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House Made of Dawn. By N. Scott Momaday. New York: Harper, 1999. 198 p. N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for House Made of Dawn, a poetic book which vividly captures the Native American spirit as well as the alienation of the contemporary American Indian caught between two worlds--the world of the ancestors and tradition and the encroaching Euroamerican world of capitalism, consumerism, and materialism. Abel, the central protagonist, must sort through the confusion of his times and find his path or perish. A tale of survival, myth, and of legendary renewal, House Made of Dawn is an excellent introduction into the poetic and spiritual vision of the Native American while providing insight into the psychic divisions most Native Americans face as mainstream America treats the Native American as an invisible outsider. In the 1950s and the 1960s, the United States Congress decided to terminate many reservations and relocated many Native Americans to urban centers in an effort to assimilate the Native American into Euroamerican culture and in order to solve the problems of poverty, unemployment, and lack of educational resources on Native American reservations. A continuation of the civilizing mission of Eurocentric society, this policy generated havoc in Native American communities and led to the psychic disharmony the main protagonist of House Made of Dawn, Abel, experiences as he relocates to Los Angeles. The structure of House Made of Dawn is circular like many mythopoetic narratives: the prologue mirrors the finale of the book in which Abel repeats the ritual of running and connects with his ancestral past; the first chapter, "The Longhair," documents life on the reservation, Abel's erotic encounter with the white woman Angela, and the inner world of the Native American on the reservation, with the gap between the European and American Indian imagination that occurs when Abel kills an albino sorcerer; the second chapter, "The Priest of the Sun," documents the hybrid cultural world of relocated Native Americans as they struggle through alcoholism, alienation, and psychic dislocation--the sermons of Tosamah, Priest of the Sun, links together peyote, poetry, and spiritual vision to Christianity; in the fourth chapter, "the Night Chanter," Abel's drunkenness becomes a symbol of the failure of the termination policy adopted by the United States Congress--in this chapter, Benally becomes the narrator and describes Abel's spiritual dislocation and alcoholism; and finally, "the Dawn Runner" illustrates Abel's transformation into a man, ready to assume the ritual responsibilities his ailing grandfather Francisco can no longer take on. Momaday describes Abel's moment of insight in vivid terms: Abel was suddenly awake, wide awake and listening. The lamp had gone out. Nothing had awakened him. There was no sound in the room. He sat bolt upright, staring into the corner where his grandfather lay. There was a deep red glow on the embers, and the soft light opened and closed upon the walls. There was no wind outside, nor any sound; only a thin chill had come in from the night and it lay lke the cold of a cave on the earthen floor. He could see no movement, and he knew that the old man was dead. (182) This is Momaday's poetic vision at its best because his audience can easily grasp the fluidity and solemnity of the Native American oral tradition in this passage. If you enjoy reading poetry, are interested in the mythopoetic vision of Native American cultures, and would like to read something out of the ordinary, I highly recommend N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn. If you are looking for a book with a straightforward, prosaic narrative absent of poetic insight, this book is not for you. Works Cited. Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.
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