House Made of Dawn Study Guide

N. Scott Momaday is a Kiowa writer of novels, shorts stories, poems, and essays. He was born in Oklahoma before moving as a young child to Arizona and later New Mexico, living on reservations for the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo peoples. He spent several years at the Jemez Pueblo, where his father worked as a teacher, and Momaday’s experiences there inspired House Made of Dawn. House Made of Dawn was his first novel, and its publication in 1968 made Momaday a leading voice in Native American literature. He has continued to write since then, garnering acclaim and awards for many of his projects. Momaday also spent many years as an English professor at colleges and universities across America, including Stanford, Columbia, Princeton, and the University of Arizona. He holds 12 honorary degrees and was a trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian.

After relegating Native American tribes and nations to reservations in the 19th century, the American government spent much of the 20th century passing legislation to push Indigenous people to assimilate into white American culture. Two significant policies enacted in the 1950s, which the characters discuss in House Made of Dawn, were termination and relocation. The policy of termination discontinued government support for Indigenous tribes and the protection of Indigenous-owned land, implicitly encouraging tribes to disband. The relocation policy, meanwhile, established infrastructure to move Native Americans off their previously-protected reservations and into urban areas. These policies led to the growth of Native American populations in cities, like the community that Abel finds in Los Angeles. The relocation policy offered minimal support to Native Americans after relocating them to cities, resulting in widespread poverty and generating controversy around both policies.

Literary critic Kenneth Lincoln described House Made of Dawn as the beginning of a “Native American Renaissance,” which other scholars suggest includes works that reclaim and reevaluate Native American heritage. Two prominent novels from the Native American Renaissance are Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel Ceremony and James Welch’s 1974 novel Winter in the Blood. Ceremony shares many similarities with House Made of Dawn, as Silko also uses a non-linear story to explore a Pueblo man’s experiences after fighting in World War II. Winter in the Blood shares with House Made of Dawn themes of isolation that result from Native American characters’ distance from their heritage. Writers in the second wave of this Renaissance include Louise Erdrich, whose debut novel Love Medicine (1984) follows a non-linear narrative similar to Momaday’s. Like Momaday, Erdrich is a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize.