The Oser Essay
In commemoration of Jean Oser’s contribution to Saskatchewan film culture, the Department of Film at the University of Regina awards the Jean Oser Prize annually for the outstanding critical essay written in a Film Studies course. The Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative is pleased to reprint the 2021 Oser Essay in Splice.
Two Worlds, Two Voices: Indigenous Double Consciousness and Linguistic Sovereignty in Richardson Morse’s House Made of Dawn
By Jesse Desjarlais
It has never ceased to be interesting to be an Indian and to walk in two worlds… —Eleanor Brass
American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois coined the term “double consciousness” to articulate the experience of being Black and living in a predominantly White nation. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois describes Black Americans’ subjective experience as “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others[…]two souls, two thoughts; two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (Du Bois 9); for Indigenous North Americans who have lost their language through colonial enterprises, the notion of possessing two voices can be added to this list of qualities. Following Du Bois, the notion of double consciousness—and the associated internal conflict it signifies—has since been extended to incorporate the experience of Indigenous nations in North America. Shalene Jobin argues, for instance, that the Canadian residential school system “aimed to produce subjects who had internalized the goals of colonial institutions—people who saw themselves through the eyes of the colonizer, seeking recognition and therefore mimicking non-Indigenous ways of being” (Jobin 40). By borrowing from Du Bois’s post-Emancipation work and adapting it to the experiences of Indigenous colonial subjects, Jobin illuminates the similarities between the doubled consciousnesses of Indigenous peoples in North America and African Americans. Jobin particularly builds on Du Bois’s theory to focus on how residential schools and other colonial forces alienated Indigenous people from their languages—which, in turn, colonized their knowledge systems, epistemology, and oral culture. She writes, of the devastating impacts of losing language, “The goal was to produce subjects so thoroughly alienated from their original language and society that the society would eventually cease to exist. Indigenous ways of being and knowing would be forgotten, and colonization would be complete” (Jobin 45). Jobin subsequently examines how storytelling and oral traditions can work as a decolonizing force—a reclamation of language, an attempt to articulate the ineffable, one that attempts to eliminate double consciousness, foster Indigenous linguistic sovereignty, and affirm the ongoing presence and value of Indigenous cultures.
A text such as Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday’s 1968 novel House Made of Dawn can be considered in light of Jobin’s theoretical development of Indigenous double consciousness. Momaday thoroughly addresses the colonizing of Native American language, particularly examining the role of trauma (both from war and colonization) in stifling his main character’s ability to articulate emotional and psychological needs. Momaday writes of Abel, a Native American man who has suffered both relocation and trauma in the Second World War, “He could not even say the commonplace formula of greeting ‘Where are you going’…he was dumb. Not dumb—silence was the older and better part of custom still—but inarticulate” (Momaday 53). Abel’s lack of emotional intelligence triggers a traumatic descent into inarticulation, and is linked to many things in the text: alcohol, PTSD, the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, the role of Christianity in colonization. All of these factors are thoroughly present in Abel’s life, both in the novel and Richardson Morse’s subsequent film adaptation. However, Morse’s House Made of Dawn (1972) has noteworthy differences to the source text. Although Momaday worked with Morse on the screenplay, Morse retains sole credit for the direction of the film. A collaboration between an Indigenous author and a non-Indigenous filmmaker, such as in House Made of Dawn, has the potential to serve as an act of reconciliation and cooperation; however, that must be considered in light of what Jobin says about the colonial influence on Indigenous self-expression and the perpetuation of an Indigenous double consciousness.
House Made of Dawn’s ability to embody what Michelle Raheja calls visual sovereignty—“the creative self-representation of Native American visual artists” (Raheja 9)—is compromised by Morse’s non-Indigenous background and John Saxon’s redface portrayal of Tosamah. Morse’s decision to cast a white man to play an Indigenous preacher is symptomatic of a colonial Christian presence in the film, one that stifles Indigenous linguistic sovereignty; interestingly, however, it unintentionally presents Tosamah as a double to the Albino, the man killed by Abel in a drunken knife fight (expanded on below). While the film’s use of redface is an unfortunate side effect of a long history of the mistreatment and marginalization of Indigenous North Americans by the film industry, the Albino is a character who appears in Momaday’s novel: a Native American born on the Jemez Pueblo whose albinism leads to him being simultaneously Indigenous and white, a metaphorical representation of the colonial threats posed to Abel in relocation, imprisonment, and integration into the armed forces. It is this metaphorical representation of colonization that Morse and Saxon inadvertently double through the use of redface—and, while Morse’s non-indigenous vision and John Saxon’s redfacing stifle Momaday’s Indigenous voice, they do further exemplify the idea of double consciousness, as analysis will reveal below.
