MASARYKOVA UNIVERZITA V BRNĚ PEDAGOGICKÁ FAKULTA
KATEDRA ANGLICKÉHO JAZYKA A LITERATURY N. Scott Momaday´s House Made of Dawn as a Landmark in Native American Literature Diplomová práce Brno 2007 Vedoucí diplomové práce: Vypracovala: Mgr. Pavla Buchtová Bc. Hana Konečná
1 Prohlášení Prohlašuji, že jsem diplomovou práci zpracovala samostatně a použila jen prameny uvedené v seznamu literatury. Souhlasím, aby práce byla uložena na Masarykově univerzitě v Brně v knihovně Pedagogické fakulty a zpřístupněna ke studijním účelům.
Declaration
I hereby declare that I worked on the thesis on my own and that I used only the sources mentioned in the bibliography. I agree with this diploma thesis being deposited in the library of the Faculty of Education at the Masaryk University and with its being made available for academic purpose.
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Acknowledgments Herewith I would like to thank Mgr. Pavla Buchtová, who commented on my work, for her kind help and valuable advices that she provided me throughout the thesis. Moreover I would very much like to thank Mr. Alfred Schwab who provided me with an exhaustive lecture on Native Americans, guiding me through the Indian missions in San Antonio. Last but not least I would like to mention that I am deeply indebted to my employer, without permission of whom my studies would not even be possible.
3 Contents:
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Introductory Word
1.2. The Term “Native American”
2. THE HISTORY OF NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE
2.1. Native American Literature till the 20 th Century 2.2. The Beginning of Native American Novel
3. HOUSE MADE OF DAWN, THE BREAKING POINT IN NATIVE AME RICAN O NOVEL
3.1. Native Language Usage
3.2. Natural World Images
3.2.1. The Landscape of the Night Chant
3.2.2. Good and Evil Bearers
3.2.3. Animals
3.3. Storytelling
3.4. Native American Beliefs and Rituals
4. CONCLUSION
4 1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Introductory Word
In 1969 N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction an American award regarded as the highest national honor in literary achievements 1 for his House Made of Dawn , a novel about a young Native American who seeks to discover his tribal identity in the Euramerican world. For the first time in the history of white American literature, a piece of work by a Native American writer received critical acclaim .
Momaday’s work appeared simultaneously with a rebirth of political and social consciousness on the part of Native Americans 2. During the early 1970s the truth about the conditions on nation’s reservations was exposed and publicized by Native American activists, and thus America’s general public became involved in the plight of its native cultures. The generation of Native Americans coming of age in the late 60s and early 70s was the first one to receive a substantial education. In addition, the project of historical revisionism, which attempted to document from a native perspective the history of the invasion and colonization of the North American continent (the period referred to as the Wild West in particular); was launched (“Native American Renaissance”).
By describing a struggle for finding personal identity, Momaday named the issue that the Native American community faced in the second part of the twentieth century. As an effect of the technological revolution, Native Americans have been uprooted, again, from their soil. They have become disoriented, and, as a consequence, alienated to so called “land ethic”. Many of them suffered a kind of psychic dislocation of themselves in time and space. Native American sense of the natural order has become unreliable. Abel, the main protagonist of the 1 The Pulitzer Prize is administered by Columbia University in New York City. Apart from literary works it awards the achievements in print journalism and musical composition (“Pulitzer Prize”).
2 The best known of all Indian Power groups was the American Indian Movement (AIM) which was formed by a group of Chippewas in Minneapolis in 1966 to protest alleged police brutality (Mintz).
5 novel, leaves the reservation because of the World War II and then, after serving a prison sentence for murder, the Relocation Program (which was an attempt by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to accelerate the integration of Native Americans into the majority culture).
In writing the novel, which was first conceived as a series of poems and then replanned as a book of stories, Momaday drew on his own childhood experiences of growing up at Jemez Pueblo through the era of World War II. There are details in the novel which correspond to author’s real life occurrences, e.g. the portrayal of Abel which is a composite of the boys whom Momaday knew at Jemez. They died young violently, or survived and are living under the Relocation Program in Los Angeles, Chicago, or Detroit (“House Made of Dawn”). The actual geographical locations as well as Kiowa and Navajo beliefs and customs are also personally inspired elements in House Made of Dawn as Momaday partly spent his boyhood on the Navajo, Apache and Pueblo reservations of the Soutwest.
The leaving of a native place, either because of war or other reasons, inevitably had to cause physical disruption of tribal traditions. However, House Made of Dawn is not a casual story about a war veteran who suffers psychological damage because of participating in the warfare. In the novel , Momaday combines his personal observations with his imagination, something his father tought him to do through his Kiowa ancestral history. It might be said that the novel, apart from depicting the harmful effects of Native American displacement, recognizes the power of word in Native American orature and attempts to transform it into the written form. In early periods, Native American literature was based on oral tradition, that is, telling of stories, singing of songs, making of prayers and chanting. Naturally, there were differences from one cultural area to another. In House Made of Dawn there are histories of Kiowa, Navajo and Pueblo peoples combined. Being born to English speaking parents, one eight Cherokee but seven eights Euro American mother, and Kiowa father whose second language was English, Momaday appropriated the English language as his mother tongue. However, set in his early age in Rainy Mountain Creek in Oklahoma Momaday was thoroughly rooted in the Kiowa culture of his father´s family.
In my thesis I will be touching on the aspects which led the way for the breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream American one. I will research into
6 Momaday´s attempt to transform the original Native American orature into written literature (moreover using the English language and context as a medium) to foster the continuance and renewal of it, being, as Momaday says, a generation from extinction. I will also explore the modernist features of the novel and impact it might have had on further generations of Native American writers.
7 1.2. The Term “Native American” First and foremost I would like to clarify the terminology used to name the native peoples of Americas in my diploma work, since there is some controversy that surrounds the terms in use. These are: Native Americans, American Indians, Indians, Amerindians, Amerinds, or Indigenous, Aboriginal or Original Americans. In Canada, the native peoples are known as First Nations. No single term has been universally accepted. Today the most frequently used term “Native American” was “originally introduced in the United States by anthropologists as a more accurate term for the indigenous people of the Americas, as distinguished from the people of India […]. Because of the widespread acceptance of this newer term in and outside of academic circles, some people believe that ´Indians´ was outdated or offensive.” (“Native American name controversy”). From the Native American writer´s, namely Gerald Vizenor´s, point of view, the term “Indian” is a convenient word. However, he adds, “it is an invented name that does not come from any native language, and does not describe or contain any aspects of traditional tribal experience and literature […]. The name is unbidden, and the native heirs must bear an unnatural burden to be so christened in their own land.” (Vizenor 1995: 1) Nevertheless, some of the so called Native Americans have not approved the term. They claim it as imposed by the government without their approval. Furthermore, some of them question the term because, they argue, “it serves to ease the conscience of ´white America´ with regard to past injustices done to American Indians by effectively eliminating ´Indians´ from the present” (“Native American name controversy”). They prefer “American Indian” to “Native American”, which is a term that was also used to name the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C opened in September 2004. It might be said that the terms “Native American”, “Indian”, and “American Indian” are used interchangeably now. Working with academic sources, I have found out that “Native American” prevails. That is why I have decided for its usage within my paper although I will accept the terms which are used in the sources I cite or paraphrase (e.g. “Indian” used by Momaday in House Made of Dawn ). In my opinion, people from any ethnic group generally
8 wish to be called by the name they give themselves, in their own language. This preference, I think, has gained importance recently as a means of avoiding ethnic discrimination. Therefore the general terms mentioned above only cover the names of tribes so commonly used today. And that is why I have also decided upon stating the tribal origin next to the proper names of the Native American writers. In conclusion, my attempt to choose a noncontroversial terminology for native peoples of Americas also necessarily entails considering the question who qualifies as a Native American and, consequently, who qualifies as a Native American writer. As it is described in The Remembered Earth (an anthology of Native American writers), today Native American people fall into one or more of the following categories: genetic, cultural, and social. People are classified by their tribe, family, or the government as “full bloods”, “half bloods”, “one fourths”, “one eighths”, and so on. This is the genetic distinction. Culturally, a person is characterized in terms of where he or she is from, who his or her people are and what their ways of life, religion, and language are like. Socially (there is a rather fine line between this and the cultural criterion), a person is judged as Native American because of how he or she views the world, i.e. his or her views about land, home, family, culture, etc. And as the author of the anthology concludes his categorization, “thus, to most Native Americans today, it is not merely enough that a person have a justifiable claim to Indian blood, but he or she must also be at least somewhat socially and culturally definable as a Native American.” (Hobson 1979: 8 9) According to Momaday, “we are what we imagine ourselves to be. The Native American is someone who thinks of himself, imagines himself in a particular way. […] And the quality of this imagining is determined as well by racial and cultural experience.” (Momaday 1997: 39). To be an Indian is an idea which a man has of himself, it does not matter if his ancestry is Native American or not, he adds rather freely. Similarly, the Chippewa writer Gerald Vizenor humorously proclaims that he has a revolutionary fervor for Indian identity, the hardest part of which is his belief that all people were invented as Indians (to his own mixed blood he refers to as “torsion in the blood”). (Owens 1992: 5) There are authors who do not demand to be pigeon holed under “Native American writer” category. For instance, N. Scott Momaday says that he does not even know anything like the Native American literature category, he considers himself to be an Indian, and a “writer”
9 (Simerová). Momaday, however, as well as many Native American writers and scholars, started his career with writing about non Indian subject. In Momaday’s case it was a collection of the works of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, a lesser known poet of the Emersonian circle in mid 19th century Massachusetts (Hobson). His tribal identity is not his one and only theme.
On the other hand, there are authors who are proud to be categorized as “Native American”, e.g. Louise Erdrich (Chippewa) who nominates American Indians as her first audience that she writes for. She explains further that Native American literature develops a sense of Pan Indianness; it is through literature that the readers have a kind of universalizing experience (Coltelli).
Furthermore, there may be authors who proclaim to be of Native American origin only because they intend to gain in popularity of Native American literature, which has risen since the 1970s. In general, I believe that there must be a line between one’s discovered roots and present identity however much the writer of Native American origin projects his tribal history to writing. Still, for many contemporary Native American writers their writing substitutes a process of cultural recovery, which might be termed as re membering or putting together the pieces of formerly tribal identity. The question is if the traditional values are not desacralized, if the transformation is possible. Owens relates this to the “move into the secular world of decontextualized ´art´ and one that resembles the transformation of ceremonial dance by the highly choreographed American Indian Dance Theater” (11).
It can be argued that “the Indian in today’s world consciousness is a product of literature, history, and art, and a product of that, as an invention, often bears little resemblance to actual, living Native American people” (Owens 1992: 4). Fiction becomes “a process of deconstructing the verbal artifacts of Indian – or mixedblood – identity” that became more complex since there are mixed marriages, not only tribal cultures mingle mutually (Owens 1992: 5). To identify oneself as an Indian or mixedblood means to confront questions. Writing about the identification, or perhaps authenticity, means to work with oral literature, myths and ceremonies that have much greater power and diction in the life of an individual.
10 2. THE HISTORY OF NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE In this chapter the brief history of Native American literature will be given to sketch in the background for Native American novel and House Made of Dawn consequently. Using the anthologies Tales of the North American Indians by Stith Thompson, The Remembered Earth by Geary Hobson, and Native American Literature by Gerald Vizenor, I would like to summarize the Native American Literature till the 20th century. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel by Louis Owens, a coherent overview of the works by major Native American novelists, helped me trace the beginning of Native American novel. 2.1. Native American Literature till the 20 th Century There would not be a true literary history of the United States without a native voice. The voice of Native Americans in particular is considered to be substantially rich, with its ritual songs, prayers and tales that conveyed beliefs and way of living of a tribe in the spoken mode (oral tradition in general is considered to be the basis of literature). However, it is assumed that there were variants of Native American written language. Hobson claims that they appeared long before Sequoyah developed the Cherokee syllabary (5). The Cherokee silversmith Sequoyah was, together with many Native Americans, impressed by the white people’s ability to communicate with one another by strange marks on paper (what they sometimes referred to as “talking leaves”). It was around 1809 when he started to develop a system of writing for the Cherokee language. After an attempt to create a character for each word, Sequoyah decided to divide a word into syllables and create one character for each syllable. Using the Roman and quite possibly the Cyrillic alphabets, he created 85 characters. This work took Sequoyah 12 years to complete. By 1823 so called Cherokee syllabary was in full use by the Cherokee Nation. They made it official in 1825 (“Sequoyah”).
11 On closer consideration it cannot be claimed that either the supposed earlier variants of Native American written language or Sequoyah´s syllabary were extensively used by Native Americans to record their (oral) literature as it was done with the English language afterwards. Even in its re written form in the English language – primarily collected by non Indians – Native American literature is quite old within the framework of American literature.
