The Native American characters of House Made of Dawn show great respect for the natural world, and the narrator follows suit; the story dedicates entire pages to descriptions of nature and characters’ reactions to it. Francisco, one of the oldest point-of-view characters, has the strongest connection to nature. He communes with the crops he plants, hearing and understanding the whispers of his corn. One of his last memories as he dies is a lesson he taught to his grandsons, imparting to them the importance of following nature’s rhythms. On the hunt that marks Francisco’s maturation into a man, he feels that both he and his horse have come of age at the same time.
Younger Indigenous characters share Francisco’s instinctual respect for nature, but modernization from outside their reservation interrupts their connection to nature. When Ben teaches Abel some Navajo songs, he describes them as songs about “the way it used to be, how there was nothing all around but the hills and the sunrise and the clouds.” Ben imagines a world without man-made inventions imposing on nature as holy and powerful, but that world is gone. At the end of the book, Abel runs across a valley to the point of exhaustion, until “he [can] see at last without having to think.” Freed from his own worries, he takes in the landscape and finally connects with it. Abel’s journey suggests that although Indigenous people’s ability to become one with the natural world is inhibited by the industrial trappings of colonialism, Native Americans can still pursue that union.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Nature ThemeTracker
Nature 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.
Then, through the falling leaves, he saw the machine. It rose up behind the hill, black and massive, looming there in front of the sun. He saw it swell, deepen, and take shape on the skyline, as if it were some upheaval of the earth […]. For a moment it seemed apart from the land; its great iron hull lay out against the timber and the sky, and the center of its weight hung away from the ridge. Then it came crashing down […].
He made his way along the incline at the edge of the cultivated fields to the long row of foothills at the base of the red mesa. When the first breeze of the evening rose up in the shadow that fell across the hills, he sat down and looked out over the green and yellow blocks of farmland. He could see his grandfather, others, working below in the sunlit fields. The breeze was very faint, and it bore the scent of earth and grain; and for a moment everything was all right with him. He was at home.
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.
[…] there was no longer a white house of stucco and stone, looming out against the leaves of the orchard, but a black organic mass the night had heaved up, even as long ago the canyon had been wrenched out of time […]. It was no longer the chance place of her visitation, but now the dominion of her next day and the day after, as far ahead as she cared to see. […] In fact it was secret like herself, the Benevides house.
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.
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.
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 saw the dark shape sauntering among the trees, and then the others, sitting all around, motionless, the short pointed ears and the soft shining eyes, almost kindly and discreet, the gaze of gray heads bidding only welcome and wild good will. And he was young and it was the first time he had come among them and he brought the rifle up and made no sound. He swung the sights slowly around from one to another of the still, shadowy shapes, but they made no sign except to cock their heads a notch, sitting still and away in the darkness like a litter of pups, full of shyness and wonder and delight.
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.
