House Made of Dawn

"Momaday is cited as the writer who inaugurated the Native American Renaissance. House Made of Dawn is just wonderful. It made a huge splash, drawing more attention to Native writing in its wake. It’s about a character called Abel who at the beginning of the book is returning to his tribe’s reservation after serving as a soldier in World War II. It’s very much about his upbringing, his service, his reintegration after war, and his later life in Los Angeles. That description makes it sound like another classic bildungsroman but it’s not. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter House Made of Dawn makes a break from the normal bildungsroman and a breakthrough for Native American novels because the story does not privilege the human. Abel is the main character, but especially in the first half of this novel, it’s just as much about the natural world, the landscape, the animals, the water, the sky. The second part of the novel takes place in the built world of Los Angeles but Momaday maintains a focus on the environment. It’s a horizontal version of thinking about the world that’s really exciting. That kind of writing is part of what engaged the readers. He’s less committed to something like representation, although House Made of Dawn was definitely taken up as representation. And the story does concern itself with how tribal practices translate to the urban context in the latter half of the book. That is really important because indigenous stories are not bound to rural spaces. Momaday takes us to a reservation and then into urban life, showing us indigenous life in different contexts. It starts with Momaday in 1968. But a lot of fiction writers were part of the Native American Renaissance: James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko are two other famous examples. They were writing about native life. Anything that is bound by a category like Native American Renaissance is going to have books and authors that fall beyond its scope, to some degree. There are people who get canonized and others who get left out. What that has to do with the emergence of new left American Indian politics is a great question. At that time, there was a lot of organization against integrationist policies. In 1969, 89 American Indians began the occupation of Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay, to call attention to injustices against indigenous people. I think there was a back and forth relationship between the politics and the literature. It’s a moment when people are thinking about what makes identity and what “counts” as Native."