Adventure classics -- A run to save his life

House Made of Dawn

by N. Scott Momaday

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I was astonished that Kiowa poet, novelist, teacher, and media star N. Scott Momaday chose to begin his academic career with a study of one of the most obscure of American poets (and one who might still be unknown if not for Momaday’s attention), Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. What was there in the life and work of a reclusive nineteenth century New Englander who made only one attempt to communicate with the rest of the world that would commend him to a twentieth century Native American from Oklahoma, I wondered, until I read Momaday’s words about Tuckerman -- “an eye for the minutest aspects of the world. . . pervaded by an always apparent sense of grief.”

They are words that could describe Momaday’s own 1968 first novel, House Made of Dawn, written out of the grief of a character whose entire culture was attempting to burst from obscurity.

Originally intended as a series of poems that became a novel, House Made of Dawn is as slender as last month’s novel by another poet, Dr. Zhivago, is wide. But both burrow deep into the soul.

Momaday is a member of the same Kiowa tribe as the lost, rootless renegades Larry McMurtry used as bogeymen in last Wednesday’s Lonesome Dove. Read Momaday’s version, and you’ll never see McMurtry’s enigmatic villain Blue Duck the same way again.

Even at only 198 pages, with its nonlinear narrative, multiple points of view, and harrowing descent into the central character’s emotional and physical collapse, House Made of Dawn isn’t an easy read. The opening section traces the early life of young Pueblo Indian Abel in New Mexico, brought up by his grandfather Francisco after the death of his mother. The descriptions of the natural world -- the house of dawn -- through which Abel runs in a Pueblo ceremonial, depict the setting as clearly as a landscape
painting. (Not coincidentally, Momaday is also an artist).

Abel has just returned from combat in World War II, an experience that has left him so emotionally shattered he seeks refuge in the forgetfulness of alcohol. After a doomed love affair, Abel kills a rival, the eerie albino Indian Juan Reyes, in a drunken brawl.

The book’s middle sections follow Abel’s release from prison and a forced relocation to Los Angeles, where he is severed from his land and culture. These sections are written from the point of view of Abel’s friends, fellow soldiers, and social workers, as if Abel himself is too broken to carry the burden of narrative. At the end, physically shattered by a brutal beating, Abel returns to his home. Though his grandfather is dying, his presence, his final words, give Abel the strength to take up the story again in his own voice, to find a voice, even if a silent one, in the ancient, grounded ceremonial of running.

“My father was a great storyteller and he knew many stories from the Kiowa oral tradition,” Momaday states in a discussion of his work in the PBS documentary The West. “He told many of these stories over and over because I loved them. But it was only after I became an adult that I understood how fragile they are, because they exist only by word of mouth, always just one generation away from extinction.”

(Although the main story behind House Made of Dawn was based on Momaday’s
experience in experience growing up in the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico where his parents were teachers, the book’s middle sections incorporate stories from other relocated Natives. Some of the Kiowa stories are also excerpted in Momaday’s volume of memoir and folklore, The Way to Rainy Mountain.)

Momaday received the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for House Made of Dawn, and the book’s wide acceptance paved the way for such younger Native writers as Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich. The book was adapted as a movie in 1972.

For more about Momaday, I liked the interview at
www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/program/producers/momaday.htm/

To learn about the movie’s history, see
www.nativenetworks.is.edu/eng/rose/hmod.htm/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics ends of month of writing about Texas and the Southwest with Laura Esquivel’s magical romance, Like Water for Chocolate.)

Adventure classics -- Last woman left standing

Island of the Blue Dolphins

by Scott O’Dell

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The protagonist of Island of the Blue Dolphins opens the book with a remembrance of the day sea otter hunters landed on her tiny island home. It was a day that would mark the beginning of the end for her entire people.

Scott O’Dell’s novel attempts to give a name and memory to the girl who would become known to history as the Lost Woman of San Nicolas. By 1835, conflict with the otter hunters had nearly wiped out the Native American tribe living on one of the Channel Islands off the coast of California. When news of the catastrophe reached the mainland, the Santa Barbara Mission sponsored a ship to resettle the surviving people of the island the Spaniards had called San Nicolas.

But when the ship left the island, the woman later baptized as Juana Maria (given the name Karana by O’Dell) wasn’t on it. The explanation for this oversight died with her, but the novel follows a story narrated decades later, in which she jumped overboard as the ship left and swam back to the island. O’Dell explains her action as an attempt to rescue her younger brother.

She soon found herself alone on the island, her brother killed by wild dogs and the mission lacking enough ships for a second rescue attempt. The brother’s existence and death were among the few facts that could be gleaned when another ship finally found her eighteen years later.

Island of the Blue Dolphins ends with the rescued Karana hoping to reunite at last with her family. But her real story was to end tragically. Isolated for centuries, possibly millennia, on their island, the remaining members of her tribe soon succumbed to diseases for which they had no immunity. And attempts to locate anyone who could speak her language, even among other Channel Island natives, proved futile.

Juana Maria, her true name unknown, became fatally ill only seven weeks after arriving on the California mainland.

Island of the Blue Dolphins, a Newbery Award winner in 1961, is the best known of Scott O’Dell’s many novels for children and teens. Its simple language and muted emotional tone make bearable the otherwise horrific plight of the abandoned young girl.

Only I wondered, rereading it recently for the first time in decades, whether the tone might also have been O’Dell’s attempt to write something the culture of the time considered an “Indian” voice.

But that was the beginning of the tumultuous 1960’s. By the end of the decade, Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize and the gates were opening to a renaissance of literature about Native Americans written by Native authors.

(Next Friday -- Young David Balfour searches for his sole living relative, only to find a miserly uncle who doesn’t mind selling him into indentured servitude in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped.)