It is necessary to be cognizant of the unintentional colonial impacts of the collaboration between Morse and Momaday; especially, as critics like Joanna Hearne begin to more thoroughly examine Native voices in cinema and films that promote reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. House Made of Dawn performed poorly, both critically and financially—resultingly, there is little criticism published on the film, making Hearne’s work invaluable. However, in this general absence of criticism, a contemporary reading of the film from the viewpoint of Indigenous double consciousness must be cognizant of the colonial presence subliminally at work in the film. For instance, due to Momaday’s involvement, Hearne does rightly suggest that House Made of Dawn is “a milestone in the resurgence of Native American filmmaking,” particularly in the way that it subverts traditional film tropes of Indigenous assimilation and stasis in favour of mobility and diversity (Hearne 219). She also addresses the fact that the film’s screenplay “was the first to be adapted from a Native-authored novel” (Hearne 220), a novel which won Momaday the 1969 Pulitzer Prize in Literature; she even addresses the complications of casting Saxon as a Native American character (Hearne 257). However, Hearne, discussing these casting decisions, cites Momaday’s personal sentiment about the “imagined, constructed, individual dimension of Indigenous identity” (Hearne 220-1); the inclusion of Momaday’s quote about the imagined and constructed identity of Indigenous people has an ironic, unfortunate, and unintended interaction with the presence of redface in the film. Resultingly, Hearne’s original sentiment nearly justifies the presence of redface in the film as just another imagined or constructed type of Indigenous identity. This potential reading—rather than illuminating a racist, malicious, or apologetic tone by Hearne—reveals instead the prevalence with which Indigenous voices and perspectives continue to be artistically and systemically disregarded.
Hearne particularly fails to address how Saxon’s redface counters one of the original aims of the book: the expression of inexpressible trauma through speech and song by Native American voices. In particular, Saxon’s portrayal of Tosamah places a skewed Christian message in the mouth of a white actor in redface, a corruption of the Indigenous attempt to reckon with the Christian doctrine present in North American colonialism. Additionally, by having a redface character solely have the courage to face up to police corruption in the bar (which, again to her credit, Hearne addresses), the film adaptation flagrantly recreates both the conditions of double consciousness and the original colonization of Indigenous voices and stories. In the novel, meanwhile, Momaday highlights how Indigenous cultures view self-narration, sovereignty, and language in interdependence; the historical colonization of Indigenous language—and the disabling double consciousness this exacerbates—is difficult enough to overcome without the continued colonization of Indigenous voices in literature, film, and criticism.
Momaday’s original novel and theory on the colonization of language help to illuminate the issue underlying Morse’s decisions: the ongoing struggle in decolonizing for linguistic sovereignty. At the end of the novel, Abel learns from his grandfather the role of the voice in self-creation, in a scene in which is grandfather lays dying. Momaday writes: “The voice had failed each day, only to rise up again in the dawn. The old man had spoken six times in the dawn, and the voice of his memory was whole and clear and growing like the dawn” (Momaday 172). As Hearne observes, Morse’s film privileges Abel’s agency through locomotion against cinematic tropes of stasis; in the novel, however it is as much the voice of memory that allows Abel to return home. The importance of homecoming in the novel is itself another wholly neglected notion in Hearne’s criticism, as she praises the way the film adaptation “evinces an aesthetically complex divergence from the melodramatic scenarios of ‘separation and return’” (Hearne 219). As opposed to the film, the emotional, spiritual, and vocal nostos that occurs in Momaday’s original novel is not melodramatic; nor, as many Indigenous cultures and communities have been irreparably separated from their homelands and their language, is it a simple case of separation and return. Just as Jobin speaks of the role of destabilizing linguistic sovereignty in residential schools, Robert Lee Nichols writes that New Spain’s colonization of the Americas, for instance, was dependent on “the eradication of linguistic diversity through whatever means possible” (Nichols 31). Nichols further states that linguistic diversity may help to preserve this kind of politics and to demonstrate that in indigenous movements for linguistic security, the languages themselves are not merely conceived of as the ends of the political struggle, but is also the means to preserve such a space for local action and deliberation. (Nichols 32)
Colonial enterprises in the Americas have had devastating effects on linguistic diversity: for instance, a report titled “Native North American Languages Spoken at Home in the United States and Puerto Rico,” based on data collected from 2006 to 2010, shows that approximately 372,000 Native Americans speak their language at home, and that overall this number is trending downwards (“Census Shows Native Languages Count”). If, as Raheja posits, visual sovereignty is a necessary component for an Indigenous artistic expression, then linguistic sovereignty for Indigenous people—various means of communication and self-expression in which they make claims of agency—is just as important for self-identity, political action, decolonization, and a sense of homecoming. Despite making an effort to include untranslated Indigenous languages in the film, Morse’s stifling of Momaday’s voice—both in his direction and favouring John Saxon’s redface portrayal of Tosamah over Momaday—acts against Indigenous artists’ visual and linguistic sovereignty.
