"House Made of Dawn borrows its title from a healing ceremony centuries old. The novel tells of a young Jemez Indian named Abel from the Pueblo where Momaday grew up, the age of twelve through high school. Its prose rhythms, complex narrative points-of-view, and flashbacks assimilate experimental techniques in modern fiction and New World romantic themes. ...Abel's dislocations as a contemporary Indian fracture a voice that searches for consciousness. His ancestors were exiled from the plains by plague and taken in at Jemez. ...Abel was kidnapped from his grandfather and put into a government boarding school, drafted into a world war, and sentence to prison for ritual homicide, then relocated in the urban ghetto of Los Angeles. Past, present, and future—Indian life as-it-was, then estranged among whites, followed by a prolonged return—disjoint the narrative. School, war, prison, and the city are white institutions where the martyred son of the earth, the biblical , lives through the Indian nightmare of a machine come into the garden."
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Kenneth Lincoln, Native American Renaissance (1985) Word Senders, "IN BEAUTY IT IS FINISHED" p. 117.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/N._Scott_Momaday
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N. Scott Momaday
(February 27, 1934 – January 24, 2024) was a novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet. His novel ' was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the . His follow-up work ' blended folklore with memoir. Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 for his work's celebration and preservation of indigenous oral and art traditions. He held twenty honorary degrees from colleges and universities and was a fellow of the American Academy of A
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