Question 1

Why did House Made of Dawn win the Pulitzer Prize?

Accepted Answer

House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969 — making N. Scott Momaday the first Native American writer to win the prize — at a moment when the American literary mainstream had almost entirely ignored Native American writing, and when the civil rights era was beginning to extend to questions of representation and recognition across racial and ethnic lines. The Pulitzer committee's decision was significant beyond its literary recognition: it introduced Native American literature to a mainstream readership that had not previously encountered it, and it gave subsequent Native American writers — Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Louise Erdrich — both a model and a platform. The novel itself is formally demanding — its non-linear structure, its dense use of Pueblo and Kiowa oral tradition, and its refusal of easy narrative resolution distinguish it from conventional literary realism — and its recognition by the Pulitzer Prize signaled that Native American literary ambition could be taken seriously on the same terms as any other American literary tradition.

Question 2

What is the significance of the title House Made of Dawn?

Accepted Answer

The title of House Made of Dawn comes from a Navajo Night Chant, a ceremonial prayer that includes the repeated phrase 'House made of dawn': 'House made of dawn, house made of evening light, house made of dark cloud...' The chant is a prayer for restoration and healing, and its presence in the title announces the novel's central concern: the possibility (or impossibility) of Abel's healing and return to the world. The house made of dawn is not a literal structure but the sacred space of ceremonial order — the world as it should be, the world in which human beings are in right relationship with the natural and supernatural forces around them. Abel, throughout the novel, is outside this house: he cannot enter the ceremonial order of the Pueblo of Walatowa, and he cannot find any equivalent order in the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco where he is sent. The novel's ending — Abel running before dawn, the act that his grandfather Francisco performed throughout his life — is ambiguous: it may be a return to the ceremonial order, or it may be a gesture that Abel can make without being able to fully enter what it represents.

Question 3

How does House Made of Dawn portray the "relocation" program?

Accepted Answer

House Made of Dawn's Los Angeles sections are set during the period of the federal Indian Relocation Program (1952–1973), in which the Bureau of Indian Affairs offered Native Americans living on reservations financial incentives and assistance to move to cities — ostensibly to improve their economic opportunities, but in practice as part of a broader federal policy of termination that aimed to dissolve Native American tribal identity and assimilate Native people into mainstream American society. Abel arrives in Los Angeles as part of this program, and the novel's portrayal of his experience there is devastating: the city offers him no community that can receive his particular history and identity, the Native American church meetings he attends provide a partial community of fellow relocated people but no equivalent to the Pueblo ceremonial life he has been separated from, and the white world is entirely indifferent to him except as a body to be employed or policed. The relocation sections of the novel are among the earliest and most powerful portrayals of the urban Native American experience in American literature.

House Made of Dawn Reading Order

Complete House Made of Dawn Book List