The Analysis of The Novels "Pushing The Bear" & House Made of Dawn" by Diane Glancy & N. Scott Momaday

Pushing the Bear and House Made of Dawn: Interpreting the Fragmented Works of Diane Glancy and N. Scott Momaday

Diane Glancy and N. Scott Momaday are Native American authors who both apply fragmentation and multi-perspectivism in their works, Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears and House Made of Dawn, respectively. These techniques, though applied in similar ways, deliver different results, both within the narrative structure of the texts as well as on the characters of the novels.

In the winter between 1838 and 1839, somewhere between 11,000 and 13,000 Cherokee peoples were marched for four months to what is now Oklahoma— “Indian Territory.” But this new land was not Indian territory, and the Cherokee people were put here against their will thanks to the many treaties that preceded the march, which was both a genocidal act and a forced erasure of hope and relationship between the Cherokee and their land, an essential component to an agrarian-based people. Throughout her novel, Glancy makes the disambiguation felt by the Cherokee people tangible by applying narrative tactics to convey them viscerally to the reader— fragmentation, dislocation, unfamiliar language, and isolation are all effects of the Trail on those forced to endure it, and all are employed by Glancy for readers to experience.

Glancy frequently incorporates words and elements of the Cherokee syllabary throughout Pushing the Bear, but rather than providing line-by-line translations, leaves only an alphabetic glossary at the very end of the novel, challenging readers with a constant choice: either ignoring the words altogether, leaving holes of dialogue unaccounted for, or registering the unknown language as its own presence. The Cherokee language present in the narrative is a form mirroring the characters speaking it, both tangible and transient, seen but not heard. It is a form of written expression that is meant to be spoken, something that cannot be reduced to an English equivalent.

These abrupt disjunctions of unfamiliarity with language presented in the novel are deliberate, mirroring the dislocation of the characters and the ways in which the Trail acted as its own source of cultural fragmentation. This is put to great use in the middle of the novel, when Glancy utilizes a song written wholly in the Cherokee language, with only the title offering any type of translation, “The Song We Sang On the Trail of Blood” (Glancy, Pushing the Bear 129). This scene is meant to highlight the comfort of language for Knowbowtie and the others engaged in song, as well as create dissonance between the text and the reader. Attention is brought to a language that was thriving and inherent among the Cherokee peoples, and is now a series of unfamiliar runes the reader passes over, never knowing their meaning. Knowbowtie comments, “Sometimes I could hear the singing in the night with the wind. Sometimes I could hear it in the day when I walked, my arm bent as if I carried my musket. I looked around me. Yes, I saw the mouths moving” (Glancy, 128).

The language permeates through every aspect of what the Cherokee hold dear, a constant reminder of where they’ve come from and what they’ve lost. There is a great attention to highlight the clash between the spoken word and the written tradition— The Great Spirit created the world with his voice, and the white man took it away with their written treaties. The written word, therefor, is a direct threat to the spoken traditions that make up so much of the Cherokee culture. The Basket Maker is the epitome of this idea— a character created to communicate the reverence of storytelling and the important or oral tradition.

She creates new stories on the Trail, despite the immediate rejection of them from those around her. In one altercation, The Basket Maker is attempting to tell a story: “… But I say, the idea for baskets came from our stories. The Baskets hold fish and corn and beans. Just like our stories hold meaning. Yes, I say the baskets copy our stories” (Glancy, 153). She is then interrupted by a woman, telling her she “can’t make stories on [her] own” and to “leave [the trail] unspoken.” When The Basket Maker argues further, the woman claims “the spirits gave us the stories. When they still talked to us. I think they’re mad at us now. Why else would we walk the trail?” (Glancy, 154). Many are afraid that the uprooting of their people from their land will break their bond with their spiritual ties to their culture, stories, and even their ability to conceive of new stories. Through The Basket Maker, Glancy is creating a hope for the characters that via the continued use of their oral traditions and ability to conceive new stories, their history will not be lost, and the lives of the people lost on the trail will not be forgotten, but will be passed down to future generations.

Like Glancy, Momaday is deftly utilizing fragmented narratives to mirror the internal struggles of his characters in House Made of Dawn. Momaday’s themes of hybridity, self-determination, and the importance of storytelling come into play as Abel, a Pueblo Native recently come home scarred from WWII, struggles to heal both within his Native culture and the wasteland of modern America. The novel’s dealings with crises of faith and lack of sovereignty are highlighted by Momaday’s employment of starkly contrasting characters, whose opposing perspectives and life experiences often bear existential and violent ends.

House Made of Dawn is taking place during a time of a literal upheaval and uprooting of Native peoples and cultures, when Termination and Relocation was attempting to forcefully end tribal affiliation by taking Native men off of reservations and into modern cities to “civilize” them. The broken, fragmented narrative of Abel’s character is a direct causality of the idea that Native cultures could somehow be terminated or homogenized with “modern American” culture. Estranged completely from his own people, Abel exists solely in the context of the novel to remember events that highlight his outsider label and isolation from everything that should be inherent and familiar. When he does attempt to participate in ceremonial life of his village, such as when he joins the Bahkyush Eagle Watcher’s Society, he only manages to alienate himself further from the religious and ceremonial life of the Pueblo tribe. His only response to events is intense violence, as if he is trying to articulate his own isolation and lack of power by destroying the modes these feelings are able to affect him. Perhaps his most notable violent act comes with his killing of the albino, perhaps the most visceral, symbolic representation of what is responsible for his painful alienation— white colonialism manifested physically, to which he can place all of his unheard fear and anger.

One of the most prominent and immediate sources of fragmentation in House Made of Dawn is the presence of alcohol and how it affects Abel’s life. The first image we’re given of Abel is him stumbling out a bus, falling drunk into his grandfather’s arms. Alcohol plays a very distinct role in the novel, both for Abel and for the reader, acting as a major source of alienation and discomfort by portraying a stereotype (the “drunken Indian”), creating a borderland between white, modern culture and understanding the reality of a Native culture in their own voice. Momaday does this by using alcoholism as not only a direct contributor to the disintegration of Abel’s personal and social lives, but by also setting up a barrier between him as a Native America and his traditional, racial-spiritual heritage. When Abel finally is able to abandon alcohol and return home, thus returning to his own cultural roots, he is able to finally achieve some sense of meaningful identity.

The novel ends as it begins: in the valley north of the town, at dawn, the race of the dead takes place once a year— the same race Abel is running in the prologue and the end, and the same race Francisco recounts running. “The soft sound of their going, swift and breaking away all at once, startled him, and he began to run after them. He was running, and his body cracked open with pain, and he was running on. He was running and there was no reason to run but the running itself and the land and the dawn appearing” (Momaday, House Made of Dawn 185).

Abel, having just been beaten to the point of near-death just days before, has returned to Walatowa and finds his grandfather in his final moments. Francisco remembers taking Abel to where the race of the dead takes place after recounting his first bear hunt. Shortly after, Francisco passes away and, ignoring his body’s pain, Abel finally successfully reconnects himself to his traditional life, accepting the responsibility that comes with the heritage which has been passed down to him. “He was running, and under his breath he began to sing. There was no sound, and he had no voice; he had only the words of a song. And he went running on the rise of the song. House made of pollen, house made of dawn. Qtsedaba” (Momaday, 185).