Initially, Native American literature was recorded by the Jesuit Fathers (who came to America to work on missions) in their Relations beginning in 1633 where they reported tales current among the tribes with whom they had come into contact. From them we have at this early date rather good versions of the Iroquois creation myth. (It makes no difference whether the author calls his book myths, tales, or legends.) It is interesting that these tales collected again in the twentieth century have the same form they had when they were collected in the early seventeenth century (Thompson 1929: 16).
Tales were collected by travelers and explorers, even if not to a large extent, during the next two centuries (Thompson 1929: 16). However, the figure of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793 1864), an American ethnologist who is regarded as the foremost pioneer in Native American studies, added to the collecting a scientific value. Married to the half Ojibwa daughter of a fur trader, Schoolcraft got acquainted with tribal matters the Ojibwa language and lore personally. His voluminous work on Native Americans resulted in Historical and Statistical Information Respecting...the Indian Tribes of the United States ( “Henry Rowe Schoolcraft”).
One of the world’s leading authorities on folklore, Stith Thompson, in his introduction to the anthology of Native American tales called Tales of the North American Indians (17) , further mentions Professor Franz Boas and his followers who worked on collecting about 1890. Franz Boas (1858 1942) is considered to be one of the pioneers of modern anthropology and is often called “the Father of American Anthropology” (“Franz Boas”).
In the late 1800s anthropology in the United States was dominated by the Bureau of American Ethnology, which was established in 1879 by an act of Congress. Its main purpose was to transfer archives, records and materials that related to the Native Americans of North America. The Bureau together with the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the American Folk Lore Society has collected tales from practically every corner of the continent. With the assistance of several universities and
12 societies that were devoted to the cultivation of particular areas, they covered the entire United States, working in increasingly efficient manner. According to Thompson, “no other primitive people have such an extensive and accurate record of their myths, tales, and legends as the North American Indian.” (17)
Nevertheless, the many anthologies of tribal songs, dreams, and stories are beautiful images in translation, to be sure, but the original context of performance and other circumstances of oral expression are seldom understood in the translation. Too often the rich sources of native imagination and oral literary styles have been reduced in ethnographic studies to the mere evidence of culture. The fragments of songs and oral stories published in anthologies of tribal literatures may seldom have anything in common but the language of dominance. The sudden closure of oral literatures favors written texts over heard stories. Now it cannot be evident if the song was sacred or secular, public or private, if it was an individual dream or a public ceremony. The translations cannot reveal the rich poetic language of the songs and stories. Moreover, translations were usually done by Christian believers and so the spirituality of Native American literature was quickly disappearing. Native Americans have published their own books in English since the beginning of the nineteenth century. A Son of the Forest was one the earliest published writings (1829) by William Apess (Pequod). Luther Standing Bear (Oglala Sioux), John Rogers (Chippewa) and others of their generation were the last to hear “the oral stories of natural reason” in their native families before the stories were recorded and translated, and they were the first to learn how to write about their memories and experiences. (Vizenor 1995: 10) Hobson introduces an idea that these early writers published books that related to their tribal cultures but they generally were Christian converts. “Though their books usually contain a condescension towards their formerly held tribal religious beliefs, they are nevertheless extremely important as contributions to an understanding of their tribes in the early days.” (Hobson 1979: 5) Hobson further mentions Poor Sarah ; or the Indian Woman (1833) by Elias Boundinot, the first novel written by a Native American in a Native American language. It was published six years after the founding of the Cherokee Phoenix , the first tribal newspaper to print in both the native language and English (5). Published by Boundinot, Cherokee
13 Phoenix was partially written in Sequoyahs syllabary, but mostly in English. In 1653 or 1654 Eliot produced his Catechism that was probably the first book to be printed in the Indian language (Cline). In the second half of the 19th century, with the development of the Indian reservations system in the 1870s and 1880s, autobiography became the most popular form and continued to dominate well into the 20th century. The autobiographies were usually written under the guidance of anthropologists or poets who were recording and editing the life stories of Native Americans. It is common to find the white writer’s name with “as told to” or “recorded and edited by” note next to the subject’s name in the title. Perhaps the most famous of these is John G. Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks (1932). According to Neihardt, “Black Elk told his story to his son in the Oglala Lakota language. The son then translated it into English for Neihardt, who then rewrote it. This was a common practice ranging among the tribes, from Crows and Cheyenne of the northern tier of the United States to the Apaches and Navajos in the Southwest.” (Neihardt, quoted in Hobson) Of course, not every personal history was “told to” someone else. Some self sufficient authors naturally appeared. Among them were Charles A. Eastman, a Santee Sioux and university trained medical doctor, who wrote such books as Indian Boyhood (1902) and The Soul of the Indian (1911) and Chief Luther Standing Bear, the author of My People The Sioux (1928) and Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933). Momaday's 1975 autobiographical volume, The Names, is part of this tradition. (Hobson) In conclusion it might be said that Native American literature, which is, written by Native Americans themselves, originated with the beginning of Native American novel at the end of the 19 th century. However, it was namely N. Scott Momaday, at that time a young professor of English at Stanford University in California, who became the first recognized native novelist for the publication of House Made of Dawn in 1968 and started the first wave of Native American Renaissance in the second half of the 20 th century.
14 2.2. The Beginning of Native American Novel
Before 1968, when House Made of Dawn was introduced, only nine novels by Native American authors had been published. According to Other Destinies , a critical analysis of Native American literature, there were four outstanding works which led to Momaday’s breakthrough into the American literary canon. They were: John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854); Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, the Half Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range (1927) ; Joseph Mathews’s Sundown (1934) and D’Arcy McNickle´s The Surrounded (1936).
It was John Rollin Ridge’s novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854) which gave birth to Native American novel. It came with a theme of conflicting identities of the main character living in Native American and Euroamerican worlds. As Owens states (32), it is “wild and bloody fiction purporting to be the biography of a notorious Mexican American bandit”.
The mixedblood writer Ridge (Cherokee) subverts the America’s treatment of his tribe here, namely the oppression and displacement of Native Americans owing to the Indian Removal Act 3 (Murieta was driven to his outlaw life because of mistreatment by Anglo Americans). As the author explains it, the young bandit dies “not as a mere outlaw, committing petty depredations and robberies, but as a hero who has revenged his country’s wrongs and washed out her disgrace in the blood of her enemies”. According to Ridge, Murieta “also leaves behind him the important lesson that there is nothing so dangerous in its consequences as injustice to individuals – whether it arise from prejudice of color or from any other source” (Ridge, quoted in Owens 1992: 38). However, Ridge disguises this message with a potboiler romance.
Ridge, who as the grandson of the prominent and wealthy Cherokee leader had in those days rare opportunity to assimilate into the Euramerican world, simply wanted to penetrate into the (white) market. Therefore he decided upon a less controversial, romantic character of a
3 It was a piece of legislation passed in 1830 that gave the president A. Jackson power to negotiate removal treaties with Native American tribes living east of the Mississippi. Under these treaties, the Native Americans were to give up their lands east of the Mississippi in exchange for lands to the west, most of what would become Oklahoma.
15 mixedblood Mexican American bandit to acknowledge Indianness his identity. (Ridge published his work under his tribal name “Yellow Bird”). Moreover, it was the author’s origin that added to the attractiveness of the novel. As the publisher of the novel drew the reader’s interest in the preface, “aside from its intrinsic merit, will [the novel], no doubt, be read with increased interest when it is known that the author is a ´Cherokee Indian´, born in the woods – reared in the midst of the wildest scenery – and familiar with all that is thrilling, fearful, and tragical in a forest life” (quoted in Owens 1992: 34).
According to Owens, Joaquin Murieta is a novel that “stands as fascinating testimony to the conflicts and tensions within the mixedblood author, who moves easily inside the dominant white culture but cannot forget or forgive the denigration by that culture of his indigenous self” (Owens 1992: 32 33). It marks the beginning of a new genre – the Native American novel – which is free from the hegemony of the dominant and (to Native Americans especially) destructive culture of European America. The experience of spatial displacement (Ridge’s Cherokees as well as other tribes were removed to the territory) gave rise to what has been called a “postcolonial crisis of identity”.
As the 20th century progressed, Native American literature broadened beyond memoir and biography into fiction, journalism and even playwriting . During the one hundred years period an evolution had taken place in the way the Native American writers approached their subjects. They gradually managed to originate new ways of expression for their works to integrate into the mainstream of American literature.
The central concern of the novels published prior to House Made of Dawn , in the first half of the 20 th century, was a mixedblood protagonist with a strong feeling of alienation. This concept of a Native American was diametrically different from then still valid white concept, carried over from the 19 th century. A Native American was comprehended differently by Cooper, Melville or Twain – with whom he moved from a “stoic savage” to “vanishing Indian” and lastly “pathological breed” (Owens 1992: 23). Being Native Americans of origin, Ridge’s followers: Mourning Dove, Joseph Mathews and D´ Arcy McNickle described their characters from new perspective. Nevertheless, it was still the white readership for which they wrote primarily.
Novels by Mourning Dove, Mathews and McNickle were written in a modernist period. Native American literature, however, carried with it different value systems, assumptions
16 about the universe, and functions within society. Modernity had a different definition and set of issues for Native Americans. Similarly to black Americans, Native American writers represented a unique and distinct artistic movement. The mainstream concept of modernism was inspired by the European avant garde art that originated in Germany in the 1890s (but affected also the large American cities: Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York City). However, the great modernist works appeared later, mainly in the 1910s and 1920s. Its primary techniques were those of experiment in form and style, an intentional break from past tradition (with World War I functioning as the significant defining moment) but reference to earlier literature, and irony and stream of consciousness method. The modern period was as an era of radical innovation and experimentation. The modern for Native Americans, however, had different starting point and driving force. The radical break from the past, the "Great War," for Native Americans living as colonized subjects under the control of the U.S. government came a few decades earlier in 1887, with the enactment of The Dawes General Allotment Act 4 (which started the forced assimilation of Native Americans within American Society). Moreover, rather than to deny the past Native American writers focused on saving it from extinction. Native American modernist movement was a movement from the oral to in English written mode (and thus adapting to modernity). The form was not experimental in the way the American modernist texts were. The transformation itself, however, can be considered to be an experiment. (Kent 1999:9)
Experimentation and alienation are closely connected within modernism. Modernist authors perhaps felt somehow alienated from the mainstream society. Similarly, in the Native American fiction of the first half of the 20 th century, the mixedblood characters are displaced from the white industrial society where they consider themselves to be outsiders. However, they feel alienated also in their own Native American society, not being full bloods (which is a tragic image perpetuated by nineteenth century white American fiction). As it occurred in popular fiction by white authors, “the half blood had no place in society and, by inference, no right to exist“ (Kent 1999: 29). Nearly three quarters of a century after publishing Joaquin Murieta , in 1927, Mourning Dove, the first Native American woman writer, wrote of the bitter sense of isolation and 4 The Allotment Act granted 160 acre allotments to each tribal male, and gave away the unclaimed land to homesteaders.
