House Made of Dawn

Native American Renaissance

House Made of Dawn was hailed for its contrast with previous novels about Native Americans, which shared with anthropological works timeless settings in a presumed past that was defined as more culturally authentic. Focused on Abel, it tells the story of a troubled World War II veteran who returns to the reservation, is imprisoned for murder, relocated to Los Angeles, and ultimately finds his way back to his community, the fictional Pueblo town of Walatowa, Cañon de San Diego, New Mexico. The novel is temporally complex, with the story unfolding through multiple techniques, including flashbacks, visions, songs and stories from oral traditions from multiple Native American traditions, sermons, and passages from a diary.

Momaday has said that the novel is in part based on his memories of growing up among Native American veterans who returned from World War II to face prejudice despite their service. The novel deals with contemporary social issues, including prejudice, relocation of Native Americans from traditional lands and reservations to cities, urban Native American life, and the Native American Church and its peyote rituals. These themes and settings, particularly the contrast of reservation and urban life and the role of traditional religion and ritual in these contrasting settings, all became important in contemporary Native American literature.

Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, is a Native American community that has been continuously inhabited for over 1,000 years. The term house made of dawn refers to the world of spiritual and physical wholeness and connectedness to the land and its people; the land plays an important role in the spirituality of indigenous American people. In the 1968 book of the same name, the protagonist, Abel, becomes separated from that world through his life experiences outside his family's New Mexico reservation.

An important issue in this novel, and also influential for subsequent writers of contemporary Native American fiction and for Native scholars of this literature, is the role of oral tradition in literature and in contemporary life. Momaday is a member of the Kiowa Nation from Oklahoma but spent his childhood in Jemez Pueblo of New Mexico, the model for Walatowa, and on the Navajo Reservation in Oklahoma. Multiple traditions are represented and sensitively combined in the novel, the title of which is taken from a Navajo healing ceremony, the Night Chant. Healing through traditional practices that link Native Americans to community and the natural world is a major theme of the novel, which begins and ends with a traditional run in the Pueblo community that honors the dead.

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