House Made of Dawn

N. Scott Momaday

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1968

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue and Part 1, Chapters 1-3

Part 1, Chapters 4-7

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Background

Historical Context: European Colonization of the Americas

House Made of Dawn is set in the US in the mid-20th century. Many of the characters are Indigenous Americans, and they feel alienated from the society built by the colonizing forces from countries such as Great Britain, France, Spain, and other European countries. In this sense, the novel takes place in the shadow of the European colonization of the Americas. This process of colonization began soon after Christopher Columbus’s Spanish expedition to the Caribbean in the 1490s inadvertently reached the Americas—a journey that began a scramble by European powers for wealth and treasure in the “New World.” In the ensuing centuries, European nations sent ships filled with people to colonize North America. They claimed the land and extracted wealth from the continent that they sent back to their home countries.

The arrival of European colonizers in the Americas had tragic consequences for the people already living in the region—people who had lived in North, Central, and South America for thousands of years. After their contact with the Europeans, the estimated Indigenous population of the Americas fell from 50 million people to eight million in just 150 years because of active warfare, disease, enslavement and deportation, and the systematic killing of people who refused to convert to Christianity and instead held fast to their own spiritual beliefs.

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North America (most of which eventually became the US and Canada) was home to many societies and cultures at the time of the Europeans’ arrival on the continent. Many of these people lost lives, land, and agency due to oppression, violence, and intimidation by colonial forces. In response, many societies banded together to form new tribes to resist European control. As the Europeans took control of the region at the expense of the Indigenous population, they continued to spread west until the entire continent was under European colonial control. The US and Canada supplanted the Indigenous population and restricted the lives of Indigenous peoples to certain reservations and areas, many of which were liable to change. The loss of life, authority, and culture that the Indigenous people of the Americas experienced at the hands of Europeans has been called the first genocide of the modern era.

Cultural Context: Indian Reservations

Large parts of the plot of House Made of Dawn are set on an Indian reservation in New Mexico named Jemez Pueblo. In the southwestern US, pueblo is used as an alternative, Spanish-language name for reservations. Indian reservations are areas governed by an Indigenous tribal nation, whose authority the US government recognizes and which is accountable to the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs rather than the government of the state where the reservation is located. The US has 326 Indian reservations; some tribes govern more than one, some share governance with other tribes, and some tribes have no reservation. Currently, Indian reservations account for 2.3% of the total area of the US, and most of this land is west of the Mississippi. Of the estimated 5.2 million Indigenous Americans in the US, approximately 22% lived on reservations as of 2012.

During the European colonization of the Americas, Indigenous Americans were often forcibly removed from areas that the colonizers sought to occupy. Treaties made under duress and involved violence, and mutually agreed-on deals were occasionally used to transfer ownership from Indigenous people to Europeans. Tribes displaced by Europeans lost access to ways of life, livelihoods, food sources, culturally important landmarks, and much more during their removal from their ancestral homelands. After the foundation of the US, white bureaucrats created administrative organizations to manage the land issues arising from the continued forced removal of Indigenous peoples as white colonization spread west. Manifest destiny, a phrase that white settlers coined in 1845 to justify the spread of white colonialism of the continent at the expense of the Indigenous peoples, implied a belief that God had tasked white settlers with bringing the land under their control.

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Throughout US history, the Indigenous population has endured violence, relocation, cultural extermination, and marginalization by the government. Indian reservations were created as a solution to the problem of so many dislocated people; ironically the official use of the term Indian to describe Indigenous tribes perpetuates the problem of cultural erasure. Reservations were often remote, small, and far from tribes’ ancestral homelands. Indigenous Americans were forcibly moved to these locations; examples of these forced relocations include the Trail of Tears, in which President Andrew Jackson defied the Supreme Court to march 60,000 Indigenous American people to a new location. Thousands died. In the modern era, reservations are often among the country’s poorest regions, affording residents a consequently poor quality of life.

Literary Context: Momaday and the Native American Renaissance

The author of House Made of Dawn, M. Scott Momaday, based many elements of the book on his life experiences growing up on an Indian reservation in the southwestern US. His father was a member of the Kiowa tribe, and his mother was part Cherokee. At the age of 12, Momaday moved to the Jemez Pueblo, the reservation depicted in the story. His parents worked as teachers on the reservation, and he attended the local high school and then the University of New Mexico, eventually earning a Ph.D. in English Literature. Momaday worked in academia and wrote poetry. His research and writing examined his cultural heritage, particularly Indigenous oral storytelling traditions. After publishing a collection of poetry titled The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Momaday began House Made of Dawn as another poetry collection, and it evolved into a novel. The novel won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Momaday’s burgeoning popularity, coupled with his cultural exploration and depiction of life on Indian reservations, led to the emergence of the “Native American Renaissance.”

The Native American Renaissance is a North American literary movement that emerged in the 1960s and built on the literary traditions of writers like William Apess, John Rollin Ridge, and Simon Pokagon, whose work was largely unrecognized. The success of Momaday’s novel and the subsequent popularity of his works was considered a breakthrough moment for Indigenous American writers. The movement sought to reclaim Indigenous cultural heritage through literature, to rediscover and reexamine traditional works by Indigenous American authors, and to preserve culture, belief, religion, folklore, and the oral traditions in danger of being lost because of European colonization. In addition to Momaday, other writers—including Duane Niatum, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, James Welch, and Joy Harjo—published important works throughout the 1970s, building on Momaday’s success.