17 estrangement felt by the mixedblood in Cogewea, the Half Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range . Still, the work is rather sentimental. The novel is partly autobiographical, supplemented with passages about the injustices suffered by Native Americans and historical facts on tribes which were added by Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, the editor of the novel. The author (originally Christine Quintasket, Okanogan) attempts to record her ancestral heritage and the way of life she led (the fact that little Christine shared her family with a white orphan gives her two world perception another account). To appeal to her (white) readership and better play a role of a mediator between white and red worlds, Mourning Dove used to say that her father was a Scot, which was denied by both family members and the tribal census. (Owens 1992: 41 42). This is understandable if we take into consideration that she wanted to support her Indian culture appreciation. She did her best to break the stereotypes that most writings about Native American Indian gave at that time. She was the first writer who created a forceful female protagonist. To cite Owens, “Mourning Dove’s novel announced explicitly what was to become the dominant theme in novels by Indian authors further on: the dilemma of the mixedblood, the liminal ´breed´ seemingly trapped between Indian and white worlds.” (40). “Breed” is considered to be inferior degenerate here. Similarly the setting the Great Montana Cattle Range that is heterogeneously populated functions as a metaphor for the complicated world where there is no place for the despised breeds. However, “she rejects the tragic ending and clearly perpetuates the half blood’s existence in the future of American civilization” through the marriage bond formed between Cogewea and Jim, another mixedblood of the novel (Kent 1999: 29). The romantic atmosphere begins to disappear from the Indian novel in the 1930s with the appearance of fiction by John Joseph Mathews (in 1934) and D’Arcy McNickle (in 1936). Mathews’s Sundown , according to Owens (49), “introduced the modern American Indian novel, laying out a pattern for novels by Indian writers that would be confirmed two years later by D’Arcy McNickle.” The novel shows the tragic results the oil boom had in the Osage Reservation, disrupting its tribal values and tradition. It comes with a new type of Native American who is awakening to new authenticity. For the first time in Native American literature, Mathews comes with symbolic meaning of a name. He calls the main protagonist
18 Challenge Windzer and so his quest might be understood as a challenge for Native Americans to cope with Euramerica and its orders. The idea is brought positively; it is not a savage’s funeral but Native American’s birth. As Owens articulates that, the story is a more complex narrative of cultural survival: The ´dark hours just before dawn´ are Mathews’s subject; a ´feeble questioning´ of the dilemmas of Indian existence and identity in the twentieth century is his method; and an awakening to a renewed sense of self – authenticity – for Native Americans would appear to be his goal. (Owens 1992: 53) Additionally, also for the first time, the ecosystemic mythical in terms of Native Americans – world is inserted. A creek plays the central role in Chal´s life, like a valley in a much later House Made of Dawn (Native Americans feel deeply embedded in their native place and leaving it unwillingly means to lose their tribal identity). The images of light and sound (as in House Made of Dawn ) have their immense role in the narrative, too. And then sometimes, when he waked early in the morning, he could hear some mourner on the hill which bordered the creek, chanting the song of death, and always some inscrutable sorrow welled and flooded him; something that was not understandable and was mysterious, and seemed especially fitting for the dense dark hours just before dawn; the hours most fitted for that questing, that feeble attempt to understand. (Mathews, quoted in Owens 1992: 53) Writing of the Native American vision quest for seeking identity, McNickle situates his novel, The Surrounded , on a metaphorical junction with two possible roads. The first leads to acculturation in Euramerica where Native American values have no meaning. The second is bad, too it is the dead end. The pure Indianness – the whole former Native American identity is, under given circumstances when the place is settled by white intruders, impossible. Moreover, there is no possibility for any communication across the two roads. As it is stated by Owens, “McNickle, more than any writer before him, would recognize and write about the crucial role of language and epistemology in the Indian’s struggle for identity, authenticity, and survival.” (62). The monologic language of the authority (metaphorically for example in religion) does not accept divergences. Father Grepilloux declares that it makes no difference whether Archilde, the main protagonist, stays in the valley or not.
19 It was inevitable that a new age would come. It is beginning now. And your boy [Max Leon´s] is standing there where the road divides. He belongs to a new time. He may not stay in this valley, and it makes no difference whether he does or not; it’s what he makes of himself that will count. (McNickle, quoted in Owens 1992: 69) The priest does not accept Max’s unity with place – the valley the boy was born in. Catholic Church, as an authority, did not want to understand the Native American (also religious) identity. Native Americans were supposed to be catholicized to count in Euramerican society. Even if the reconciliation of both worlds, and thus cultural survival, seems to be a failure, the novel has sort of a positive conclusion. As Archilde extends his hands to be cuffed (in the concrete being imprisoned by America’s image of the Indian), he shows that he has not assimilated successfully yet. Nevertheless, Narcisse and Mike, Archilde´s nephews, flee to the mountains and remain free at the novel’s end. It is evident that the next generation after Archilde will undoubtedly benefit from his sacrifice, although their searching for identity will not be an easy quest. We can observe another example of symbolic meaning of a name here. The main protagonist’s name, Archilde, might suggest “Our Shield” – the protector of Indians – or “Our Child” if anglicized, which illustrates the desired dependence upon the Christian faith and missions (Owens 1992: 71). What is interesting, the novel had another unpublished version, the earlier draft entitled “The Hungry Generations”, where McNickle allowed the main protagonist live happily ever after, being fully acculturated. Here on the metaphorical junction Archilde takes the first road that is promising a future. Undoubtedly, “The Hungry Generations” (with acculturation of a Native American pictured as a future) and The Surrounded (depicting the dead end of Native American culture) represent the two unlike roads as such. It is evident that the first modernist novel, Cogewea, the Half Blood was different from the two latter: Sundown and The Surrounded . Both Ridge and Mourning Dove came with a sentimental romance where the characters rather resemble the noble savage. Thus they appealed to their white readership and become mediators between the two worlds. On the
20 other hand, they also depicted the treatment and oppression of Native Americans. The mixedblood dilemmatic schizophrenia of the main character in Cogewea, the Half Blood , passes to the novels by Mathews and McNickle. The oppression by Euramerican world is still evident in Sundown and The Surrounded . However, Mathews first comes with a “silent” hero whose portrayal might be understood as a challenge for the assimilation since the whole former Native American identity cannot be preserved (undoubtedly, the concept of noble savage is finally displaced by a more realistic portrayal of a Native American). McNickle formulates this through a vision quest with the only one possibility – which is again to assimilate – available. The possibility is not stated clearly, though, as it was with typical modernist works which ended without resolutions, using symbols rather than statements. Both Mathews and McNickle use the principles of oral literature to incorporate (and thus preserve) the authentic Native American past to Euramerican present. To certain extent, we might consider the Native American fiction of the 70s to be modernist; however the period had ended decades ago. Similarly to modernist literature, the first wave of Native American Renaissance writers referred to its earlier, oral literature. Writers of the movement as N. Scott Momaday or Leslie Marmon Silko intended, no doubt, to integrate present and past to show that their literature has a long tradition and develops gradually and is being made new (to paraphrase Ezra Pound’s “Make it New” slogan). To understand their works a reader should know more about the Native American culture. As the Anglo modernists did, Momaday and Silko root themselves in traditional culture and try to connect with modern culture. The notion of the mixedblood trapped between Native American and white worlds is still valid with them.
21 3. HOUSE MADE OF DAWN, THE BREAKING POINT IN NATIVE AMERICAN NOVEL
N. Scott Momaday, so called spiritual father of today’s Native American writers, published his House Made of Dawn in 1968, which is 32 years after McNickle´s The Surrounded . Momaday picks up where Mathews and McNickle ceased, though he had possibly no opportunity to read any of the novels that had been published before.
The quest for Native American’s identity is put forward in House Made of Dawn . A Native American is caught between Native American and white worlds but it is evident that his identity is not lost and can be discovered, symbolically through the Navajo Night Chant healing ceremony. The novel is considered to be the first major recognition of a piece of work by Native American writer and breakthrough into the mainstream American canon. It also sparked the Native American Renaissance. Finally it seemed, that
an American Indian writer had produced a novel of a type well schooled readers could both recognize and sink their teeth into, and the critical feast touched off by a Pulitzer Prize was a result in part of the fact that Momaday’s novel is even at first glance recognizably modernist and thus deceptively easy fare for a New Critical approach. (Owens 1992: 91) Still, the early reviewers of the novel such as historian Marshall Sprague in New York Times Book Review (9 June 1968), complained that the novel contained plenty of haze. Sprague also discussed “the seeming contradiction of writing about a native oral culture, especially written in English the language of the so called oppressor”. He thought that the mysteries of “cultures different from our own” cannot be explained in a short novel however talented the author may be (“House Made of Dawn”). Some reviewers were even more critical. For instance, William James Smith in reviewing the novel for Commonweal 5 (20 September 1968), criticised Momaday for his mannered, rather
5 Journal of opinion published by Catholic laypeople which provides a review of public affairs, religion, literature and the arts.
22 lyrical style full of intensified words. Other critics said that it was nothing but “an interesting variation of the old alienation theme”; “a social statement rather than [...] a substantial artistic achievement”; “a memorable failure”, or “a batch of dazzling fragments”. (“House Made of Dawn”) However, in general mostly positive reviews admired for example the poetic language evoking a sense of mythic wholeness, an aspect of new romanticism possibly. And as Baine Kerr noted, “Momaday has used the modern Anglo novel [as] a vehicle for a sacred text”, and was “attempting to transliterate Indian culture, myth, and sensibility into an alien art form, without loss” (“House Made of Dawn”). He managed to push the secular mode of modern fiction into the sacred one in recognition for the power of the spoken word. Firstly, It might be objected that it is the novel´s intended complexity that tries to substitute the means of the preceding oral liturature. Secondly, Momaday´s writing in English can be understood as an element of the inevitable appropriation to American culture as such. And lastly, to comment on the author´s “mannered, rather lyrical style”: In oral literature a storyteller is entitled to tell a story, he is, to certain extent, orginal and creative as he chooses the words, their arrangement and so implies the meaning of the story (not only the storyteller and audience are involved in the creative process though, place is no less important). The poetic beauty of Momaday´s narrative style is therefore the closest step to the richness of means the oral literature abounds with. However, a linear progression of events would not, without doubt, provide such a platform. To sum up, to understand the mysteries of Native American literature inevitably requires more extended knowledge of its culture, then the subtleties of its works can be appreciated in full. The novel is divided into four sections: “The Longhair”, “The Priest of the Sun”, “The Night Chanter” and “The Dawn Runner”. The first section starts at Walatowa, a town in New Mexico's Cañon de San Diego, on July 20 th , in 1945. A young Indian Abel, the main character of the story, being drunk returns back home from the service in World War II. His terrifying war experience comes back in flashbacks, disrupting the scenes which depict the harmony of his native place. The reason why he joined up the army is not given here. In reality, the young Native Americans may have gone off to war to defend their land America because of the desire to assimilate the American culture due to showing the loyalty to the nation. Undoubtedly it was connected with at least promised benefits.
23 At home Abel stays with his grandfather Francisco, the man of the family, who remained Abel’s the only living relative since his mother and brother died of a disease years ago. His father is unknown. Francisco is the only connection with the boy’s past since townspeople do not accept Abel much. Even as a child he felt foreign in the town due to his father’s origin. It was said that his father was a Navajo, or a Sia, or an Isleta; an outsider anyway. (Abel may also have decided to leave home for battlefield because of the feeling of alienation.) Indeed foreign in the town is Angela St. John , a white woman from Los Angeles who has just moved into the nearby Benevides house to recover from an illness. She becomes Abel’s lover and acts as a connection with his future life. After a murder of the albino, an excellent horseman who outdoes Abel at a contest held for Saint Santiago feast, Abel is sent to prison. After serving his sentence he is placed in Los Angeles under the care of the Indian Relocation program where he meets Angela again.
Neither the time spent in prison, nor the place, is described. The second section of the novel starts in Los Angeles on January 26, in 1952. Here Abel unites with a local group of Indians, the leader of the group, Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah, Priest of the Sun; and Navajo Indian Ben Benally who seem to be well adapted to the new living conditions. Los Angles, as described by Ben Benally was lit with different colored lights which were always on. They shone on the pavement and the cars. The stores were all lighted up inside, the windows were full of shiny things. Everything was clean and bright and new looking there. And there was also a lot of noise, you could hear the cars, lot of whistles and horns, there was a lot of loud music all around (Momaday 1969: 128). However, material abundance and tempting prospect of urban life do not manage to draw Abel away from his roots, he simply cannot adjust to his new role of a social workers´ client.
He finally returns back to Walatowa to find his grandfather on the verge of dying. When Francisco dies Abel becomes the man of the family, in reality, the only one alive. So he starts a ceremonial run at dawn, the Winter Race, an act that symbolizes a transfer of roles from one generation to another. Running, which has a significant role in the novel, is following in the footsteps of Abel’s ancestors. The story concludes on February 28 th , in 1952.
By means of flashbacks, weaving together past and present, Momaday emphasises the disparity between reservation life and the life in a modern American city (consequently
24 Native American and Euroamerican worlds). In terms of the novel's structure , i t is interesting that these two environments have a set of parallel characters. There are two father figures: Francisco and Ben Benally; no mother figure but two lovers: Angela and Milly, a social worker in Los Angeles; two spritual figures: Farther Olguin, native of Mexico who is in Walatowa on mission and Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah, the Priest of the Sun.
Abel resembles the typically displaced modernist figure who “finds himself in a situation he recognizes structurally as an inquiry into significance, but he is no longer sure what he is supposed to be looking for”, as put by Louis Menand (quoted in Owens 1992: 19). He suffers from the mixedblood dilemmatic schizophrenia that the former Native American novel protagonists suffered before. Otherness has always been a part of him: “He did not know who his father was. His father was a Navajo, they said, or a Sia, or an Isleta, an outsider anyway, which made him and his mother and Vidal [his brother] somehow foreign and strange.” (Momaday 1969: 15) The Relocation program only added to his displacement. With Abel, a Native American World War II veteran, Momaday also touches the topic of alienation. In reality the service in the war was underlined by pains of discrimination in the army and difficulties that Native American veterans suffered when they returned home, to the reservation. So, in House Made of Dawn , we may find echoes of Lost Generation concept.
As it is described, Abel was foreign not only in the white world. His mixed blood made him foreign to the rest of the Indians in the town, too. As he goes out of the pueblo the first morning back at home all the dogs began to bark, which even enhances the feeling of strangeness. It is also his name which anticipates a difference. Of names, Momaday has said, “I believe that a man is his name [...]. Somewhere in the Indian mentality there is that idea that when someone is given a name – and, by the way, it transcends Indian cultures certainly – when a man is given a name, existence is given him, too. And what could be worse than not having a name.” (Momaday, quoted in Owens 1992: 98)
Similarly as in Mathews´ Sundown and McNickle´s The Surrounded , the main protagonist’s name carries a meaning in House Made of Dawn . Abel is a name with biblical resonance 6, which perhaps underlines the disunity between the two worlds white and Native American, as well as the otherness in the pueblo culture. As it is depicted in the Bible, Abel was a good man. Thus it might be understood that Momaday wants to emphasize the main protagonist’s
6 Angela could be identifiable with an angel, or Mary, Our Lady of Angels, as Owens adds (105).
25 Christianity and faith so promoted by the whites. 7 Owens further concludes that it may be designed so to encourage European Americans to think of the Native American as the slain brother and consider themselves condemned for this primal sin (98).
In the novel, Momaday pushes McNickle´s vision quest ahead. McNickle´s the only possibility for a Native American to assimilate the white culture is changed here into the challenge for him to try to appropriate it. Tribal culture should be kept and cherished, though. Through Navajo healing Night Chant, or Jemez Winter Run, the main protagonist can recover his broken apart identity, suffering spatial and temporal displacement. As it was mentioned before, novel characters do not have Indian but Euramerican names, the fact of which only adds to the message of the story. The journey towards wholeness may be also taken as looking for balance between good and evil, eagle and serpent aspects. In the words of Robert Nelson, Abel will never be whole at this place “until he surrenders to being held by the land, possessed by it as fully as he would possess it”. “The eagle holds the land whole and entire in its vision: eagle medicine is about possessing the land 8. Snake medicine is about being possessed by it, and Abel needs a good dose of this medicine to make his spirit whole.“ (Nelson 1993). Writing the novel, Momaday, without doubt, also reflected his own journey towards self recognition, in his case Kiowa tradition. Similarly as his predecessors, Momaday based the novel on his firsthand knowledge of life at different communities. Thus the personal experiences as well as imagination (that is so rich in Native American culture) are combined. Navarre Scott Momaday was born 1934 in Lawton, Oklahoma and spent the first year of his life at his grandparents' home on the Kiowa reservation where his father was born and raised. When he was one year old, Momaday’s family moved to Arizona. Eventually, they settled in New Mexico where Momaday’s parents, both teachers, taught for 25 years in a two teacher Indian day school. The boy was exposed to the Kiowa, Navajo, Apache and Pueblo Native American cultures. Like Abel Momaday lived
7 The albino might be considered his evil counterpart. Momaday himself calls the albino “an embodiment of evil, an intelligent malignity” (Momaday, quoted in Owens 1992: 102) 8 In many Native American cultures, the universe was believed to be made up of three layers: the underworld that was often considered a dangerous place, the middle world where humans dwell, and the sky world that was inhabited by powerful spirits. The middle world was believed to be held by a giant serpent (Beck). Without doubt, the human and the sky worlds were supposed to be in unity.
26 inside and outside of mainstream society. After graduation from the University of New Mexico and a year of teaching on the Apache reservation at Jicarilla, Momaday earned a doctorate in English literature at Stanford University in 1963. He taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara till 1969 (“The Writer Warrior”).
As it was with massive (white) colonization of anywhere on the globe, during the course of time the native authors attempted to maintain their tribal in aboriginal nations oral literature to withstand the mainstream. They needed “make it new”, though, for their literature to be able to survive. Like his fellow Native American writers, Momaday learnt that it was essential to make the English language access the Native American discourse. To balance both literatures, he refers to Kiowa, Navajo and Pueblo tribal cultures, i.e. native language, storytelling, natural world symbols, and beliefs and rituals. These are the main aspects of the breakthrough House Made of Dawn made in the American literary canon.
27 3.1. Native Language Usage
There were thousands of languages spoken in North and South America prior to the first contact with Europeans. With the spread of settlers´ languages, needles to say, the process of suppression of the Native American languages gradually proceeded. (Some Spanish missionaries, however, still preached to the natives in local languages.) As Momaday notes in his essay “On Indian White Relations”, “one of the most perplexing ironies of American history is the fact that the Indian has been effectively silenced by the intricacies of his own speech. Linguistic diversity has been a formidable barrier to Indian white diplomacy.” (Momaday 1997: 54)
Native American languages had no chance to survive across the country, similarly to Native American tribes which could not stay untouched. Nevertheless, there were communities which did not mingle with the settlers to such an extent and managed to preserve their language actively spoken up to these days. Of course, several indigenous Creole languages developed in the Americas from European languages (e.g. in Louisiana).
The reason why N. Scott Momaday wrote House Made of Dawn was to address some of the issues that the Native American community faced in the second half of the twentieth century. It was dedicated to general (white) public. Therefore it is written for the most part in English 9, enriched only with bits of native language and Spanish as it is predetermined by setting in Jemez pueblo in New Mexico. For Momaday as a multilingual author, switching between Spanish English, English Jemez is not an arbitrary act, nor is it simply an attempt to mime the speech of his community. Incorporating both, Momaday is creating a multiple perspective and thus better enhances to express the intended subject matter.
9 In addition, as Momaday recollects in the introduction to Man Made of Words , his mother tongue is English: ”From the time I was born my parents spoke to me in English, for that was my mother’s native tongue, and she could speak no other. [...] The house and the arbor of the homestead on Rainy Mountain Creek in Oklahoma crackled and rang with Kiowa words, exclamations, and songs that even now I keep in my ear. But I would learn only a part of the whole, and I would never learn to converse easily in Kiowa. [...] My Kiowa family spoke to me in broken English, or their Kiowa words were translated into English for me by my father.” (7)
28 Abel’s native place Walatowa, translated as “village of the bear”, “the people in the canyon” or “at the pueblo in the canyon”; is a native (Towan) word for the village called Jemez Pueblo on most maps today (Nelson 1993).The Towa language (also known as Jemez, after the pueblo where it is spoken) is one of three Kiowa Tanoan 10 languages spoken by the Pueblo people of New Mexico. Tanoan is a major linguistic grouping of Pueblo Indians . Altogether there are about 4000 speakers of Tewa (Tano), Tiwa, and Towa (Jemez) in the American Southwest today. Though these languages are closely related, speakers cannot fully understand one another. Similarly to Tiwa speakers, the Jemez people prefer their language not to be written down for cultural and spiritual reasons. Understandably, there is some disagreement among some Pueblo elders, who feel that their languages should be preserved by oral traditions alone, and a younger generation which puts it differently. For example, some Tewa (Tano) speakers decided that Tewa literacy is important and developed their own orthography for the language. There are language programs today that teach children to read and write in most of the Tewa speaking pueblos (“Tano/Tewa Indian Language“).
The opening and closing word of House Made of Dawn reflect the Native American storytelling tradition. The prologue begins with “Dypaloh” a traditional invocation of Jemez storytellers which symbolicaly opens the novel and apparenty illustrates the content of it, serving as a transformative act of storytelling process. The very last word of the novel is “Qtsedaba”, which is Jemez traditional ending of a story. Having the novel framed like this, we might conclude that it is Towan (or Jemez) story; undoubtedly the author´s personal deposit as he lived in the pueblo in the late 1940s and early 1950s when he was a boy. With a single word Momaday assumes a Native American literary tradition in which stories have serious responsibilities: “to make us whole and heal us, to integrate us fully within the world in which we live and make that world inhabitable, to compel order and reality”. (Owens 1992: 94) There are only two mentions about the languages spoken by the people of Walatowa. First is the mention about people of the town who “after four centuries of Christianity, still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky”. Second comes during the feast of Our Lady of the Angles. Then old Francisco walks the streets of the town and out of the doorways he 10 Kiowa Tanoan (also Tanoan Kiowa) is a family of languages spoken in New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Kiowa is mostly spoken in southwestern Oklahoma .
29 passes comes “the queer, halting talk of old fellowship, Tanoan and Athapascan 11 , broken English and Spanish” (Momaday 1969: 56, 71). It is Abel’s grandfather who acts as a bridge between past, present and future (in reality he would be the bearer of ancestral language). Francisco is, as Owens states (1992: 103), “the syncretic balanced man of the novel” who successfully fused the two worlds that he inhabits. However, he does not speak his native language explicitly here. In the first section “The Longhair”, Francisco is described as singing and talking to himself above the noise of the wagon on the way to pick up Abel who is coming back from war service. The utterances are not reported although there is a snatch of Spanish “heyana oh ... Abelito ... tarda mucho en venir. ... “ which, undoubtedly, marks the moments of joy from Abel’s return (Momaday 1969: 11). Another moment when Spanish, common at missions in New Mexico, is uttered when Francisco addresses his fellow contestant Mariano at the race for good hunting and harvest (“Si dió por vencido”), or further when he prompts a boy in sacristy being there on the occasion of the feast of martyrs (“Ándale, hombre!”) (Momaday 1969: 12, 28). It is also mission’s father Olguin himself who utters in Spanish “bienvenido a la tierra del encanto” to welcome Angela St. John to Walatowa (Momaday 1969: 29). The only moment when ancestral language is used in the novel, in addition to Jemez “Dypaloh” and “Qtsedaba”, comes when Francisco is lying on his deathbed in the last section “The Dawn Runner”. He says random words in Spanish which fall together and make no sense and ends up with “Ayempah”, meaning perhaps “go well” (Momaday 1969: 175). Apart from frequent calling Abel’s name out in Spanish throughout the novel, there is the only Francisco’s direct speech that is addressed to Abel again: “´Listen,´ he said. ´It is the race of the dead, and it happens here.´” (Momaday 1969: 186). It seems as if this only direct sentence of Francisco, moreover in English, shows Abel the way. This is the initiation into the tribal heritage that might help Abel to be whole and recovered. Abel cannot use his ancestral language properly, though. He may have lost the ability to do so because he left the reservation, or simply, in mixed race Walatowa there was no opportunity for Abel to use the language oftentimes, Francisco himself speaks the Spanish language. The inability to pray, sing or say the things he wanted after returning from Word War II merely
11 Most of the Navajo tribe is of Athapascan stock.
30 demonstrates Abel’s complete disunity as native language is commonly understood a part of everyone’s identity. He had tried in the days that followed to speak to his grandfather, but he could not say the things he wanted; he had tried to pray, to sing, to enter into the old rhythm of the tongue, but he was no longer attuned to it ...had he been able to say it, anything of his own language – even the commonplace formula of greeting “Where are you going” – which had no being beyond sound, no visible substance, would once again have shown him whole to himself; but he was dumb. Not dumb – silence was the older and better part of custom still – but inarticulate . (Momaday 1969: 57) To ask a person “Where are you going?” is so commonplace formula in many languages that it almost has the status of a universal greeting. It is also conventional at the eastern pueblo of Jemez. In the deepest implication of these words there is the expression of the speaker’s belonging to the place and by extension, according to Momaday, “the stuff of story and ritual” since the sense of place and belonging are bonded fast by the imagination. (Momaday 1997: 111). Very old in the Native American worldview is the conviction that the earth is vital and that there is a spiritual dimension to it in which man rightly exists. Therefore not being able to attune to his ancestral language, to say even the commonplace formula of greeting, Abel feels displaced from his native Walatowa. The discrepancy in his soul brings the inability to articulate in his ancestral language. English, generally functioning as lingua franca for Native Americans when dealing with authorities, could not serve as a proper or even substitutive code for Abel. The words were familiar but the sense not. After he murders the albino, Abel is arrested and judged by the whites. “Word by word by word these men were disposing of him in language, their language, and they were making a bad job of it. […] He could understand, however imperfectly, what they were doing to him, but he could not understand what they were doing to each other.” (Momaday 1969: 95). Native Americans have a highly developed oral tradition, what they say they mean. That is why the legal elaborate English spoken at court, does not appeal to Abel at the least, it is far removed from the rhythms of storytelling and song. Similar situation of misunderstanding is depicted when Abel deals with social workers in Los Angeles: They can’t help you because you don’t know how to talk to them. They have a lot of
31 words , and you know they mean something, but you don’t know what, and your own words are no good because they’re not the same; they’re different, and they’re the only words you’ve got. Everything is different, and you don’t know how to get used to it. (Momaday 1969: 144) Thus it might be concluded that the misunderstanding in communication was not the inability to understand the literal meaning of the words, and that it is not Abel’s nature but Indianness which handles words and silence as means of communication differently. Silence, paradoxically, is another aspect of a native language. When his grandfather dies Abel follows him at the Winter Race. He is running, and under his breath he begins to sing. Without sound and voice; he has only the words of a song (Momaday 1969: 191). Living, as we would put it, out of the civilization, in the nature, Native Americans handled words with moderation; even deep silence often appeared as a means of communication. As it is nicely depicted when Abel is put on trial for the murder: “When he had told his story once, simply, Abel refused to speak. He sat like a rock in his chair, and after a while no one expected or even wanted him to speak. That was good, for he should not have known what more to say.” (Momaday 1969: 95). Nevertheless, the bearers of meaning, whether expressed explicitly by the characters or not, work between the two worlds reciprocally. Even if Angela does not speak any ancestral language she perceives the Native American ability to communicate without words; which is to see beyond the landscape, every shape, shadow and color; and thus be free, complete and spiritual. First she experiences this with the participants of corn dance at Cochiti 12 . “It was simply that they were grave, distant, intent upon something that she could not see. Their eyes were held upon some vision out of range, something away in the end of distance, some reality that she did not know, or even suspect.” (Momaday 1969: 37). The same ability to see but communicate ´nothing´ Angela learns from Abel when he cuts the wood for her at the Benevides house. She describes him as a wooden Indian with cold and expressionless face. In spite of the fact that Angela distinguishes the Native American particularity she is not able to go through it herself. Her differently functioning culture does not allow her to comprehend the Native American bearers of meaning wholly.
