House Made of Dawn follows Abel, a Native American man, as he returns home to be with his dying grandfather Francisco. Through the novel’s examination of its complex characters, House Made of Dawn examines notions of a Native American identity and explores various paths available to Indigenous people in midcentury America. The book suggests that living in one’s native land allows people to form meaningful connections with their homes that “alien and inferior” residents cannot achieve, and that doing so helps a person in turn discover who they are.
Ben and Abel, who move away from their reservations, yearn for home and often discuss returning. When Abel finally goes home to Walatowa, Ben imagines the joy and relief he would feel at returning to his reservation. The narrative, though, never resolves whether Ben will commit to uprooting his life in Los Angeles and return home. Tosamah, the Priest of the Sun, also lives away from the reservation. He is educated and proudly modern, looking down on the more traditional Abel for fulfilling the stereotype of a “primitive Indian”—but Abel also seems to be the only one of the three men who finds real peace, which he does when he returns home. The division between Native Americans who live on reservations and those who live elsewhere speaks to the diversity of the Native American experience more generally. The Indigenous characters bond over similar spiritual beliefs, but they also have different backgrounds, legends, and priorities. Rather than suggesting that there’s only one way for people to feel at home and like they belong, House Made of Dawn highlights how place, connection to one’s home, and relationships form a person’s identity.
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Home, Belonging, and Identity ThemeTracker
Home, Belonging, and Identity Quotes in House Made of Dawn
Dypaloh. There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands. Red and blue and spotted horses grazed in the plain, and there was a dark wilderness on the mountains beyond. The land was still and strong. It was beautiful all around.
Abel was running.
[Abel’s] father was a Navajo, they said, or a Sia, or an Isleta, an outsider anyway, which made him and his mother and Vidal somehow foreign and strange. Francisco was the man of the family, but even […] the boy could sense his grandfather’s age, just as he knew that his mother was going to die of her illness. It was nothing he was told, but he knew it anyway and without understanding, as he knew already the motion of the sun and the seasons.
She could think of nothing more vile and obscene than the raw flesh and blood of her body, the raveled veins and the gore upon her bones. And now the monstrous fetal form, the blue, blind, great-headed thing growing within her and feeding upon her. […] And at odd moments she wished with all her heart to die by fire, fire of such intense heat that her body should dissolve in it all at once. There must be no popping of fat or any burning on of the bones. Above all she must give off no stench of death.
These [animals]––and the innumerable meaner creatures, the lizard and the frog, the insect and the worm––have tenure in the land. The other, latecoming things––the beasts of burden and of trade, the horse and the sheep, the dog and the cat––these have an alien and inferior aspect, a poverty of vision and instinct, by which they are estranged from the wild land, and made tentative. They are born and die upon the land, but then they are gone away from it, as if they had never been. […] [M]an too, has tenure in the land; he dwelt upon the land twenty-five thousand years ago, and his gods before him.
The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held onto their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.
It made him glad to be in the midst of talk and celebration, to savor the rich relief of the coming rain upon the rows of beans and chilies and corn, to see the return of weather, of trade and reunion upon the town. He tossed his head in greeting to the shy Navajo children who hid among the camps and peered, afraid of his age and affliction. For they, too, were a harvest, in some intractable sense the regeneration of his own bone and blood.
And then they were ready, the two of them. They went out into the darkness and the rain. […] When they were midway between the river and the road, they stopped. […] All around was silence, save for the sound of the rain and the moan of the wind in the wires. Abel waited. The white man raised his arms, as if to embrace him, and came forward. But Abel had already taken hold of the knife, and he drew it. He leaned inside the white man’s arms and drove the blade up under the bones of the breast and across. […] [The white man] closed his hands upon Abel and drew him close.
“And in his hurry he said too much. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ It was the Truth, all right, but it was more than the Truth. The Truth was overgrown with fat, and the fat was God. The fat was John’s God, and God stood between John and the Truth. […] He had said all there was to say, everything, but he went on. ‘In the beginning was the word….’ Brothers and sisters, that was the Truth […]
[O]ld John was a white man, and the white man has his ways. […] He talks about the Word. He talks through it and around it. […] And in all of this he subtracts the Truth.’”
