He is an active member of the Gourd Dance Society, where he has succeeded his grandfather, Mammedaty. Momaday was born on the Kiowa Reservation in Lawton, Oklahoma, on February 27, 1934. His father, Alfred Morris, was an artist and teacher; in fact, his artworks are used to illustrate several of Momaday's books, including his history of the Kiowa people, The Way to Rainy Mountain. His mother, Mayme Natachee Scott, taught and wrote children's books.
John Big Bluff Tosamah
Abel feels alienated and struggles to reconnect with his community and its ancient traditions. This chapter also contains a depiction of a peyote ceremony and introduces Ben Benally, who will play a significant part in Abel's eventual healing. In Los Angeles, however, Benally's sense of place is lost in his idealism and naïveté.
Point of View
[Many] white heroes fail or are unconvincing because their relationship to the land has been more fantasy than history and because they are conquerors and violators. Their vision must then remain either an anomaly or forlorn and tragic. Abel's grandfather, a farmer and holy man who lives by the organic calendar [is] … able to sustain the shock of civilization and technology and preserve and transmit the land vision that [he has] never violated as [an individual] or as a people.
House Made of Dawn: Characters
He thinks about his experiences of the war, his time in prison, and his relationship with Milly. When he finally picks himself up off the beach, he stumbles back to the small apartment that he and Ben share. As Martinez batters Abel's body, so Tosamah batters his spirit, and Momaday, through his use of narrative structure, stresses the parallel between them. The novel's second chapter, "The Priest of the Sun," in effect begins and ends with a sermon by Tosamah.
He raised Abel after the death of Abel's mother and older brother, Vidal. Francisco instilled in Abel a sense of native traditions and values, but the war and other events severed Abel's connections to that world of spiritual and physical wholeness and connectedness to the land and its people, a world known as a "house made of dawn". The relation to place taught him by Francisco is broken by each, as are his hands. In the Navajo emergence narrative, for example, First Man and First Woman accompanied by Coyote and other actors from the animal world journey upward through four underworlds into the present Fifth World.
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When he returns to his job, the boss harasses him and Abel quits. A downward spiral begins and Abel continues to get drunk every day, borrow money from Ben and Milly, and laze around the apartment. Fed up with Abel's behavior, Ben throws him out of the apartment.
As the whiteness of the whale does to Ishmael, it suggests an emptiness in the universe, a total void of meaning. It is an emblem complementary to Angela's philosophizing over the Cochiti dancers. The albino confronts Abel with his own lack of meaning, his own lack of a sense of place.
Community Reviews
[Tosamah] tries to span two religions and cultures; neither Christian nor pagan, he remains isolated from himself and his tribal past. A sacred vision emerges in the novel when Abel discovers himself and when … he returns home through his grandfather and his racial memory. His quest takes him through the typical monomythic pattern of descent and death, through "loneliness and fear" … until he is able to return to the reservation and join the ancient religious ritual, the run against evil and death…. [He] will be able to accept his place in the universe and defeat the fear that has dominated his life. Benally, then, like Tosamah, is a priest whose saving message, because he has divorced his religion from his everyday life, has an ironic as well as a revelatory dimension.
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The Priest of the Sun
More than six years after the incident outside the bar, Abel is released from prison as part of a program to relocate Indigenous American people. In Los Angeles, he meets a group of Indigenous American men led by a priest named Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah. Reverend Tosamah refers to himself as Priest of the Sun and tells stories about the Kiowa people. He mocks Abel for his inability to integrate into the modern world, calling him a longhair. Abel meets Ben Benally when both work at the same factory in Los Angeles. When Abel meets a white social worker named Milly, they develop a romantic relationship, but Abel continues to struggle with alcohol addiction.
The January 28 chapter is composed almost entirely of Tosamah's second sermon. This is a passage previously published in an essay in Ramparts magazine and later in The Way To Rainy Mountain, in which Momaday meditates on his Kiowa grandmother's life and the history and passing of the magnificent Kiowa culture. On August 1, in a strange, almost ritualistic encounter, Abel stabs the albino to death in a cornfield. This section of the story ends the next day, with Francisco again alone, hoeing in his fields.
Memory, too, presents the novel; events from Francisco's past, or from Abel's, Ben's, or Tosamah's, are juxtaposed with events of the present moment, giving the reader a dimensional montage of thought and attitude. As the seventh dawn comes these words grow into coherent fragments in Francisco's memory and serve as a final statement of the realizations about the relation of place, words, and community Abel has had earlier in the novel. Benally's childhood memories of life with his grandfather near Wide Ruins reveal a sense of place very like that Abel groped for on his return to Walatowa.
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