12 Cochiti is a Pueblo in Sandoval County, New Mexico.
32 The element of Jemez native language in the novel evokes an imaginative oral performance. The three words “Dypaloh”, “Qtsedaba” and “Ayempah” may express much more than it could be thought. They indicate that there is a story that ends up with reconciliation, “beauty all around” as it is chanted in the Navajo Night Chant. Thus ´poorely´ given message is not enough for a person born to the white in words rich culture but is fully sufficient for a Native American. The use of Spanish probably sketches in the contextual situation of setting in New Mexico. English as a laguage of the novel corresponds to the message of it, to appropriate the English language but remain whole. The novel is analogous to the Navajo Night Chant healing ceremony, with the words of which it ends. Even if they are in English instead of Navajo, the words are able to convey the meaning.
The storytelling aspect of the novel is moreover supported by elaborate images of nature and place so sensuous in Native American life. Kinship with all the creatures of the earth is a real and active principle in Native American culture. To cite Grant Towendolly: „Spirits are all about us in a gust of wind, or a light wind whirling around our door, that is a family spirit of our loved ones, wanting to know that we are safe“. (Towendolly, quoted in Harrison)
33 3.2. Natural World Images
There is no evil pre condition, no lost harmony and balance, in the Native American interpretation of origin. Many Native American origin tales, by contrast to Christian belief, explain that people and the universe at the same time moved from chaos and disorder to balance and harmony of natural world. These so called Emergence stories were most widely developed among agricultural peoples in the southwestern United States (i.e. the Pueblos including). If one is ill, restoration can be achieved by a ritual return to the place of Emergence and recovery of the original power from that place. With numbers of Native American tribes, it can be expected that some of the stories show interesting similarities while others differ greatly among the tribes (Wiget). Nevertheless, Native American origin tales more frequently differ from the stories of biblical tradition. For “most of the Native American people did not originate in a protoworld (like Eden) but rather in the womb of the Earth Mother, from which they were called out into the daylight of their Sun (or Sky) Father” (Wiget). Spiritual powers that created people were always connected to nature. According to Hopi (Pueblo) creation myth it was Tawa, the Sun God, and Spider Woman, the Earth Goddess who were the original sky parents . The story describes further the subsequent generations presented as animal like or insect like people preparing the world for the coming of the later humans (MacLloyd). Given such beliefs, Native Americans did not consider humans as having a radically different nature from the rest of the earth’s inhabitants. Their beliefs were linked to animism that saw kindred spirits in all animals and plants; nature was sacred.
The removal from a specific identity sustaining environment, as in Abel’s case, breaks the relationship between self and place. No other place, moreover urban, can compensate the loss of spirituality and thus authenticity. To move or to be moved from one’s own homeland given to the nation through creation myth was unthinkable. Abel himself, when walking the canyon after his return from the war, feels like he would have sung a creation song of the first world, fire and flood and of the emergence of dawn from hills. He is not able to articulate it, however (Momaday 1969: 57). He instinctively returns to his native place to gain the original power from it and thus recover himself.
34 Modernism was “an art of cities” designed to confront problems of massive urbanization, with emphasis upon a “placeless iconography” (Owens 1992: 93). Contrariwise, Native American literature concerned primarily with rural existence. The modern way of life is a threat for Abel, the main protagonist of House Made of Dawn . He simply cannot feel free and happy in the city built up with the houses made of bricks. He was born into the limitless house made of dawn.
35 3.2.1. The Landscape of the Night Chant
Following the invocation, House Made of Dawn transforms into a vision out of the Navajo Night Chant ceremony: “There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting” (Momaday 1969: 7). “House made of dawn” is a metaphor for life in peace and balance, a limitless world. According to Navajo Creation Story, which has many versions however, “the Creator had a thought that created Light in the East. Then the thought went South to create Water, West to create Air and North to create Pollen from emptiness. This Pollen became Earth.” All of these elements mixed together and created the Holy People (“Navajo Creation Story”).The verse from the Night Chant in full version celebrates the individual elements of the natural world that are interconnected and balanced.
House made of dawn. House made of evening light. House made of the dark cloud. House made of male rain. House made of dark mist. House made of female rain. House made of pollen. House made of grasshoppers.
The landscape described so lyrically in the prologue of the novel might be that of Walatowa, or any other place: “The first light had been deep and vague in the mist, and then the sun flashed and a great yellow glare fell under the cloud. The road verged upon clusters of juniper and mesquite, and he could see the black angles and twists of wood beneath the hard white crust [...].” (Momaday 1969: 7). The landscape is a kind of cathedral of spiritual life for Native Americans, their home of deepest being. Due to the traditional invocation, timeless and mythic background is introduced, which has been termed by Momaday as “the realization of the imaginative experience”. According to him, “to be integrated into the pueblo – the people, the place – is to be timeless, outside of time and part of the endless cycles of nature. It is also to be removed from the experience of ephemerality, fragmentation, and most significantly, to be defined according to eternal, immutable values arising from a profound integration with place.” (Momaday, quoted in
36 Owens 1992: 94 95). The secular mode of modernist fiction is transformed into the supersensory one with the Native American reverence for the land and its mysticism. As it is described in the novel: The people of the town [Walatowa] 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 [...]. Momaday 1969: 56) However, the agrarian Pueblo people are perhaps more invested in the land than are other tribes. Their whole life is predicated upon a thorough perception of the physical world and its countless aspects. Also for this reason their oral tradition is very rich. (cf native lg) As Francisco lies dying at the end of section “The Dawn Runner”, he recalls six episodes from his life at Jemez pueblo, two of which deal specifically with a bond to the land. Francisco shows Abel how the people came to relate to the land in the pueblo. The first episode recalls how Francisco took Abel and Vidal out to the old Campo Santo when “they were old enough“ to learn how to live their lives according to the “house of the sun”, to know “where they were, were all things were, in time” (Momaday 1969: 177). The other recalls the time Francisco took only Abel north of the town to the “round red rock” to hear the sound of ancestors still running the race of the dead (Momaday 1969: 185 186). In both episodes, Francisco is teaching Abel old truths of the tribe, truths that are anchored at very specific places on the land. According to Nelson, the Black Mesa of Walatowa (the round red rock), may be seen as analogous to the Kiowa Rainy Mountain of Tosamah's vision (and Momaday's consequently), and the Navajo Tségihi of Ben's. In all three cases, “the ´place among the rocks´ functions as the locus where the possibilities of renewed vision (´dawn´), renewed physical motion, and spiritual healing may become constellated in and by an act that confirms one's identity with the landscape.“ (Nelson 1993) Abel’s progression in the healing process is marked by the description of the landscape. The prologue scene finds Abel “almost to be standing still, very little and alone” running through a lyrically described valley. There was no town but road that was probably leading there; which
37 might symbolize Abel’s return home to the reservation. As he is running through the dawn, “for a time the sun was whole beneath the cloud; then it rose into eclipse, and a dark and certain shadow came upon the land” (Momaday 1969: 7). The harmony is broken. Comparing the landscape in the prologue to the landscape at the end of the novel we realize that the “shadow” is still there lying over the world, heavy and still. (Momaday 1969: 190). And than, suddenly, the life emerges from the land itself, upon the saddle of the black mesa, where there was nothing but only the clear pool of eternity “the void began to deepen and to change”. The sun is rising. So, Abel’s vision gradually cleared and “he was running and there was no reason to run but running itself and the land and the dawn appearing”. “Pure exhaustion laid hold of his mind, and he could see at last without having to think.” (Momaday 1969: 191) Driven with the “House Made of Dawn” song, Abel could see clearly where he was, where all things were in space: “He could see the canyon and the mountains and the sky. He could see the rain and the river and the fields beyond. He could see the dark hills at dawn.” (Momaday 1969: 191). To borrow Nelson’s nicely formulated conclusion, the crucial difference is that “Abel at the novel's end has recovered an identity with the land worth singing about , and he sees (both literally and figuratively) life his and the land's as, at this moment at least, indivisible“. (Nelson 1989: 15)
38 3.2.2. Good and Evil Bearers
Weather elements in connection with darkness and light, sound and silence are pivotal for the novel to imply good and evil powers that are struggling for Abel “good” and “evil” is rather Christian terminology, however, it is used the novel: “The runners after evil ran as water runs [...]. They ran with great dignity and calm, not in the hope of anything, but hopelessly; neither in fear nor hatred nor despair of evil, but simply in recognition and with respect. Evil was.” (Momaday 1969: 96). Moreover, as it was mentioned before, the people of Walatowa were Christianized and so it is highly possible that they could have accepted the notion of good and evil. Variously discolored rays of light are the most frequently used throughout the novel, in collocations as: dim light, dry uniformity of light, the shafts of reddish gold final light, the splinters of light, the cold perimeter of light , or, the finest running lines of light, silver and bronze. Light, and dawn consequently, is a good’s device (also in Christian faith where light symbolizes hope in the darkness). As the Priest of the Sun connects light with Native American spirituality: “to look upon that landscape [around Rainy Mountain in Oklahoma] in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.” (Momaday 1969: 117) The novel starts and ends at dawn. Dawn signifies purity and connection with land and place. The first morning after coming back from the WW II Abel wakes up at dawn and later on, when appearing on a hill above the native town placed in a valley, he can see “the whole of the valley growing light and the far mesas and the sunlight and on the crest of the mountain”. The scene symbolizes a return to Abel’s roots that is the well known and safe valley: In the early morning the land lay huge and sluggish, discernible only as a whole, with nothing in relief except its own sheer, brilliant margin as far away as the eye could see, and beyond that the nothingness of the sky (Momaday 1969: 14). Another light of the sky, moonlight, often comes in an enchanted way. The light of the moon is connected with the scene when Abel finds himself on the beach in Los Angeles, an urban place which is not familiar to his culture. The scene is depicted as follows: “the moon made a bright, shimmering course upon [the sea], a broad track breaking apart and yet forever whole
39 and infinite, undulating, melting away into furtive islands of light in the great gray, black, and silver sea”. The sea is not of Abel’s landscape since he comes from an inland pueblo. Therefore he considers it “an enchanted thing, too, for it lays under the spell of the moon”. (Momaday 1969: 91) Light and sun is connected with harmony. The harmonious scenes are usually depicted in a calm, motionless environment. The silence is absorbed with sound usually when a change in order and balance is about to happen. For example, Abel’s remembrance of an event from the World War II begins with a comforting sense of place but becomes a nightmare memory as a German tank enters the pastoral scene: “It moved into the wide wake of silence, taking hold of the silence and swelling huge inside of it.” (Momaday 1969: 26). The sound arouses the feelings of strangeness, fear and uneasiness. Like the “dark and certain shadow” in the prologue, the tank comes between Abel and the sun, denying light and vision. The evil aspect is frequently involved in relation with sound, the sound of wind in particular. Abel comes across “the thing” – evil obviously at a very young age while still living on the reservation. He hears the thing itself: “He knew even then that it was only the wind, but it was a stranger sound than any he had ever known. [...] The moan of the wind grew loud, and it filled him with dread. For the rest of his life it would be for him the particular sound of anguish.” (Momaday 1969: 16) Francisco comes across the evil when he is working in the fields one day. But in comparison to his grandson he is not fearful, which is understandable, as Francisco is not going through a healing process. He realizes the proper way how to deal with evil – when Francisco acknowledges its presence he turns away and thus neutralizes its power. Again, here the evil comes in relation with sound: Evening gives motion to the air, and the long blades of corn careen and collide [...] there was nothing save the soft sound of water and wind and, somewhere among the farthest rows, the momentary scuttle of a quail; [...] there was something else; something apart from these, not quite absorbed into the ordinary silence: an excitement of breathing in the instant just past, all ways immediate, irrevocable even now that it had ceased to be. [...] His acknowledgment of the unknown was nothing more than a dull, intrinsic sadness, a vague desire to weep, for evil had long since found him out and
40 knew who he was. He set a blessing upon the corn and took up his hoe. He shuffled out between the rows, toward the dim light at the edge of the cornfield. (Momaday 1969: 63 64) To be sure, Francisco’s turning toward the dim light at the end implies a turn to good powers. Francisco is old and skillful enough to know how to balance both; he is not fearful and deprived by the evil which, according to Jemez tradition, cannot be defeated. Rather frequently there are the images of light and sound combined together with a storm. It comes, bringing flashes of lightning, thunder and wind in its train elements of drama, which can evoke a way of healing process as the powers are struggling for Abel. Novel’s protagonists often wash their sorrow of in the rain. The weather element of rain in the novel symbolizes a form of reconciliation with one’s self. Angela experiences this concretely when she obliterates “all the mean and myriad fears that had laid hold of her in the past” (Momaday 1969: 71) Nevertheless, some critics of the novel personify Angela with the white “invader” as she comes from Los Angeles and lives “above” the pueblo in a large “white” house. Moreover she is constantly described as being “pale”, which might be seen as a connection to the albino, too. (Nelson 1993) Then the storm scene, which simply describes the rage of weather elements, may be seen as evil’s presence. Similarly, the storm sketches in the scene when Abel is about to kill the albino. Meanwhile Abel and the albino were sitting in a bar, “the rain diminished, and with nightfall the aftermath of the storm moved slowly out upon the plain.” (Momaday 1969: 76). It might be concluded that rain lets Abel reconcile with his self when he kills the albino, destroying the “white” evil and thus carrying on another part of the healing ritual.