In both the novel and the film, there are many factors contributing to Abel’s inability to speak. Momaday writes that upon returning to the Jemez Pueblo, traumatized and addicted to alcohol after his experiences in WWII, Abel fails to reintegrate into his homeland: “He had tried in the days that followed to speak to his grandfather, but he could not say the things he wanted; he had tried to pray, to sing, to enter into the old rhythm of the tongue, but he was no longer attuned to it” (Momaday 53). In this passage, Momaday reminds us that, in addition to speech, both prayer and song are compromised in the destruction of Indigenous languages—which, as Jobin tells us, complicates the Indigenous relationship to storytelling, oral traditions, spirituality, epistemology, music and culture. To “enter into the old rhythm of the tongue,” as Momaday puts it, Abel must necessarily reclaim his voice through a personal journey—a self-attunement, a reconstruction, a reclamation, a return to home via a return to his home language. In a way that Morse’s film fails to fully capture, Momaday’s text places import on the way language allows for self-expression, preservation of identity, and the transmission of cultural identity via storytelling—exemplified by Abel’s emotionally and culturally-sustaining relationship with his grandfather. Simply put, the novel is necessary to help us better understand the film. However, considering Momaday’s writing credit and the casting of local Indigenous actors in House Made of Dawn it must be stated that Indigenous voices are not entirely stifled by Morse’s direction or the use of redface—it is simply necessary to address and reckon with that fact when considering the message of Indigenous sovereignty in both the source text and the film.
In particular, five scenes in Morse’s adaptation of House Made of Dawn are worth considering in relation to linguistic sovereignty: first, the appearance of the Albino in Abel’s memory from childhood, and second, the fatal knife fight between the two; third, Tosamah’s sermon, and fourth, the peyote ritual that Abel and the others undertake after his relocation from prison to Los Angeles; and, lastly, one of Abel and Benally’s final interactions before Abel leaves Los Angeles, the scene in which they are drinking to excess, singing, and planning for their return to the reservation and the land. These five scenes, in combination with supporting excerpts from Momaday’s original text, exemplify fully the way Indigenous double consciousness effects linguistic sovereignty, particularly by illustrating Abel’s struggles with inarticulation due to colonialism and trauma.
The Albino first appears in Abel’s childhood encounter with a rattlesnake. Momaday and Morse’s portrayal of the Albino serves as a physical embodiment of Indigenous double consciousness, a threat to Abel’s self-identification: The Albino is both Native American and white, devil and human, mortal (he dies in the knife fight) yet immortal (he does not appear to age). This last characteristic of the Albino is particularly important—he is eternally present in Abel’s life, from childhood right up to the moment that Abel kills him. In his omnipresence, the Albino truly is like the devil in the Christian tradition: both the snake in Eden and Christ’s tempter in the desert before his crucifixion; in the beginning, he is there in the Garden of Eden, and in the end he is present in Paul’s Revelation. In his equation with the snake (and, therefore, with Lucifer), the Albino additionally signifies the mouth as an abject bodily site, one that is poisonous. This, coupled with the Albino’s physical resemblance and similar clothes to a sheriff/police officer, presents him as an eternally constant source of “poisonous” colonial discourse in Abel’s life—be it a jailer, a relocation agent, a police officers in Los Angeles, or a nemesis on the reservation. Additionally, the Albino’s is a provider of an actual physical poison: alcohol. In the film, the Albino purchases alcohol for Abel before their fatal knife fight, signifying alcohol as a contributing colonizing force in the lives of Indigenous people. In the reconstructed timeline of the film (Morse splices various timelines together), Abel is not seen drinking alcohol until the Albino buys him a drink at the bar; this deviates significantly from Momaday’s novel.
