House Made of Dawn describes several ceremonies and festivals detail to showcase various Southwestern Native American religions. These ceremonies grant a sense of community, ecstasy, and understanding to the participants. They often coincide with revelations or moments of growth for the characters; for instance, Francisco is accepted as a voice in his community when he performs well as a drummer, and Abel first encounters the albino man during a ceremonial fight at a festival.
The characters also grapple with the significance of Catholicism in their lives. Tosamah, who distrusts Catholicism as a colonialist institution, condemns the “Jesus scheme” as a form of oppression. Francisco and Abel, on the other hand, find spiritual meaning in blending Catholic traditions with traditions of the Jemez religion. Tosamah is a religious man––he is a priest, in fact––but Ben Benally believes that his dismissal of Catholicism speaks to Tosamah’s feeling of superiority and his disconnect from magic and superstition. Ben views magic as a fact of life that must be honored, and the profound effects of spirituality and ceremonies on the characters’ lives suggest his view is correct. Still, House Made of Dawn presents traditional Indigenous religions and ceremonies, as well as Christian ones, as capable of providing comfort and community.
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Religion, Ceremony, and Tradition ThemeTracker
Religion, Ceremony, and Tradition Quotes in House Made of Dawn
[Francisco] is evil & desires to do me some injury & this after I befriended him all his life. […] He is one of them & goes often in the kiva & puts on their horns & hides & does worship that Serpent which even is the One our most ancient enemy. Yet he is unashamed to make one of my sacristans & brother I am most fearful to forbid it. […] Why am I betrayed who cannot desire to betray?
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 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.’”
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.
“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.
In the only possible way, perhaps, [Father Olguin] had come to terms with the town […]. To be sure, there was the matter of some old and final cleavage, of certain exclusion, the whole and subtle politics of estrangement, but that was easily put aside […]. That safety––that exclusive silence––was the sense of all his vows, certainly; it had been brought about by his own design, his act of renunciation, not the town’s. He had done well, by the town, after all. He had set an example of piety […].
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.
