Identity crisis is described as a period of uncertainty and confusion in which a person’s sense of identity becomes insecure, typically due to a change in their expected aims or role in society. Momaday’s some other works also deal with identity confusion and a quest for Native identity. In his The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday takes a journey to his own Kiowa heritage and identity. The book is narrated in three voices. As Momaday (2010) states; The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself. (p. 14).
In The Ancient Child, Momaday (2010) portrays a boy, Set, who is raised away from the reservation and starts to be crushed between his two selves after “returning to tribal lands for the funeral of his grandmother” (p. 15). He turns into a bear in the end. This book is a “magical saga of one man’s tormented search for his identity” (Momaday, 2010, p. 15) In Mormady’s novel ‘House made of Dawn’, one of the basic themes is an identity crisis occurred to the protagonist of the novel. identity crisis is described as a period of uncertainty and confusion in which a persons sense of identity becomes insecure typically due to a change in their expected aims or role in society He struggles for his identity even in his own tribal community which rejects to allow any conciliation amidst changing conditions.
The track to own identity rests in the things that definesl us who we are. Momaday’s repetitive usage of the term ‘run’ has great significance in the protagonist’s quest of identity because the novel is set between the runs of Abel. His novel starts with his run and finally the novel ends with the run. The quest for identity can be examined and explored from the lens of Abel who is trapped between two contrasting cultures. Momaday’s technique of recovering or attaining one’s identity in the novel will be traced through the character Abel of the novel.
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Abel has faced difficulties to acknowledge or approve the customs of his culture. He moves into modern America only to suffer from a consistency of identity. He does not belong in either of the culture fully. His personal associations with the community in which he lives are disappearing. He returns to his tribe hoping that he would cope and agree to new values without sacrificing the old ones. Abel lived in the place where the community is isolated from the modern influences. Tribal community could preserve their customs, traditions, languages and religions as Francisco who is a teacher teaches and passes on the traditional wisdom to younger generations of his community. He teaches the younger generations of his community including Abel and Vidal how everything is associated with the sun.
Abel has learned from his grandfather some of the tribal activities such as hunting deer, herding sheep and other communal ceremonies but he still feels a pinch of outsider to this community because his father is unknown and regarded as outsider. Later with the death of his mother and brother, he feels lonely and separated. Though he lives with grandfather, Francisco but he is found to be very dominating over him. He has control over Abel’s education and regulates his social contacts. Abel is unable to integrate fully into his community because of these circumstances. Abel has suffered so much to discover his own identity within his own tribal society. The elderly generation of tribal society exercises the pressure on younger generations of their society to guarantee the continuation of old systems and this leads to a conflict within the tribal generation groups which finally makes the younger generations to escape out in quest of identity.
He denies and neglects the archaic world of tribal society and enters into the new modern world in America but this does not give him any peace in mind, rather it has aggravated his conflict. This has brought him into a state of total confusion about his identity. Momaday has vividly portrayed how such confusions of Abel’s separating from the tribal and going toward American has further made him dilemma about his own identity.
Despite such harmonious and tranquil tribal life in the community, Abel remains somehow unsatisfied and strange to his own community. He remains aloof and isolated from rest of the flocks for most of the time. It is never known to Abel about who his father was making him and his mother outsider to this community. Abel’s isolation is further heightened by the early death of his mother and brother. Abel could not integrate fully into the native cultures of his community due to the lack of his family ties and this lack results in the development of indifference attitudes towards the tribal community which has made him to questions the way of life that are prevailing in the tribal communities.
Momaday has portrayed the brutality of conflict undergone between the younger generations of the tribal community against the traditional tribal patterns. Such conflicts of generation gap reveal about the conflicts and crisis in Pueblo culture. According to Pueblo conservatives, they urge that their tradition and cultures have survived only in isolation against the growing pressure from outsiders. Pueblo communities remain so much alarmed to preserve and safeguard their cultures from any intruders. As a result, educational systems imposed to the younger generations are inclined to enhance their traditional values. This has forced Abel to leave his native for the quest of new world. His inability to adjust to the rules brings about the final break between Francisco and Abel because Abel has already set his mind to leave towards the society where there are no such rigid and harsh conventions of traditional norms. He has started his departure with bold steps into an unknown world with precarious future.
Despite Abel’s fear of what has awaited him in the unknown world of modern America, his departure becomes a vital step for him to discover his identity. Abel has out casted himself from his tribal community and enters into the world of modern America. Upon reaching into the strange land, his inner firmness does not grow rather he is disturbed by the traumatic events of the war because he has participated in the war siding with American Armies. He realizes that he is only an Indian amongst white soldiers who is denied from a personal identity by his armed friends. In pressing him into this misconceived role, his friends not only close him out from their culture but also deny his identity as a Jemez man.
This lost of identity amongst the white soldiers and his feeling of loneliness compelled him to return to his native land. The consequences of the war have led Abel to remain confused, and estranged. Upon his return to his native land, he spends his time with his grandfather trying to heal his mental and physical collapse. He tries to find his way back to the center of Indian culture but he finds it hard to adjust with the culture as he has left during his adolescent age. For him, the shock of war itself is the determining factor to push himself back to his native land. In the alien world, he becomes a subject of dehumanizing military conflict amongst the whites.
Abel tries to fit himself to the land and the culture of his tribe. He tries to recover all the lost glory of native’s culture from his mind by standing for a long time facing towards the land yielding to the light. He has never moved but his eyes roved after something. Shortly afterwards, he feels his way back to a glorious center of his identity which has been lost to him. Only by relating himself to this center, he can regain the order and overcome from his inner crisis. His search of identity is sought in line with the religious significance as it aims at a communion with the land which is sacred to the natives.
Then a little later, Abel has seen his grandfather and other Indians working in the farm, he realizes for a moment about the old familiar sense of unanimity with his homeland. He could feel the faint breeze boring a scent of earth and grain and for a moment, he feels everything is all right with him. He is at home and later the people of Jemez have celebrated the game called Chicken Pull which is viewed by the natives as the insertion of the rooster into the ground and its subsequent removal as a symbolic representation of planting and reaping. The game has a scene of scattering of the feather and blood of rooster as a representation of rain so that the fertility of the land is improved and boosts the harvest.
Abel has whole heartily participated in this ancient ceremony to reconcile with his tribal culture that has gone lost from him. Abel has started to wear his old clothes and done away with his uniform. He is estranged from his archaic traditions for so long but slowly he has succeeded to integrate himself into the cultural context of his old community recovering his own identity.
References
- Lučić,I.N.(2015) The Influence of Indian tradition in “House Made of Dawn” by N. Scott Momaday, 4(1),91-95. DOI: 10.15640/rah.v4n1a11
- Identity in House Made of Dawn Essay.(n.d.).Retrieved from https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Identity-in-House-Made-of-Dawn-FKJURY9YTJ
- Seklem,I.(2014) Abel’s Identity Crisis and his Journey to his Native Self in ‘House Made of Dawn’, A Critical Analysis Perspective, 2(1), 10-27
