The Names by N. Scott Momaday

The events of one's life take place, take place. How often have I used this expression, and how often have I stopped to think what it means? Events do take place; they have meaning in relation to the things around them. And a part of my life happened to take place at Jemez. I existed within that landscape, and then my existence was indivisible with it. I placed my shadow there in the hills, my voice in the wind that ran there, in those old mornings and afternoons and evenings. It may be that the old people there watch for me in the streets; it may be so.

When I visited Walatowa, the main settlement at the Jemez Pueblo in northern New Mexico, a couple summers ago, I told the guide at the visitor center that I was interested in the life of author N. Scott Momaday, who had grown up at Jemez. He took me into their small museum and showed me a huge photograph of Momaday's mother, Netachee, who had come with Momaday's father to teach at the Jemez Day School. A similar photograph, or perhaps even the same one, is printed in Momaday's memoir The Names, an illustration of the community that adopted Momaday and his family, inviting him into the place about which he writes, "My spirit was quiet there." As in House Made of Dawn, Momaday writes so beautifully about the landscape of Jemez, and it's clearer here than ever that it's a loving eye that produces such descriptions. It's the voice of a man writing about his home.

The Names begins with accounts of Momaday's ancestors, including his namesake Mammedaty, and Pohd-lohk, who gave Momaday his "Indian name," Tsoai-talee, which is derived from the name of Bear Lodge, or Devils Tower, in Wyoming. On his mother's side, Momaday describes a heritage that is part Cherokee but mostly white Kentuckians. His father's side is Kiowa, and here as in The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday writes with affection about his Kiowa family in Oklahoma. These places and heritages combine to make Momaday who he is, but not all equally; you can see that Momaday writes with respect and reverence for the Kiowa of Oklahoma, and with a mystic detachment about Bear Lodge, but much more ardently about Jemez. Between these there is a sojourn to Gallup, the colorful, largely Native city of western New Mexico, and Hobbs on the state's northeastern side, where Momaday's account of his life might be difficult to distinguish from any of the other children, whose big themes are school and sports, bullying and being bullied. This section contains a long section of stream-of-consciousness that captures the point-of-view of young Momaday, and is some of the memoir's most experimental and unusual writing.

What struck me when the novel turns to Jemez was the feeling that Momaday has of being an outsider. The hero of House Made of Dawn (and I did read much of The Names through the lens of this novel) is a native of Jemez, made an outsider by his alcoholism and the alienating experiences of war, but the novel is also interested in true outsiders, like the white woman Angela and the priest, Father Olguin. Here, as in the novel, Momaday writes of the Pecos Pueblo people who were given refuge at Jemez when their pueblo was destroyed. But only here in the memoir did I understand how much Momaday identifies with those people: refugees. The Names illuminates other parts of the novel, too. Here, for example, is an old and admired man named Francisco, who no doubt has become the Francisco of the book, and here is an account of the strange ritual where men try to pluck a buried chicken from the ground on horseback. Momaday describes it here as an ancient tradition that has degenerated, becoming a game for boorish young men; this really recontextualizes the scene in House where Abel kills the man who has embarrassed him at it.

More than anything, I thought The Names was beautiful. Momaday has a way of writing that feels utterly sincere. I guess it's not true that there's no room for irony here--Momaday's account of growing up in Hobbs makes great use of a child's narrow and self-involved worldview--but when Momaday grows up, or when he talks about Jemez, or the land, there's none of that, no detachment. I think of it as the prose of a writer who is deeply engaged with the world, and who speaks only when he has something to say. He really was remarkable.