Momaday describes the disturbing and severing effects of Abel’s dependency on alcohol in the early pages of the book. Describing Abel’s return from war, Momaday writes, “The door swung open and Abel stepped heavily to the ground and reeled. He was drunk, and he fell against his grandfather and did not know him” (Momaday 8). From the beginning, Momaday impresses upon his audience how disruptive alcohol is as a colonizing force, a regular and important concern for many Indigenous writers in North America—just as the Albino appears to be omnipresent, so, too, does alcohol. Later in the novel, Momaday tells us that “[Abel] had never been sick until he was sick with alcohol” (Momaday 89). Woodland Cree author Harold Johnsons writes about the sickness of alcohol in relation to colonization of Indigenous Canadians in his monograph Firewater:
Drinking is part of the colonial experience. Self-induced intoxication is self-induced colonization. By drinking, we participate in our own colonization. We take all the negative ideas that kiciwamanawak brought here and we take them into ourselves. We are born again as the colonizer through the ceremony of drinking. (Johnson 34)
Momaday and Johnson both see alcohol as a destructive colonizing force, and both consider linguistic sovereignty as a potential solution. While Momaday focuses on the reclamation of Indigenous languages and songs, Johnson, in line with Jobin, speaks of the healing properties of reclaiming the storytelling tradition. He tells us that colonizers “brought the Jesus story and the money story, and they brought the alcohol story” (Johnson 10); to combat this, Johnson insists on using the oral tradition: “This is what I think we must do and we must do it now. We have to change the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and about alcohol” (Johnson 126).
Just as Raheja calls for visual sovereignty, Indigenous writers such as Jobin, Momaday and Johnson urge for linguistic sovereignty—the ability for Indigenous peoples to represent themselves in stories and songs. As said before, Morse’s direction and John Saxon’s use of redface particularly complicates this mission in the way that it negatively effects another story: what Johnson calls “the Jesus story.” In their introduction to Living on the Land, Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez and Nathalie Kermoal remind readers of how important and interconnected linguistic sovereignty, culture, and spiritual expression are in Indigenous culture: “the interconnection of aspects of Indigenous knowledge is communicated in oral tradition, songs, artifacts, stories, dances, and ceremonies” (9). Christianity disrupts social structures through the removal of Indigenous spirituality and epistemology: as Altamirano-Jiménez and Kermoal remind us, “the legitimacy of Indigenous knowledge comes from social relationships and cannot exist without them” (8). Colonization and Christianity have drastically altered Indigenous culture, causing irreparable trauma and long-lasting damage in regards to spirituality, language, and the well being of Indigenous communities and families.
Momaday writes of this ongoing trauma when introducing Tosamah and the relationship between Christianity and linguistic sovereignty:
Now, brothers and sisters, old John was a white man, and the white man has his ways…He talks about the Word. He talks through it and around it. He builds upon it with syllables, with prefixes and suffixes and hyphens and accents. He adds and divides and multiplies the Word. And in all of this he subtracts the Truth. And, brothers and sisters, you have come here to live in the white man’s world.
…
In the white man’s world, language, too — and the way in which the white man thinks of it — has undergone a process of change… his regard for language—for the Word itself—as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. (Momaday 83-4)
In the novel, Tosamah’s entire sermon centres around double consciousness: living in two worlds, speaking with two languages, believing two origin stories—the ongoing attempt by Indigenous peoples to reconcile Christianity with their own spirituality, the traumatic impact of colonization on languages, oral traditions, and Indigenous epistemology. In this passage, Momaday even suggests that language itself—not just Indigenous languages—has been modified into an instrument of destruction rather than creation.
Not only are Momaday’s messages largely absent in the film, but the original message itself is wholly compromised by John Saxon’s redface portrayal of the minister at the Los Angeles Holiness Pan-Indian Rescue Mission. Saxon employs a bravado and swagger comparable to a charismatic preacher, an unavoidable association in light of his obvious whiteness; the church sign message presented by Momaday in the novel—“Be kind to a white man today” (Momaday 80)—is stripped of its significance and grace by Saxon’s portrayal. