House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

These things he told to his grandsons carefully, slowly and at length, because they were old and true, and they could be lost forever as easily as one generation is lost to the next, as easily as one old man might lose his voice, having spoken not enough or not at all. But his grandsons new already; not the names of the strict position of the sun each day in relation to its house, but the larger motion and meaning of the great organic calendar itself, the emergency of dawn and dusk, summer and winter, the very cycle of the sun and of all the suns that were and were to come. And he knew they knew, and he took them with him to the fields and they cut open the earth and touched the corn and ate sweet melons in the sun.

I have been trying to teach House Made of Dawn for years and years, it seems like. It took several years of pondering to conceptualize the class in contemporary Native American fiction I now teach, though I always knew that Momaday's legendary novel would be a part of it, and then just after I reread the novel in 2020, school as we knew it shut down. Reading it again I feel a kind of nervous anticipation about how students will respond to it--personally I suspect they will find it too difficult to really enjoy, though they will be challenged by it in ways they may not recognize on a surface level--and again I feel rather stymied by it. It's a weird, complicated book, one that's hard to penetrate, and one whose greatest power seems removed somewhere behind the page itself, and to see it is to see as the traditional Pueblo dancers do, "beyond the mountain": "To say 'beyond the mountain,' and to mean it, to mean, simply, beyond everything for which the mountain stands, of which it signifies the being."

Anyway. I've reviewed this book twice before, and you can read those reviews here and here, so I won't make a big review for this time around. But one thing I did notice this time around, because I've now read The Way to Rainy Mountain, is how much of that other novel is contained within this one. Momaday is Kiowa, a tribal nation native to the Great Plains, who lived for a time at the Walatowa Pueblo in New Mexico because his parents were teachers in the Indian Service. (There is a "pan-Indian" quality to the novel if you're willing to look for it, not least in the way the Pueblo reveres the customs of a small group of refugee Navajo who were integrated into the Pueblo generations prior--something that is echoed in the befuddled care the Navajo narrator Ben Benally bestows on the Pueblo protagonist Abel in Los Angeles.) The experiences of Momaday's grandmother, an Oklahoma Kiowa, are incorporated into the book as the memories of Josiah Big Bluff Tosamah, the bombastic "Priest of the Sun" in the Native American Church in Los Angeles:

The last time I saw her, she prayed standing by the side of her bed at night, naked to the waist, the light of a kerosene lamp moving upon her dark skin. Her long black hair, always drawn and braided in the day, lay upon her shoulders and breasts like a shawl. I did not always understand her prayers; I believe they were made of an older language than that of ordinary speech. There was something inherently sad in the sound, some slight hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow.

I probably wouldn't have noticed the parallels if not for Tosamah telling the story of how his grandmother was a member of a Kiowa band that traveled to Texas to beg to be sold a buffalo from a private herd, for which they were rebuffed, a moment that largely spelled doom for their religious traditions. What's interesting about this is that Tosamah is a rather ambiguous character, whose church is depicted as too syncretic, and too eager to make accommodations with the settler world into which Indian Relocation programs have dropped these characters: he makes fun of Abel for being a "longhair," but that's who Abel is--though he tries to make it Los Angeles, it's only back at Walatowa that he can really be the person he is meant to be. What was Momaday doing, I wonder, by giving a character like Tosamah his own memories?

I don't know that I find this book any easier after three readings, but I am noticing new things about it. It can be a challenging, even off-putting book, but how many books really reward repeated readings like that. I hope my students, even if they don't love it--and I don't think even I could say I love it, though I respect and admire it--find something in it worth reflecting on.