The Ancient Child by N. Scott Momaday

What he saw, not once but recurrently, was a dark, impending shape on a dark field of the sky. It seemed very slowly to revolve and approach. At a certain distance it was seen to be a beast, massive and indefinite. It was disintegrated, distorted, changing. The head was twisted in a severe, unnatural attitude, as if the neck were broken. It described a terrible mutation and suffering, a pain so great so to have become desperation and rage, and profound helplessness. There were faint blue facets upon the grotesque head and limbs, elongated like the quick strokes of a brush. But these only intensified the darkness of the thing and gave to it the illusion of light within, of a deep, steady, central life. The sky beyond was murky and splotched with light, not points of clear bright light, but random forms like beads of amber in which were ancient and delicate debris. And closer, the eyes of the beast glinted and were pierced with dull opalescence, and the great misshapen mouth gaped and flamed. Set had the terrifying conviction that when the beast drew near to him, within reach, it would crack open with pain and all its shining, ulcerous insides, its raveled strings and organs, its slime and blood and bile would fall and splash upon him, and he would dissolve in the hot contamination of the beast and become in some extreme and unholy amalgamation one with the beast.

Locke Setman--Set--is a successful artist living in the Bay Area. He has a beautiful girlfriend, a thriving  career, a loving adoptive father. One day he gets a cryptic message from Oklahoma: his grandmother, from the Kiowa side of his family that he knows little about, is dying. He rushes to Oklahoma out of curiosity and compulsion, but he's too late. His grandmother, who he never had a chance to meet, is dead. But there is another woman there, a beautiful young medicine woman named Grey, who gives him the bundle of bear medicine that is his birthright. Returning, stymied, to California, his life begins to fall apart. He suffers a series of nervous breakdowns; he becomes violent. His artwork is better than it's ever been, but unsellable. He comes to understand that he must return to Oklahoma, to Grey, that a life that he thought he was severed from by the fact of his adoption. It's only this return by which he might rescue himself.

Momaday's House Made of Dawn is a book that means a lot to me. The first time I read it--in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico--I was captivated by its slipperiness, its difficult language and shifting genres, though it is only through teaching it and letting the book unfold as an experience over many readings that I feel like I understand it. I was reluctant, a little, to read Momaday's only other novel, The Ancient Child, because what if it wasn't as good? There is something a little more recognizably written and human about The Ancient Child, perhaps because it's a novel of the 80s and not the 60s, but it shares with House Made of Dawn the qualities that make it both a challenge and a joy. 

At bottom, there's a story I recognize: a Native American, alienated from his heritage and culture by the forces of political modernity, becomes whole by traveling to the place of his ancestors. That's the story of House Made of Dawn, too, though in both novels Momaday gives us protagonists who have multiple heritages, different tribes and European heritages overlaid into the same identity, so it's not a simple matter of tracing back one's blood. The central myths of the novel are about bears. There's the Kiowa story about the boy who was transformed into a bear and chased his sisters into the sky; his scratching of a great tree created what's now known as Devil's Tower and the sisters become the Pleiades. But there's another story, too, from the Piegan tradition, in which a little boy appears in the village out of nowhere, and then leaves. His appearance, we're told, is so strange and hard to understand that the villagers suppress the memory: it must have been a bear that visited them. The madness and despair that stalk Set are like the spirit of the bear that transforms the boy against his will--simple enough--but the Piegan story undermines the story of the bear, and suggests perhaps it is only a way of smoothing over a deeper and more troubling truth.

Then there's Grey, who flouts most literary expectations for "medicine women" by being beautiful and young. Grey's status as medicine woman is depicted as a kind of holy innocence; we are told over and over again that she "never had to quest for visions"; they simply come upon her. She's a skilled horse rider, who can snatch a match from the ground on horseback without falling, and in one pivotal scene she ties the hands of a man who tries to rape her with barbed wire and circumcises him. For the most part, Grey's visions bring her back to the Wild West, where she becomes the lover of Billy the Kid. This is so strange, but clearly important; Billy is a significant character in the story, and he exists in a kind of timeliness with Grey where he is able to converse with her about the famous circumstances of his own death. Grey is in love with him--are we supposed to read this as a suggestion that even Indigenous people can fall in love with the myths of the American West? I'm still wondering what it is that Billy is doing in this novel, but I love him here; I love the way the pieces refuse to fit neatly together. I do see that Set's return to Oklahoma means that Grey must learn to let Billy go; I see that she's not just a magical healer for Set (like, for example, the medicine woman Ts'eh in Ceremony) but someone who herself must find a way to live wholly.