When he had told his story once, simply, Abel refused to speak. […] That was good, for he should not have known what more to say. Word by word by word these men were disposing of him in language, their language, and they were making a bad job of it.
“No test is completely valid,” she said. “Some are more valid than others.”
But Milly believed in tests, questions and answers, words on paper. She was a lot like Ben. She believed in Honor, Industry, the Second Chance, the Brotherhood of Man, the American Dream, and him––Abel; she believed in him. After a while he began to suspect as much […].
She had been in Los Angeles four years, and in all that time she had not talked to anyone. There were people all around; she knew them, worked with them––sometimes they would not leave her alone––but she did not talk to them, tell them anything that mattered in the least. […]
And then one day he was there by her door, waiting for her. It was a hot, humid afternoon and the streets were full of people when she walked home. And he was waiting for her. […] He was saying something, trying to tell her why he had come, and suddenly she realized how lonely they both were, how unspeakably lonely.
We went up there on the hill, him and me, with Tosamah and Cruz. There were a lot of Indians up there, and we really got going after a while. […] Somebody built a fire, and we heated the drums until they were good and you could really hear them. Mercedes Tenorio had some turtle shells and she started doing a stomp dance.
You can forget about everything up there. […] We could see one whole side of the city, all the way to the water, but we couldn’t hear anything down there. All we could hear was the drums and the singing.
He was a longhair, like Tosamah said. You know, you have to change. That’s the only way you can live in a place like this. You have to forget about the way it was, how you grew up and all. Sometimes it’s hard, but you have to do it. Well, he didn’t want to change, I guess, or he didn’t know how. […] He was going to get us all in trouble, Tosamah said. Tosamah sizes him up right away and warned me about him. But, you know, Tosamah doesn’t understand either. He talks pretty big all the time, and he’s educated, but he doesn’t understand.
“They gave him every advantage. […] But was he grateful? Hell, no, man, he was too dumb to be civilized. So what happened? They let him alone at last. They thought he was harmless. […] But it didn’t turn out that way. He turned out to be a real primitive sonuvabitch, and the first time he got hold of a knife he killed a man. That must have embarrassed the hell out of them.
“[…] They put that cat away, man. They had to. It’s part of the Jesus scheme. They, man. They put all of us renegades, us diehards, away sooner or later.”
[Tosamah] doesn’t know how it is when you grow up out there someplace. […] You grow up in the night, and there are a lot of funny things going on, things you don’t know how to talk about. A baby dies, or a good horse. You get sick, or the corn dries up for no good reason. Then you remember something that happened the week before, something that wasn’t right. You heard an owl, maybe, or you saw a funny kind of whirlwind […]. And then you know. You just know. Maybe your aunt or your grandmother was a witch. Maybe you knew she was […]. You just know, and you can’t help being scared.
He was going home, and I wanted to pray. Look out for me, I said; look out each day and listen for me. And we were going together on horses to the hills. We were going to ride out in the first light to the hills. We were going to see how it was, and always was, how the sun came up with a little wind and the light ran out on the land. We were going to get drunk, I said. We were going to be all alone, and we were going to get drunk and sing. We were going to sing about the way it always was. And it was going to be right and beautiful. It was going to be the last time. And he was going home.
[Abel’s] own sickness had settled into despair. […] His eyes burned and his body throbbed and he could not think what to do. The room enclosed him, as it always had, as if the small interior, in which this voice and other voices rose and remained forever at the walls, were all of infinity that he had ever known. It was the room in which he was born, in which his mother and brother died.
They must learn the whole contour of the black mesa. They must know it as they knew the shape of their hands, always and by heart. […] They must know the long journey of the sun on the black mesa, how it rode in the seasons and the years, and they must live according to the sun appearing, for only then could they reckon where they were, where all things were, in time. […]
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.
He was running, and his body cracked open with pain, and he was running on. He was running and there was no reason to run but the running itself and the land and the dawn appearing. […] He saw the slim black bodies of the runners in the distance, gliding away without sound through the slanting light and the rain. […] His legs buckled and he fell in the snow. The rain fell around him in the snow and he saw his broken hands […]. And he got up and ran on. He was alone and running on. […] Pure exhaustion laid hold of his mind, and he could see at last without having to think. He could see the canyon and the mountains and the sky.
