the rocks frightened him earlier, as Angela and Abel make love "she wanted to scream" and is later "moaning softly." In the following excerpt, Lattin emphasizes Momaday's presentation of the failure of Christianity in the Indian culture and the desire of the latter for a renewed reverence for the land in its mythic vision of wholeness. Other critics found fault with the writing but suggested that the narrative problems might be necessary in order to capture the Native American mindset. At the same time, other Native American groups were drawing attention to the government's neglect of Native American people.
Point of View
Martinez told him to hold out his hands, and he did, slowly, like maybe he wasn't going to at first, with the palms up. I could see his hands in the light and they were open and almost steady. "Turn them over," Martinez said, and he was looking at them and they were almost steady. In the following essay, Hirsch analyzes the characters of Martinez, Tosamaah, and Benally and their relationships with the protagonist, noting that for these characters Abel is a symbol of contempt and a reminder of their Native selves.
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Part II: The Priest of the Sun
He sarcastically declares his respect for the whites for the way they have oppressed the Indians. This prejudice is mirrored in Tosamah's prejudice against Native Americans that follow traditional beliefs. In talking about "long-hairs," or the people who follow the traditional way and do not adapt to urban life, Tosamah is so negative that he alienates Abel. Strangely, for a novel about Native American suffering in the white world, there is not a lot of overt prejudice on the parts of the characters in House Made of Dawn. The most brutal character in the novel, Martinez, says nothing to indicate that his action is racially motivated; he has a Spanish name himself, making him no more a representative of the white culture than Abel.
Brief Biography of N. Scott Momaday
The journey advances in a series of movements from chaos to order, and each movement takes the People toward greater social and symbolic definition. The cloud pillars of the First World defined only by color and direction become in the Fifth World the sacred mountains of the four directions, the most important coordinates in an intricate cultural geography. As with the Tewa and the Kiowa, that cultural landscape symbolizes the Navajo conception of order, the endpoint of their emergence journey. Through the emergence journey, a collective imaginative endeavor, the Navajos determined who and what they were in relation to the land. The manner in which cultural landscapes are created interests Momaday, and the whole of his book The way to Rainy Mountain may be seen as an account of that process. In this emergence the landscape plays a crucial role, for cultural landscapes are created by the imaginative interaction of societies of men and particular geographies.
Ben Benally
I cannot pretend to know it, and I can't dismiss it just because it is new. For example, Father Olguin gains perspective about what the reservation was like in the last century from the diary that he reads that was written by his predecessor. Momaday is able to relate his ideas about the relationship between Native American religion and Christian religion through the sermons of Tosamah. The incidents of Abel's life in Los Angeles are not related through his point of view, but from Benally's perspective. As pastor of the Los Angeles Holiness Pan-Indian Rescue Mission and Priest of the Sun, Tosamah gives sermons on both Biblical stories and Indian folklore, often mixing the two. Like N. Scott Momaday, he is a Kiowa, and some of the stories he tells of last days of the Kiowa people are repeated in Momaday's history of the Kiowa, The Way to Rainy Mountain.
I didn't want them to hear me, because they were having a good time, and I was ashamed, I guess. If you come from the reservation, you don't talk about it much; I don't know why. I guess you figure that it won't do you much good, so you just forget about it. You think about it sometimes, you can't help it, but then you just try to put it out of your mind … it mixes you up sometimes…. I guess Tosamah knew what he was thinking too, because pretty soon he started in on him, not directly, you know, but he started talking about longhairs and the reservation and all. I kept wishing he would shut up, and I guess the others did, too … because right away they got quiet and just started looking down at their hands, you know—like they were trying to decide what to do.
On first meeting her, he "regarded his guest discreetly, wondering that her physical presence should suddenly dawn upon him so." As the story progresses, he develops strong feelings for her. Father Olguin is the Roman Catholic priest at the mission at Walatowa. He is a confused man, torn between the traditions of his religion and those of the society around him.
[His] reverence for the land can be compared to the pastoral vision found in most mainstream American literature, but the two visions contain essential differences. In Norris's The Octopus, for example, the wheat remains, a symbol of the vitalistic force moving everything, but this vision of cyclically renewed life is unconvincing, overshadowed by the railroad's evil…. Both priests are drawn to the distant past, which is something that Abel is trying to forget. For Tosamah, it is the stories that his grandmother shared with him about the last days of the Kiowa tribe in Montana. Father Olguin studies the same period of time in the journals left by his predecessor, Fray Nicolas. Abel's grandfather, Francisco, remembers these days, and is in fact mentioned in Fray Nicolas' journal, where he is represented as evil and dangerous.
Martinez is the brutal, sadistic police officer who ambushes Abel and Benally. Martinez accosts them in an alley when the two men are drunk, attempting to intimidate them. When Abel does not cower before him, Martinez cracks his knuckles with his nightstick. It is that senseless and brutal act that alienates Abel from white civilization. Benally also asserts that Martinez would stop in at the bar sometimes to pick up bribes—sometimes a free bottle of liquor, sometimes money. A believer in the traditional ways, he is described as a "longhair." The novel opens with him trying to capture a sparrow so that he might have its feathers to use for ceremonial purposes.
At the height of his suffering, her name echoes through his mind; only her name, and a question mark. The very day then that Abel kills the albino the community from which he is estranged could have provided him with a way of ritually confronting the white man. Had his return not been a failure, he might have borne his agony, as Francisco had "twice or three times," by taking the part of the bull.
The distinction goes beyond the obvious fact that one is a Catholic priest in Native American territory and the other a Native American priest living in the big city. Tosamah has friends, while Father Olguin delegates to his subordinates; Tosamah embraces mysteries while Father Olguin seeks the consolation of solving mysteries; Father Olguin is reticent—like Abel—while Tosamah's speeches ramble. Readers who have trouble perceiving the connection between Father Olguin and Abel must at least concede how unlike Abel Tosamah is. One of the first things we find out about the priest is that he has one bad eye, clouded over with a film and almost closed.
Through the distorting lens of his own desperate need for some sense of meaning to his life, Ben sees an urban paradise, and it is this vision that he consciously advances as salvation. Abel returns to the reservation in New Mexico to take care of his grandfather, who is dying. His grandfather tells him the stories from his youth and stresses the importance of staying connected to his people's traditions. When the time comes, Abel dresses his grandfather for burial and smears his own body with ashes.
"House made of dawn." I used to tell him about those old ways, the stories and the signs, Beauty-way and Night Chant. I sang some of those things and told him what they meant, what I thought they were about. And you were little and right there in the center of everything, the sacred mountains, the snow-covered mountains and the hills, the gullies and the flats, the sundown and the night, everything—where you were little, where you were and had to be. If Ben "won't believe this" it is because the sentiments Tosamah here expresses hardly parallel his actions, and Tosamah knows it.
On a rare venture out of the house, Francisco leads Abel to a place where their people once held an annual tradition called the race of the dead. He tries to convince Abel of the importance of remaining spiritually connected to their people’s past. By joining with the other runners, the race helps Abel feel as though he’s reconnecting at last with his people and discovering his place in the world, though he lacks the in-depth understanding of his race that belonged to Francisco.
As the Civil Rights movement raised America's consciousness about the oppression of African Americans, it also raised awareness about the treatment of other groups. For example, the Indian Reform Movement became a popular cause for many American people. Probably the best known activist group, the American Indian Movement (AIM), formed in Minneapolis in 1968 to protest against police brutality. After that, the group went on to lead several high-profile protests.
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