One last thing that stuck out to me: Set is an artist. The novel's biggest flaw, I think, is that it has trouble conceptualizing Set's art, because it really isn't interested in it as art, but rather as a symbol for a way of seeing. The novel is separated into sections called "Lines," "Planes," and "Shapes," pointing toward the fleshing out of vision, of visual elements coming together into a whole. It seems to me that Set's art picks up some of the yearning to see that characters profess in House Made of Dawn; I was reminded of the white woman Angela wanting to see "beyond the mountain," which I read as a kind of modernist desire to see beyond the intervening stages of art, words, interpretation. What interests me and troubles me about The Ancient Child is the way it adds myth to the list; myth points to the deeper truth of what happens to Set and Grey, but it can never be real, it can never satisfy. The novel ends with Set, gone on a pilgrimage to Devil's Tower, encountering and becoming the bear, the real, at last.

Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah

"Kiowas always wear red on the left," I told them. I wanted to teach them about their culture. I knew Turtle and Lila were always busy with work. I didn't know how much time the spent at the gourd dances.

"What color do Cherokees wear?" Ever asked.

"Cherokees don't have a color."

"Mom is not going to like that," Quinton aded.

"No, I mean in the gourd dances there are two colors. Red for Kiowa and blue for Comanche."

"My dad's a Comanche," Quinton said. He was almost to the end of his popsicle.

"Your dad is Kiowa and Comanche," I told Quinton.

"Do Mexicans have a color?" Ever asked.

"No, Mexicans don't have a color."

"How come I saw three colors on a big blanket at my house?" Ever asked. "Red, white, and green."

"That was a flag, Ever."

Ever Geimausaddle is like a lot of people growing up in Oklahoma, the crossroads of Indian culture in the United States: a mix of cultures. His mother Turtle is Kiowa and Cherokee and his father Everardo is Mexican. Though Everardo is an abusive brute, made bitter by a beating he receives at the hands of Mexican border agents, Ever himself has a large, rich extended family to support him during what turns out to be a coming of age made difficult by poverty, addiction, and violence. Calling for a Blanket Dance is a polyphonic novel, a collection of stories that capture a snapshot of Ever's life from childhood to adulthood, each one narrated by a different person in his life--mother, auntie, cousin, girlfriend, son.

The central story, to me, was the one narrated by Ever's most distant relative, Opbee--the niece of his grandfather Vincent. In this story, the title "blanket dance" is performed at a powwow for Ever and his family, in which they are surrounded by dancers, symbolizing the support of the larger community--who also toss cash onto their blanket. Later, Opbee realizes that a quilt she's purchased from Ever after the powwow is one knit by his grandmother Lena for her great-grandchild. Opbee travels around the area searching for the blankets, sold out of necessity, to re-purchase them and collect them so they can be returned to Ever and his children. There's a neat symbolism to the quilt, itself a woven object, and the act of "knitting up" committed by Opbee, who literally ties together the loose strands of Ever's life and gathers them back together. One of the strengths of Calling for a Blanket Dance is its insistence that all the strands of one's life and heritage are important. The passage above, from when Ever is a child, is pretty funny, but it also captures some of the difficulty of navigating the many facets of one's identity--Mexican, Kiowa, Cherokee, Comanche, each with its own gifts, and its demands.

Calling for a Blanket Dance is interested, too, in the ways young men grow up. Men like Ever's father Everardo and his grandfather Vincent never grow out of their destructive patterns, or, as in the case of Vincent, who gives up alcohol to late to save his health and his life, grow out of them too late. Ever, too, must fend off the allure of gang violence and drug addiction; his first wife, Lonnie, is ravaged by meth. Ever seeks a refuge in the army, but even this proves to be a false start; discharged, he returns home. Ultimately, it's fatherhood that saves him, first by adopting a troubled teen named Leander (whose casual and sarcastic voice is one of the novel's best artistic strokes) and then having children of his own.

Funnily, Calling for a Blanket Dance covers some of the same ground as Brandon Hobson's novel of the Oklahoma foster system, Where the Dead Sit Talking. But the comparison reveals the limitations of Calling for a Blanket Dance. When, in Hobson's novel, Sequoyah imagines grinding his thumb into the face of his sleeping roommate, we believe him; we are convinced that he may lash out in violence he cannot control. When Leander feels like lashing out, we are certain that social worker Ever's solution--"When you get angry, I want you to draw"--will help Leander channel his impulses into positive behavior. There's never any other narrative possibility; though marginal characters like Vincent and Lonnie may suffer, we are sure that Ever and his immediate family will be knit back into health and safety. When, in the final story, narrated at last by Ever, he camps out overnight waiting for a crack at a foreclosed house being distributed by the Cherokee Nation, is there any doubt that he'll receive one--or that, in a gesture toward the possibility of loss, that he'll be the last person in line to get one? Still, the many voices of Calling for a Blanket Dance are a difficult feat, and are what make it worth reading.

Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land by N. Scott Momaday

We humans must revere the earth, for it is our well-being. Always the earth grants us what we need. If we treat the earth with kindness, it will treat us kindly. If we give our belief to the earth, it will believe in us. There is no better blessing than to be believed in. There are those who believe that the earth is dead. They are deceived. The earth is alive, and it is possessed of spirit. Consider the holy tree. It can be allowed to thirst. It can be cut down. Worst of all, it can be denied our faith in it, our belief. But if we speak to it, if we pray, it will thrive.

Last week I had the great fortune to be able to visit Walatowa, the main community of the Pueblo of Jemez. Walatowa is the setting of N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn; I received a grant in order to visit this and other Pueblo sites in New Mexico. Walatowa is closed to visitors, but has a visitor center with a small museum; a very friendly man there guided me to a photograph of Momaday's mother on the wall, in an exhibit about the local school. She was a teacher, a Kiowa who took a job with the Indian school service, and who brought her son with her. The photo reaffirmed something that I'd been thinking about during my recent re-read of the novel: Momaday, though he too is a Native person, was a stranger at Walatowa, as much a stranger as I was, and House Made of Dawn is a book written by an outsider, who saw in the place a certain fundamental beauty that speaks to larger truths about the world. Here's what Momaday writes about his childhood at Walatowa:

At the pueblo of Walatowa I came to know a world that was remote in time and space. I was twelve years old when my parents and I moved there. In my day the life of the town had remained by and large unchanged for hundreds of years. The people grew corns and melons and chili; they hunted deer and bear in the mountains, they captured golden eagles for use in their ceremonies. Time was told on a solar calendar, according to the position of the sun on the horizon. There were ceremonial dances and feast days of marked activity and color. I fitted myself into the ancient rhythm of life there and came to know that country far and wide on the back of a horse. Then that world began to change with the return of young men form World War II. Many of them had been psychologically severed from the traditional earth. It was a time of loss.

Yet, Momaday too suffered a kind of loss in the move, or if not a loss, at least a fundamental change, in the separation from the Kiowa landscape of his mother, father, and ancestors. In Earth Keeper, a new short book of prose poetry from Momaday, he writes about an old Kiowa man named Dragonfly who teaches a respect and regard for the living world. The earth, Dragonfly instructs, relies on our belief in it: "He was told every day he must pray not only to witness the sun's appearance, but indeed to raise the sun, to see to it that the sun was borne into the sky ,that each day was made by the grade of Dragonfly's words." What a responsibility--to pray the sun into the sky! And yet, Dragonfly describes a burden that each of us must take up, to be an "earth keeper" and maintain the processes that keep the spirit of the earth alive.