41 3.2.3. Animals
Except for weather elements Momaday also uses animals as bearers of meaning. As it is further described (cf creation story) in Hopi Creation story, Tawa, the Sun God, and Spider Woman, the Earth Goddess were the first lovers and of their union the Magic Twins Puukonhoya, the Youth and Palunhoya, the Echo came into being. They were followed by Hicanavaiya, Ancient of Six (the Four World Quarters, the Above and Below), Man Eagle, the Great Plumed Serpent and many others (“A Hopi Legend”). As we can see, the eagle and serpent are embedded in the Pueblo people tradition from its origin. The former symbolizing freedom and strength, the latter is a symbol of wickedness. A rattlesnake is respected and feared by the Pueblo peoples as it symbolizes a powerful and dangerous presence. It is to be acknowledged and avoided but never killed. (Owens 1992: 105). Nevertheless, Native Americans, unlike Christians, cope with “good” and “evil” with the intention to balance both. Evil cannot be destroyed. When Abel was a boy he was a member of the Eagle Watchers Society. In an eagle hunt he captured a magnificent female eagle. His fellow society member captured another one an aged male that was poor by comparison to Abel’s. Therefore they let the male bird go. Watching it flying off, Abel is filled with longing. Surprisingly, he decides to set the female bird free too. But finding it “drab and shapeless in the moonlight, too large and ungainly for flight” Abel, filled with shame and disgust, takes hold of the bird’s throat in the darkness and cuts off its breath (Momaday 1969: 24 25). This event symbolizes Abel’s bondage, in the future he is to be depicted as bound and helpless personality. However, eagle does not only serve as the symbol of Abel’s spiritual identity but is special in the culture of Jemez, too. According to Joe Sando, “Jemez still uses the eagle as its symbol, or logo" and as a sign of ownership; and while the Jemez People currently abide at the place they call Walatowa, other important places where they have lived include the ones they named (and still refer to as) Seyshokwa, "eagle living place," and Seytokwa, "eagle cage place" (Sando, quoted in Nelson 1989: 5) Abel’s need for wholeness necessarily meant the unity of both, good and evil. He met the evil for the first time when he was a young boy: Abel, in presence of a snake killer dog, was
42 putting sheep out to pasture. Suddenly, the dog quivered and laid back its ears, not looking at Abel, not looking at anything, but listening. Then Abel heard it, the thing itself: “He knew even then that it was only the wind, but it was a stranger sound than any he had ever known.” (Momaday 1969: 16). Dogs, according to Pueblo and Navajo beliefs, are able to sense witches. Also ringing in the ears, like the moaning of the wind Abel hears, is a traditional sign of a witch presence. (Owens 1992: 104). The witch presence is a sign of evil’s presence undoubtedly. The albino, an “emblem of evil” according to Owens (102), is identified with the serpent when he is dying by Abel’s hand. Abel could feel the blue shivering lips upon him, the scales of the lips and “the hot slippery point of the tongue, writhing” (Momaday 1969: 78). In Abel’s own mind it was not a (white) man he killed. It was something else – a personification of the evil spirit. However, by killing it, he violated the balance of the needed wholeness divided into eagle and snake energies. According to Owens (103), “in attempting to destroy evil, Abel has become one with it, accepted its seed” and evil is turned back upon him as a result. Therefore, up to the final run at the end of the novel, Abel struggles to find the lost unity of both. It is the act of running which becomes a ceremonial motion. It weaves both the good and evil aspect in harmony.
43 3.3. Storytelling
Storytelling existed probably in every culture as a means of conveying fictive or non fictive orature. Formerly through words, sounds, gestures and drawings, it was supposed to entertain, educate and retain values and morals of a society and thus preserve its culture. Tools available to storytellers have developed throughout the centuries; today we can speak about multimedia storytelling. The invention of writing and, consequently, technologies enabled initially regional stories (which might be considered to be cultural artifacts) to spread all over the world. What was originally passed from one generation to another and was always but one generation from extinction (because it was preserved in memory only) became a global thing. However, information technologies, which can devotedly record the above mentioned utterance and paralinguistic features, deprive storytelling of the richness of improvisation and imagination. There is no immediate bond between the speaker and listener any more.
In the oral tradition, storytelling both said and sung united the storyteller and the audience. In the dynamic space created between them, they co participated in a story. For instance, some Navajo and Iroquois stories were told in a complex performance. To understand their fullest dimensions, the audience had to know more about the particular places where the events had occurred and about the specific voices in which certain characters had been speaking (Wiget). Such a whole performance is impossible or rather difficult to be created in written or otherwise recorded form since the communication is rather distant the situational context is suppressed.
Moreover, storytelling begins, according to Silko, with the land. She thinks of the land and the earth as the center of a spider’s web. She explains further: “Human identity, imagination, and storytelling were inextricably linked to the land, to Mother Earth, just as strands of the spider’s web radiate from the center of the web.” (Silko 1996: 194). Thus, a text heard or read out of place cannot bring the complex perception of an event of storytelling.
Still, there is some floor for personal mental images which can be individually derived from the words either heard or written. A consumer of a text visualizes the characters and settings, and then improvises the actual wording. The storyteller himself (as a conveyer of the text) creates a story according to his own imagination. He does not “memorize a set text, but learns
44 a series of script like incidents that form a satisfying narrative arc (a plot) with a distinct beginning, middle and end” (“Storytelling”). In addition, different languages have different word connotations and for that reason we associate words or messages, either consumed or conveyed, diversely. Thus no two tellings of an oral story can be exactly alike.
One stands in different relation to language in the oral tradition. Words are spoken with great care and they are heard. By means of words one can, e.g. “bring about physical change in the universe, quiet the raging weather, bring forth the harvest, ward off evil, rid the body of sickness and pain, subdue an enemy, capture the heart of a lover, live in the proper way, and venture beyond death” (Momaday 1997: 16). To speak, pray or to tell a story means to deal with forces that are supernatural and irresistible, the speaker will be taken at his word. For a Native American to be careless in the presence of word is to violate a fundamental morality.
Spoken word in general has emotional character. Written word, on the other hand, provides a free place for the writer to think the message over, or consider the proper style of the discourse. The overall sensitivity to language is being deteriorated, though. Writing my diploma work, I unavoidably contribute to this written tradition. A lot of stylized words are used to describe, in origin, spoken discourse of Native Americans here.
In House Made of Dawn , Momaday implies the notion of storytelling by using traditional invocation of Jemez Pueblo. Starting at dawn, the prologue symbolizes creation. Hence we know that “the story is to be conceived of as born from an older – timeless – oral tradition and bearing the responsibilities of that tradition” (Owens 1992: 95). Moreover, the reference to “house made of dawn” of the Navajo healing Night Chant ritual suggests the development of a story, it tells us that Abel´s healing quest will be difficult but successful. To borrow Owens´s nicely descriptive phrase, “as in traditional storytelling, we know the outcome of the story at the beginning, a fact that should shift our attention to the performance itself, to the way the story is told”. (96) The novel also contains passages which are retelling the old Kiowa legends and origin myths John Big Bluff Tosamah, the Priest of the Sun heard from his Kiowa grandmother. This character sermonizes many of the Kiowa legends that have also been addressed in other works by Momaday, such as The Way to Rainy Mountain .
45 Undoubtedly, through the character of the Priest of the Sun, Momaday passes on the stories his Kiowa fathers told him when he was a child. Momaday also followed in his mother’s footsteps. His mother was an author of children’s books, which developed his interest in literature, poetry especially (“The Writer Warrior”). A Native American poet, however, is closer to the figure of a storyteller. A Native American novelist has, as Owens acknowledges, a different position from a poet. He must rely upon story and myth but “graft the thematic and structural principles found upon the foreign (though infinitely flexible) and intensely egocentric genre of the written prose narrative, or novel” (Owens 1992: 10). Momaday managed to join both the poet as well as novelist, similarly to the Priest of the Sun who storytells within the generally framed Christian sermon. Priest´s Christian sermons contain stories of the Kiowa people, e.g. the story about the coming of Tai me from the sermon of January 26 th . According to the story long ago there were bad times for the Kiowa people, they were hungry and had no food. Therefore a man set out for a journey to look for something to eat. On the fourth day he suddenly heard a voice speaking to him. It was Tai me, a thing which had the feet of a deer, and its body covered with feathers. “Take me with you and I will give you whatever you want” the voice said. From that day Tai me has belonged to the Kiowas (Momaday 1969: 89 90). Stories are told to be believed. The man in the story does not ask questions, he simply takes Tai me, the sacred sun dance doll, with him and from that time on it belonged to the Kiowas. Implicit in Tai me´s utterance there is the mere meaning of it. The answer is simple and direct. In his second sermon, from January 27 th the priest also mentions the Kiowa origin myth of Devil´s Tower, the legend about how the Big Dipper was formed in the sky, and the history and the last days of the Kiowa as a sun dance culture 13 . Tosamah´s grandmother had been about seven when she witnessed the last of the Kiowa sun dances, held in 1887 above Rainy Mountain Creek. Three years later she witnessed the last gathering of the Kiowas as a sun dance culture, known as “Sun Dance When the Forked Poles Were Left Standing”. At this last gathering, American soldiers from Fort Sill rode out and dispersed the Kiowa tribe, preventing them from carrying out the ceremony, which was the essential act of their faith (Momaday 1969: 121 122).
13 The Sun Dance is a ritual performed by a number of different native tribes. Each tribe has its own distinctive rituals and methods of performing the dance, but many of the ceremonies have features in common. (“Sun Dance”)
46 At the end of his sermon the Priest of the Sun storytells of his own experience following the ancient way to his gradmother´s grave at the base of Rainy Mountain. His grandmother´s Kiowa forebears had come down from the high north country nearly three centuries ago. The earliest evidence of their existence placed them in western Montana. In the late seventeenth century they began a long migration to the south and east. When they entered upon the Southern Plains, the Kiowas had been transformed (Momaday 1969: 118 119). The Priest of the Sun wanted to see in reality what his grandmother had seen more perfectly in her mind´s eye. She spoke faithfully about the sites and people from Kiowa tribal history she could have never seen. The sermons are effectively based on the first sentence from the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word”. The Priest of the Sun tries to find the implication of Word in both white and Native American contexts. He says that “the white man has his ways. White man talks about the Word. He talks through it and around it. He builds upon it with syllables, with prefixes and suffixes, and hyphens and accents. He adds and divides and multiplies the Word. And in all of this he subtracts the Truth. [...] Now the white man deals in words, and he deals easily, with grace and sleight of hand.” (Momaday 1969: 87). The white man takes words and literatures for granted, being flooded with unending succession of pamphlets, papers, letters and books, commentaries and conversations. “His regard for language – for the Word itself – as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return.” (Momaday 1969: 89) To contrast it, the priest talks about his grandmother, a Kiowa storyteller, who knew her way around words as she was conveying something sacred and eternal. When she told him those old stories, something strange, good and powerful was going on. The old woman was asking her grandson to come directly into the presence of her mind and spirit, taking hold of his child’s imagination. Children, similarly to storytellers, have a vivid imagination. That is why children are such patient listeners. Similarly Francisco or Ben Benally initiates Abel into their tribal traditions. They speak about it carefully, slowly and at length, because the stories are 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. (Momaday 1969: 178)
47 The discrepancy between the two treatments of Word seen through “In the beginning was the Word” polemic only illustrates Momaday’s life experience on and out of reservation. He, as a writer, is trying to join the two perceptions of Word and make the cultures, white and Native American, accept each other. Momaday’s words are offered as a medicine; they are supposed to heal as the Navajo Night Chant does. Even if the Chant is translated into English in House Made of Dawn , it does not lose its authenticity in the context of the novel that is trying to transform the original orature to written literature. Thus the tribal storytelling, which is confined to speech, becomes multimedia storytelling confined to linguistic features and pragmatics.
