House Made of Dawn

"There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting. There were many colors on the hills, and the plain was bright with different-colored clays and sands. Red and blue and spotted horses grazed in the plain, and there was a dark wilderness on the mountains beyond. The land was still and strong. It was beautiful all around."

For Abel, a young American Indian who lives with his grandfather on the reservation, the world he was born to is rich in meaning and tradition: it is ancient and holy, great and beautiful. But it is also an anachronism.

When Abel returns from World War II, he cannot find his place in the old life or in the world outside. Estranged and butter, to those around him he appears insensitive, enigmatic, even hostile. In a drunken fight he kills a strange white man, but the circumstances of the murder are so extraordinary as to disqualify the law. Abel is released from prison and, like many of his generation, "relocated" in the city. There, in the company of a sympathetic social work, a group of lively urban Indians who hold peyote rituals, and a good friend who sees Abel's problem perfectly but cannot save him, his disintegration is completed. Because there is no place else to go, he returns to the reservation for a second homecoming. There, beyond the extreme disorder and confusion of Abel's own life, is the land itself, the continuity of generations, the house made of dawn.

What is perhaps most extraordinary about this strongly lyrical first novel is the author's ability to give his readers the immediate feeling of what it is like to grow up Indian in this country. House Made of Dawn is a brilliant exposition of the mind and soul of the American Indian — an important contribution to American literature — as well as a first-rate work of art in its own right.