But Momaday never met Dragonfly, who was an old man when his father was a boy. "This happened a long time ago," Momaday writes about Dragonfly's lesson. "I was not there. My father was there when he was a boy. He told me of it. And I was there." As in House Made of Dawn, which includes a fictionalized version of the Momaday's Kiowa grandmother's story that is repeated more pointedly in The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday suggests that storytelling and oral tradition are methods of maintaining a link to the earth even when a physical connection is absent. I was touched to think of the young Momaday, impressed by the longstanding ties between the Jemez people and the earth, thinking of his own connection to his Kiowa lands back home in Oklahoma.

Earth Keeper is interesting because it is a reminder of the way that the lessons of House Made of Dawn and Rainy Mountain remain relevant in the 21st century. "Ours is a damaged world," Momaday writes. "We humans have done the damage, and we must be held to account. We have suffered a poverty of imagination, a loss of innocence." It's a shock to see, among Momaday's plainspoken and old-seeming language, references to climate change: "But on the immediate side there is the exhaust of countless machines, toxic and unavoidable. The planet is warming , and the northern ice is melting." Can we think of climate change as the inevitable result of the loss of ancient wisdom? That we have failed, collectively, to live up to Dragonfly's instructions to be an "earth keeper?" Earth Keeper is a small book, and may seem slight and light on ideas, but this, I think, is a powerful message, and it makes the book an important and interesting context in which to read Momaday's other books.

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.

The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday

I remember coming out upon the northern Great Plains in the late spring. There were meadows of blue and yellow wildflowers on the slopes, and I could see the still, sunlit plain below, reaching away out of sight. At first there is no discrimination in the eye, nothing but the land itself, whole and impenetrable. But then the smallest things began to stand out of the depths--herds and rivers and groves--and each of these has perfect being in terms of distance and of silence and of age. Yes, I thought, now I see the earth as it really is; never again will I see things as I saw them yesterday or the day before.

The Kiowa people, as their stories say, came out of the Rocky Mountains and into the Great Plains hundreds of years ago, settling in central Oklahoma by a hill called Rainy Mountain. The hallmarks of Kiowa culture were developed along the way: their religion, centered on a figure called Tai-me, their ways of hunting, the horse prowess that helped them, along with the Comanches, dominated the southern plains for a century and a half. When his grandmother died, N. Scott Momaday--a Kiowa who grew up not, like his grandmother, near Rainy Mountain, but in New Mexico--decided to follow the footsteps of the first Kiowa to his grandmother's home, and The Way to Rainy Mountain records his observations.

But Momaday's travels and reminiscences only make up a third of the book. "The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices," he writes. "The first is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice." The first vignette, for example, begins with Momaday's father's voice telling the story of the ancient Kiowa emerging into the world through a hollow log. On the opposite page, the historical voice tells us, "They called themselves Kwuda and later Tepda, both of which mean 'coming out.'" And below that, Momaday records his own impressions of coming out into the plains for the first time, the beautiful and simple description I have excerpted at the top of the page.

"There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout," Momaday writes, "a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself." The three voices, woven together, have a remarkable cumulative power. When they seem markedly different, they seem to suggest that the present and the past can rhyme, and that even though our language puts us at a great distance from our ancestors, something between us remains unbroken. When the voices seem strangely similar, as happens more and more later in the book, as Al Momaday's stories of the past combine with Momaday's own memory of his grandparents and great-grandparents, the past seems somehow literally present--transubstantiated. And while, as David Treuer notes in Native American Fiction: A User's Guide, claims about modernist writers drawing from oral culture are often cant, one can see how the voice of legend has influenced the style Momaday uses here and in A House Made of Dawn. Al, like N. Scott, has a way with words, and more: the book is illustrated with very impressive black-and-white drawings by Al himself.

I was touched by The Way to Rainy Mountain. Clearly the book emerges from grief, grief over the loss of Momaday's grandmother, but a loss, too, of a living link to the past at a time when the Kiowa language and culture are at risk of disappearing. Wouldn't it be a shame if the "historical voice" were the only one that remained? But Momaday's pilgrimage to Rainy Mountain, and the threading of voices together into a single tight braid, seem like a preservative and hopeful act. 