48 3.4. Native American Beliefs and Rituals Apart from the storytelling aspect, there are tribal beliefs and rituals described in the novel. Describing them suggests with the theme of the book, as it inevitably did prior to Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (e.g. Mourning Dove who intended to record the way of tribal life she led). This aspect was not, without doubt, the breath of fresh air into Native American Literature of the 70s but natural novel context. Momaday spent his childhood in several different Southwestern communities, such as the towns of Gallup and Shiprock in New Mexico and also Tuba City and Chinle in Arizona (his father was Kiowa and his mother was one eighth Cherokee but seven eighths Euro American 14 ). In these communities he came together with a wide mix of children, of Navajo, San Carlos Apache, Hispanic, and Anglo origins. Undoubtedly, he heard the words of the Navajo, Kiowa, and Apache languages along with the words of Spanish and English. It might be concluded that Momaday’s fictional characters are modeled from the multicultural environment he experienced in his childhood years. To illustrate the influence of Momaday’s experience diversity, we may look at the House Made of Dawn characters´ origin. The main contributors to the tribal life aspect of the book are the Priest of the Sun who is Kiowa (author’s ancestral line), and Ben Benally, Abel’s Los Angeles friend, who is of Navajo origin. Abel’s descent is questionable, as he did not know his father’s origin; the origin of his mother is not mentioned here. Some sources, as Harper Academic’s reading guide for House Made of Dawn , nominate Abel as Tano Indian (“Reading Guide”).
Understandably, the setting of Walatowa, the Pueblo of Jemez implies the Pueblo People tribes´ origin, a diverse group of Native American inhabitants of New Mexico and Arizona. In New Mexico there is a tremendous overlapping of distinct tribal religious traditions “at most sacred sites, frequent multi tribal use of springs and mountains, close proximity of shrines of
14 In his autobiographical work The Names , Momaday says of his mother´s decision as a teenager to identify with her remote Cherokee ancestors: “She began to see herself as an Indian. That dim native heritage became a fascination and a cause for her. [...] She imagined who she was. This act of imagination was, I believe among the most important events of my mother´s life, as later the same essential act was to be among the most important of my own.” (Momaday, quoted in Owens 1992: 92)
49 different groups, and the transformation of ancient historical sites into places of contemporary religious reverence” („Native American Sacred Sites“). The Indian nations of New Mexico are highly traditional and extremely secretive about their beliefs, practices, and places of ceremonial and ritual activity (cf Tawa languages). A great deal of information is already written down and sealed in confidentiality, particularly among the Pueblos.
Walatowa is, similarly as the novel itself, a mix of certain tribal cultures and traditions. During the pueblo feast of Santiago, Francisco walks through the town meeting shy Navajo children and black faced children, the invaders (Momaday 1969: 72 73). According to Wikipedia, “Navajo oral history seems to indicate a long relationship with Pueblo people and a willingness to adapt ideas into their own culture”. (“Navajo people”). Among U.S. states, New Mexico has the second highest percentage of Native American, mostly Navajo and Pueblo peoples. Perhaps, Benally´s and Abel´s relationship may be grounded in these previous factual pieces of information. There are several rituals described in the novel that are held by the society of Walatowa. The crucial for Abel is the feast of Santiago (San Diego), the Catholic patron saint of Jemez, which is accompanied by the annual gallo or a “rooster pull”. Naturally, the Pueblo people adapted the religious practices of Spanish settlers (they converted to Christianity and thus accepted some Christian saints) as well as maintained much of their own traditional lifestyle. The Pueblo people ceremonies usually feature traditional dances outdoors accompanied of singing and drumming, interspersed with ceremonies in the kivas 15 . They may also include a Roman Catholic mass and processions. According to the legend, one day when he had journeyed a long way, saint Santiago decided to stop to rest at a house of an old man and his wife, poor and miserable people. But being gracious they gave Santiago water to slake his thirst and their only possession of value – a rooster to eat. The next morning he continued on his way. After riding his horse for many days he came to the royal city where there were many games and dangerous contests of skill and strength held. Santiago was victorious and therefore directed by the king of the country to be put to death. Now by a miracle Santiago brought forth from his mouth the rooster which warned him and gave him the spur from its right leg. When the soldiers turned upon Santiago,
15 Kiva is a square walled and above ground room that is used by modern Hopi and most other Pueblo peoples for spiritual ceremonies (“Kiva”).
50 he slew them with a magic sword. At the end of the legend, Santiago gave the Pueblo people herd of horses, cultivated plants and domestic animals. (Momaday 1969: 39 40) On July the 25 th (the day of the patron saint) riders come on their best horses to the Middle, Walatowa's ancient place, full of sound and motion. For the first time since coming home from the World War II, Abel has done away with his uniform. He has put on Levi’s with a wide black belt, a gray work shirt, and a straw hat with a low crown and a wide, rolled brim (this outfit however does not seem to be the typical Native American way of dressing). Slowly, the riders double back in single file along the wall with Abel as the last in line. Then, one at a time ride down upon the rooster, to reach for it. When Abel’s turn comes to try for the rooster he makes “a poor showing, full of caution and gesture”. It is evident that he is not used to the game. The albino, on the contrary comes to the place “dancing” and “high spirited”. He is “powerful and deliberate in his movements”, personifying the evil spirit again (Momaday 1969: 42 44). Outdoing Abel and the rest of participants, the albino finally wins the rooster pull, the fact of which might be understood as evil’s victory over Abel. According to Nelson, “seen as part of a ceremony designed to reactivate dormant life energy by calling in the blessing of rain for the Pueblo, the rooster pull in which the albino figures so prominently is clearly efficacious”. The snake spirit comes to carry the prayers of the Pueblo to the dyasa [the Cloud People who fill the arroyos with life giving rain], and the rains that have been withheld from this place for months return”. (Nelson 1993). While such moments of snake spirit preeminence are perhaps rare in the overall pattern of life or ceremony at Jemez, they are also certain. The rain comes on August 1 st : The immense embankment of the storm had blackened out the whole horizon to the north. The compressed density of its core, like a great black snake writhing, drew out of the mouth of the canyon, recoiled upon the warm expanse of the valley, and resumed the slow, sure approach upon the intervening gullies and hills and fields above the town. (Momaday 1969: 72) Another ceremony is that of Porcingula , Our Lady of the Angles , which comprises tribal as well as Christian elements. Porcingula was a young and beautiful girl. But the women of the town talked about her behind her back because “she had her way with their sons”, Francisco
51 not excluded. Even if a young sacristan then had been told who Porcingula (so called “Pecos16 witch”) was they had an affair from which a baby was carried. The old priest together with the people of the town hid away from Francisco. The child was stillborn. When Porcingula saw that the sight of the baby made Francisco afraid, she left him (Momaday 1969: 184 185). However, Porcingula was not the only Francisco’s magic love. Riding his horse one night he could hear drums all around the land. So he was going on and on for miles up to the hill where there were fires and the drums. After a while there were many couples dancing around the fires. In the firelight Francisco noticed a girl, slender and small moving a little to the drums. Appearing and disappearing in the flames, she suddenly found herself in front of Francisco and gave him her blanket. They held each other for a long time in the dance. Except for that charming night they never saw each other again. It can indeed be concluded that in Jemez society there is a tradition of witchcraft. Another witch in the novel is Nicolás teah whau, an old white mustached woman who frightened Abel when he was a boy on the reservation. “She had screamed at him some unintelligible curse, appearing out of a cornfield when as a child he had herded the sheep nearby.” (Momaday 1969: 5). However, there are studies which suggest that the albino is possessed by the witch, Nicolás teah whau. (Owens 1992: 101) According to the novel, the ceremony of Porcingula is held on August 1 st . A shrine is raised, adjacent to the kiva, made beautiful with candles and cloth and holy with incense. After Mass the lovely Lady is borne in procession from the church. The Pecos bull, “a sad and unlikely thing, a crude and makeshift totem of revelry and delight”, runs through the streets, chased by the people of the town. (Momaday 1969:75). The ceremony also includes medicine men that perform with prayers and plumes, pollen and meal. There are governor and his officials but also cacique 17 mentioned within the rituals. (Momaday 1969: 73) The discrepancy between the two cultures, Spanish and that of the Pueblo, is also nicely illustrated by the description of Native American funeral ceremonial. Father Olguin reads about it in the journal of one his predecessor’s, Fray Nicolás´s, which was found left in Walatowa rectory: 16 Pecos is a small, village located between Santa Fe and Las Vegas, in New Mexico. 17 Cacique is a term for a Native American chief in Spanish speaking areas.
52 I saw they had finished with her according to their dark custom & there was blue and yellow meal about on the floor. This rubbed on the stone fine as pollen almost & 4 feathers in the dead hands turkey & brown eagle. They had wound her in a blanket tight & I saw as not before her belly was swoln as with child & already an awful stench. (Momaday 1969: 47) Tomacita Fraguna, the dead, was finally buried in a Christian manner, by the priest. Thus both cultural rituals were fulfilled. Similarly, Abel provides his grandfather Francisco when he dies. Abel dresses him in bright ceremonial colors. Then he places pouches of pollen and of meal, the sacred feathers and the ledger book together with ears of colored corn at his grandfather´s side. After wrapping the body in a blanket he lets Father Olguin to finish the burial. (Momaday 1969: 189 190) In House Made of Dawn there are also initiatory rituals described. Several scenes here illustrate the act of hunting. For instance Francisco’s bear hunt or Abel's eagle hunt which are typical coming of boyish age events. When Francisco was younger he tracked a young and heavy bear for many miles through the forest. He finally caught up to the bear by a river, and shot. The bullet slammed into the flesh and jarred the whole black bear’s body once. The hunt was over and well done. Francisco took out his pouch of pollen and made yellow streaks above the bear’s eyes, he ate a bit of animal’s liver. Then he initiated his colt too, by smearing its muzzle with bear’s blood. He and the colt had come of age and were hunters. Their return from the bear hunt into the town is described as follows: And in the early morning he rode into the town. He was a man then, and smeared with the blood of a bear. He shouted, and the men came out to meet him [...] he gave them strips of the bear’s flesh, which they wrapped around the barrels of their guns. And soon the women came with switches, and they spoke to the bear and laid the switches to its hide. The men and women were jubilant and all around, and he rode stone faced in their midst, looking straight ahead. (Momaday 1969: 183 184). Young Abel, the youngest member of the Eagle Watchers Society, practices his tribal customs individually when he goes to the river and washes his head in order to purify himself before he sets a trap for an eagle. He places a prayer offering into a shrine near an eagle hunt house, lays rabbits and begins to sing, now and then calling out, low in his throat. The hunters of
53 Society were gone for days, holding up here and there at the holy places where they must pray and make their offerings. When they freed one of the eagles, they fixed a prayer plume to its leg and let it go. (Momaday 1969: 23 24) According to Wikipedia, the Pueblo prayer included substances as well as words. Common prayer material was ground up maize — white cornmeal. The Puebloans also employed prayer sticks, which were colorfully decorated with beads, fur, and feathers; these prayer sticks (or talking sticks) were also used by other nations (“Pueblo people”). There are also passages about running included in the novel, which is the Jemez tradition through the generations. Running is an old Jemez pastime and ceremonial activity, its “purpose being to assist the movement of the sun and moon or to hasten the growth of crops, for example” (“Jemez runners”). According to Sando, some of the favorite topics of winter stories at Jemez (prior to the advent of television) were “the victories and heroics of the outstanding runners” of Jemez (Sando, quoted in Nelson 1993). There are two types of running weaved in the novel, it is the Winter Race and the race of dead. Through the former one, the story cycles around. It is a kind of thread that holds everything together (in the prologue and the very end). We can also learn that a as a younger man Francisco ran the Winter Race, race for good hunting and harvest. Towards the end of the novel Francisco familiarizes Abel with the race of the dead that is run by the spirits of the dead runners who are moving in the shadow state between the Fourth and Fifth worlds. At Jemez as well as most other pueblos, human life in the Fifth World – the world of ordinary event – is traditionally conceived of as “emerging from (and at death returning to) the ´Fourth World´, located within the earth itself. However, spirits may move back and forth, as it were, between these worlds, as for instance when people in the Fifth World descend into the kivas to commune with spirits of the Fourth World or when spirits of the Fourth World return to the Fifth World in the form of katsinas 18 or of rain” (Nelson 1989: 19). It is said that the motion of the runners draws darkness into dawn and winter into spring.
