House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

Man came down the ladder to the plain a long time ago.  It was a slow migration, though he came only from the caves in the canyons and the tops of the mesas nearby.  There are low, broken walls on the tabletops and smoke-blackened caves in the cliffs, where still there are metates and broken bowls and ancient ears of corn, as if the prehistoric civilization had gone out among the hills for a little while and would return; and then everything would be restored to an older age, and time would have returned upon itself and a bad dream of invasion and change would have been dissolved in an hour before the dawn.  For man, too, has tenure in the land; he dwelt upon the land twenty-five thousand years ago, and his gods before him.

N. Scott Momaday's Pultizer Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn is often credited for igniting a "Native American Renaissance" in literature, legitimizing the Native perspective as a valid and productive one and paving the way for later authors.  The premise mirrors Silko's Ceremony, another classic of Native American literature: a native man returns from World War II, broken and alienated, and must find a way to reconnect with his community and his history by embracing the culture of his people.

In this case, the man is Abel, who shows up one day in the town of Walatowa--better known to Anglo audiences maybe as the center of the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico--on a bus and piss-drunk.  He stays with his grandfather Francisco, but Francisco is too absorbed with his own aging and lost youth to do much for Abel.  Through the local Catholic priest--a kind of updated, fallen version of Jean Latour--Abel gets a job cutting wood for a pregnant white woman who has taken a house nearby to take advantage of the local hot springs.  The woman, Angela St. John, seduces Abel, and the sex they have represents some kind of ultimate break, for Abel, from his community.

Angela sees in Abel the instantiation of a dream she has in which she approaches a wild animal, a badger or a bear:  "He was dark and massive above her, poised and tinged with pale blue light.  And in that split second she thought again of the badger at the water, and the great bear, blue-black and blowing."  She exemplifies way that white Americans can fetishize Native Americans, but Momaday allows for the possibility of a real connection between the two.  Years later, when Abel is lying badly beaten in a Los Angeles hospital bed, she comes to comfort him.  The relationship between Natives and whites in House Made of Dawn is never clear or straightforward.  What are we meant to do, for instance, with the albino man Juan Reyes, who humiliates Abel in a traditional horse race and whom Abel ends up stabbing to death?  His pale, terrible appearance suggests the Judge of Blood Meridian, but his ethnic identity--a Native man, of white appearance, with a Hispanic name--refuses to slip int symbolism.  Is Juan Reyes only a recognition of how endlessly complex our racial categories are in practice?

Abel goes to prison; he emerges into a grim and unforgiving Los Angeles.  He's unable to find or keep steady work; he finds friends and even a romantic relationship with a white social worker, but these things are unable to fill a deep and troubling void.  Among other things, this section of the novel presents a sharp and satirical portrayal of a preacher in the Native American Church, whose pet theory is that the Bible should have ended after six words:

You see, he had lived all his life waiting for that one moment, and it came, and it took him by surprise, and it was gone.  And he said, 'In the beginning was the Word...' And, man, right then and there he should have stopped.  There was nothing more to say, but he went on.  He had said all there was to say, everything, but he went on.  'In the beginning was the Word...'  Brothers and sisters, that was the Truth, the whole of it, the essential and eternal Truth, the bone and blood and muscle of the Truth.  But he went on, old John, because he was a preacher.  The perfect vision faded from his mind, and he went on.  The instant passed, and then he had nothing but a memory.  He was desperate and confused, and in the confusion he stumbled and went on.

Words are powerful, stories are powerful--is the preacher's insistence that everything else is "fat" a claim for the power of words or a way of reducing their power by denying so many of them?  The novel also includes what is supposed to be a pretty faithful rendition of a peyote ceremony.

House Made of Dawn is not an easy book.  The first couple of sections are incredibly difficult to parse.  The section at the Pueblos is intensely sensual, descriptive; it lingers for pages over the appearance of a coming rainstorm but withholds clarity in character and action.  The next section, detailing Abel's experiences in Los Angeles, are intentionally fractured, meant to mirror the perspective of Abel, who wakes up on the beach with both his hands broken.  The third section, which is written from the point-of-view of Abel's friend and roommate Ben are much more forgiving.  It's almost as if Momaday recognized the difficulty the narrative and wished to provide an more familiar and recognizable voice, one capable of filling in the details: Abel's hands are broken because he confronted a racist policeman who harassed them.  But Ben is also comfortable in the white Anglo world, his voice comforts a reader like me but it isn't necessarily the right voice to describe Walatowa or Abel's homecoming.

And he does come home: In the end, comforted by Angela and sent back on a train to New Mexico, Abel comes home to take care of his dying grandfather, Francisco.  Momaday suggests that Abel, broken but not done in, may find his place in his community again by taking care of those who came before him.  Man, too, he reminds us, has "tenure in the land": the connection is too old and too profound to be obliterated.