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

Abel walked into the canyon.  His return to the town had been a failure, for all his looking forward.  He had tried in the days that followed to speak to his grandfather, but he could not say the things he wanted; he had tried to pray, to sing, to enter into the old rhythm of the tongue, but he was no longer attuned to it.  And yet it was still there, like memory, in the reach of his hearing, as if Francisco or his mother or Vidal had spoken out of the past and the words had taken hold of the moment and made it eternal.  Had he been able to say it, anything out of his own language--even the commonplace formula of greeting "Where are you going"--which had no being beyond sound, no visible substance, would one again have shown him whole to himself; but he was dumb.

This semester, I'm teaching a class on Native American literature for the first time.  I had planned on teaching four texts: Tommy Orange's There There, LeAnne Howe's Savage Conversations, Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God, and this novel, N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn.  Of course, the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has changed my plans.  I don't know if school will be happening this week or next, or if I'll be there even if it is.  If I have to cut a book from the curriculum, it's probably this one, important and vital as it is.  It's demanding, challenging--but I don't know if I'm in the right frame of mind for this kind of challenge right now, and I don't know if my students are either.

Anyway.  I did find that, reading it a second time, it wasn't as difficult a read as I had first found it.  It helps, of course, to know what happens; I spent the second time around not reading for the plot but for other things: the spareness of the language, for one, which is actually quite striking.  Some other things I discovered:

House Made of Dawn is a multiethnic and multicultural story.  On the surface, it's a story like Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, in which a Native man, his spirit ravaged from war, returns to his tribal home only to find he no longer fits.  When he finds a way at last to reintegrate himself into the cultural and religious life of his community, his mental anguish disappears.  But for Silko, this means a rejection of white culture, which she associates with a malevolent force named "witchery," and complete reabsorption into the lifeways of the Laguna Pueblo.

In House Made of Dawn, on the other hand, Abel already begins as a kind of outsider: his mother is not Pueblo but Navajo.  His community, Walatowa, has opened their doors to a small group of refugee Navajo, whose ceremonies become part of Pueblo life.  The rites of the community are a mishmash of traditional Pueblo religion, Navajo religion, and Catholicism, which Momaday seems to respect.  And furthermore, my first reading of Abel's trist with the white woman Angela St. John (whose name is an Anglicization [Angela-cization?] of Walotawa's patron saint-figure Santiago, who may or may not be the St. John of of the Bible) as something nefarious now strikes me as a mistake.  Angela, after all, ends up helping to nurse Abel through his hospitalization in Los Angeles, when his hands are badly broken by a corrupt cop.  It seems hard to read House Made of Dawn as an embrace of a specific cultural tradition; after all, Abel's friend and narrator Ben Benally, who is Navajo, seems to be comfortable in Anglo-dominated L.A.

House Made of Dawn is structured around rituals and rites.  Part of what makes the book a challenge at first is that these rites are totally unfamiliar, and Momaday is not particularly forthcoming with explanations or justifications.  At Walatowa, there is ritual distance running and the Navajo practice of hunting and capturing eagles (!).  In L.A., there is the peyote ritual of the Native American church.  These rituals are what give order to life among the Native people of House Made of Dawn, and Abel's distress is clearest when he is unable to comprehend them.  During the festival of Santiago at Walatowa, Abel is bested in a strange ritual by an albino man named Juan Reyes, who rubs a bloody chicken in his face.  The first time around I read this as an act of gloating, but now it seems to me that it may be part of the ritual itself--who knows, honestly--which Abel misinterprets.  He kills Reyes in a fit of anger, perhaps because his mind remains on the field of battle, rather than the world of ritual.

House Made of Dawn is very good.  I'm sorry to think I won't get a chance to read it with my seniors, if that's really what's happening.  Doubtless some of them would breathe a sigh of relief if they knew they were being absolved of reading such a challenging text, but that's OK.  Maybe some of them will come back to it someday, like I did, and see how stunning it can be.