18 Katsina primarily refers to the supernatural beings that are believed to visit Hopi villagers during half of the year. They have the power to bring rain, exercise control over the weather, help in many of the everyday activities of the villagers, punish offenders of ceremonial or social laws, and, in general, to function as messengers between the spiritual domain and mortals. Katsinas are spiritual messengers. („Hopi Katsintithu“)
54 According to Susan Scarberry Garcia, Navajo story patterns reveal a hero, often an outsider from birth, who is forced by circumstances to leave home and encounter numerous obstacles. “After undergoing a symbolic death experience and being reborn through the aid of the Holly People or spirit helpers, the heroes return home to their people to teach the healing ceremonial that remade them.” (Scarberry Garcia, quoted in Owens 1992: 97). It might be concluded that Abel, in the end of the novel, lines up his tribal ancestors symbolically at the race of the dead. The running is very painful for Abel as he sustained severe injuries in Los Angeles. “He was running and a cold sweat broke out upon him and his breath heaved with the pain of running. His legs buckled and he fell in the snow. The rain fell around him in the snow and he saw his broken hands, how the rain made streaks upon them and dripped soot upon the snow.” (Momaday 1969: 191). This emotive description possibly made some of the novel’s readers interpret the closing run as Abel dying. But that seems unlikely. As the scene is continued, “he got up and ran on. He was alone and running on.” After proving that he managed to find his identity successfully (the whole process described throughout the novel) Abel is running on to maintain his tribal culture for the future generations. Left alone he is not running with the runners after evil any more. As a hero Abel is metaphorically returning home to his people to teach the healing ceremonial that will remade them. The final Abel´s run proceeds to the singing of the Navajo Night Chant, a song which is designed to celebrate the source of all forms of life, about the land made visible, the “house made of dawn”. It was Ben Benally, a Navajo of origin, who used to tell Abel about Beautyway and healing Night Chant in Los Angeles. He is, undoubtedly, the Night Chanter a singer or healer of the Navajo tradition. In Los Angeles Abel and Ben promise each other to meet someplace, in a year or two. As Ben had planned that, “it was going to be early in the morning, and we were going to see the sun coming up”. “We were going to sing about the way it used to be, how there was nothing all around but the hills and the sunrise and the clouds. We were going to be drunk and peaceful –
55 beautiful.” (Momaday 1969: 133). In the final scene, we can find Abel “going to see the sun coming up”, he is also singing about the way it used to be, “how there was nothing all around but the hills and the sunrise in the clouds”. The original intention of the Night Chant (or Nightway) is to celebrate life in harmony (so called Hozhò) and heal those who are sick. Its history goes back around 1000 B.C. when it was first performed by the Native Americans in the Canyon de Chelly – known today as eastern Arizona. Some of the reasons for healing are contact with lightning struck objects, exposure to taboo animals such as snakes, or contact with the dead (“Navajo people”). The ceremony uses techniques that shock and arose in order to scare off sicknesses and ugliness (Hochoxò). Once disorder is gone, order and balance are restored through song, prayer, sand painting and others. It can last up to nine days (“The history of the Navajo Night Chant”). Except for the Night Chant there are said to be approximately fifty eight to sixty sacred ceremonies in Navajo tradition. Most of them last four days or more. For Abel, for instance, the Enemy Way Ceremony, or Nidáá, performed on a person “to get rid of the evil things in his/her body, and to restore balance in their lives”, which was also important for Navajo soldiers returning from war, might be applied. World War II soldiers often suffered psychological damage, such as post traumatic stress disorder from participating in warfare. The Enemy Way Ceremony could possibly help to heal their damaged minds. To be most effective, the Navajo people require that relatives and friends attend and help out, which might be seen analogous to Ben Benally or Francisco’s help in the novel. (“Navajo people”). The Sun Dance of the Kiowas, is not held within the story but mentioned by the Priest of the Sun. Originally it was held at least once a year at a time and place designated by the Tai me keeper. All the bands of the tribe converged upon the Sun Dance place and camped in the presence of the great ancestral medicine. “It restored power to the people; it invested them with purpose, thus dignity strength; it enabled them for a moment to partake of divinity, to send their voices – however frail – against the silence at the edge of the world.” (Momaday 1997: 65) Also structuring of chapters in sequences of days conveys the Kiowa culture. House Made of Dawn begins on July 20 th , which is the date when the Kiowas attempted to hold a sun dance for the last time, in 1890 (Momaday 1969: 122). July 20 th also corresponds to the historical
56 occurences of the Jemez Puebloans and the Navajos. For the Puebloans the date marks the anniversary of Diego de Vargas’s punitive campaign against the Jemez Pueblo in 1694. The Navajos were ordered to surrender at Fort Defiance on July 20 th , in 1863 (Owens 1992: 96). The novel takes place within a seven year period (from July 20, 1945 to February 28, 1952), it is divided into four sections. Numerology here conveys the order so important in the Native American world. “Seven and four are powerful, sacred numbers within Native American cultures. Four is the number of the seasons, the cardinal directions, balance, beauty, and copletion. Seven incorporates the cardinal directions as well as the center, zenith, and nadir”. (Owens 1992: 96) Momaday used four as the number of sections, seven as the time interval for the story.
57 4. CONCLUSION The contemporary (ethnic) American literature is remarkable in its diversity. Various literary portrayals of writers´ native experience are passing down the traditions of Native American, Afro American, Jewish, Hispanic or Asian American literatures. Today’s state has its roots in the 1960s when the Civil Rights movement began to change American society and therefore its culture. During the early 1970s the truth about the conditions on Native American reservations was exposed and publicized by activists, and thus America’s general public became interested in the plight of its Native people. From that time on the ethnic and minority writers began the process of creating their own artistic forms and critical discourses to speak for themselves but fit into the mainstream literature. The American literature has gradually become pluralized. There were several means for authors to express their ethnicity. They could either use the well established forms of the canon, or create their own to better convey their tribal tradition. Understandably, as the process of the integration of minority literatures developed, authors were more and more combining both the mainstream and their newly created techniques, and thus creating the American canon. They appropriated their new “American literary identity” and its devices slowly. House Made of Dawn was the first piece of work by Native American writer which received a critical acclaim. It was published in 1968 and awarded The Pulitzer Prize a year later. As first in history, Momaday named the issue of displacement that the Native American community faced at that time; he managed to do so in an extraordinary way. Using the devices of storytelling, i.e. Jemez traditional invocation and ending of a story, natural world images and animals as bearers of good and evil spirits, he transformed the Native American spoken orature into written literature. By means of highly poetic language, Momaday weaved together past, present and myth and thus managed to storytell indirectly. His work, similarly to oral transmissions, resembles a dramatic performance.
58 What is more, he did so in the English language and thus even more opened his tribal experience into the general public. Momaday’s personal investment, however, played a crucial role as the author considers English to be his first language. He would not be able to write in any tribal language, his ancestral Kiowa language including. As an analogue to colorful Native American orature that was rich with the storyteller’s imaginations, Momaday combined the aspects of the Pueblo, Navajo and Kiowa peoples, which were driven by his Pan Indian personal life experience from life on reservation. The diversity of influences (Euramerican or Spanish including), however, might be also compared to the disunity of the main protagonist of the novel, who is torn between pueblo and city, ancient ritual and modern materialism, starlight and streetlight of their places. Abel needs to find his roots again, to recover his unity with the land; similarly to the Native Americans who needed to find their lost tribal places in the United States. Therefore we might consider House Made of Dawn to be modernist piece of literature with the themes of otherness and alienation. Using the new form and style of Native American literature, Momaday also accomplished the primary techniques of the modernist movement. In the novel Momaday takes the next crucial step for Native American writers. He functions as the cultural mediator’s between the traditional and the modern period, attempting to write his Native American cultural existence into the future. Momaday brings Abel back home to his pueblo fully recovered and thus establishes a new pattern that will continue to Native American novels up to the present time. A mixedblood protagonist will not be lost any more. There are American writers of Native American blood and background today who affirm their cultural heritage (as do writers of other cultures). They are either concerned with history (write about themselves, family or reservation life) or contemporary topics (e.g. the coexistence of cultures in contemporary America). In general, Native Americans had a strong regard for their language. It was important for imagining who and what they are. The spoken word played an important role in recording history, mythology and traditions of Native American nations. It can be considered as the Native American literature property and base. Even today, Native American oral tradition is not monolithic. Owing to the works of N. Scott Momaday and his followers we can admire the traditionally oral life experience and wisdom of Native American tribes in written form
59 and in the English language. We can understand their “translations” of formerly tribal heritage as an act of love.
60 Bibliography: Hobson, G. (1979) The Remembered Earth . Red Earth Press. Momaday N. Scott (1969) House Made of Dawn . The New American Library, Inc. Momaday N. Scott (1966) Dům z úsvitu . Transl. by Lucie Cenková Simerová (2001). Argo Momaday N. Scott (1997) The Man Made of Words . St. Martin´s Press. Owens, L. (1992) Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel . The University of Oklahoma Press. Silko, L. M. (1996) Yellow woman and a beauty of the spirit : essays on Native American life today . Simon & Schuster. Vizenor, G. (1995) Native American Literature . HarperCollins College Publishers. On line sources: Beck, J. (2003) “Native American Spirituality.” Heroes of faith. 1 Jan. 2007
Kent, A. (1999). “Mourning Dove‘s Cogewea: Writing her way into modernity”. MELUS . 9May 2007
MacLloyd, M. (2002). “Creation, A Hopi Tale.“ Native American Origin and Creation Tales . 1 Jan. 2007
Mintz, S. (2007).”The Native American Power Movement.” Digital History . 2 Jan. 2007
Nelson, R.M. (1989). “Snake and Eagle: Abel´s Disease and the Landscape of House Made of Dawn”. SAIL. 16 Dec. 2006
Nelson, R.M. (1993). “The Function of the Landscape of House Made of Dawn”. Place and Vision: The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction . 16 Dec. 2006
61 Thompson, S. (1929). Tales of the North American Indians . Sacred texts.com. 17Aug. 2006
Wiget, A.O. “Native American Oral Narrative.“ Houghton Mifflin Company. 12 Feb. 2007
“A Hopi Legend.” First People of America . 1 Jan. 2007
62 “Navajo Creation Story.” Navajo: Dine (The People) . 1998. 3 Feb. 2007
"Pueblo people." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia . 25 March 2007. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 25 March 2007
“Pulitzer Prize.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia . 9 May 2007. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 13 May 2007
63 Resumé Tato práce zkoumá prostředky, které vedly román House Made of Dawn indiánského spisovatele N. Scotta Momadaye k průlomu (ocenění prestižní Pulitzer Prize) v americké literatuře 70. let minulého století. Autorovi se podařilo transformovat původně ústní podání literatury původních obyvatel Ameriky do psané formy, navíc v anglickém jazyce. K tomu využívá některých prvků tradičního vyprávění příběhů, a to invokace a závěru, symbolismu přírodních úkazů a tradičních rituálů v indiánské kultuře. Román je bezpochyby též autorovou cestou k vlastní kmenové sounáležitosti, především k místu jako takovému. Hledání vlastní identity bylo tématem aktuálním nejen pro tehdejší indiánské obyvatele Spojených států amerických, N. Scott Momaday svým dílem ovlivnil nastupující generaci spisovatelů, pokračující v jeho stopách dodnes. This diploma thesis researches into the means which led the way for House Made of Dawn , a novel by Native American author N. Scott Momaday, to the breakthrough into the American literary canon of the 1970s. The novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969. Using some traditional aspects of storytelling, namely invocation and the ending of a story, natural world images and traditional rituals in Native American culture, the author managed to transform the originally native oral tradition of Native Americans into written form, moreover in the English language. The novel is, without doubt, Momaday’s own way to the tribal inclination; place in particular. The process of finding one´s own identity that was actual not only for the native inhabitants of the United States but also for the generation of Native American writers who are following Momaday’s footsteps up to the present day. Klíčová slova House Made of Dawn , N. Scott Momaday, Native American novel, Native American literature, American literature, American literature canon
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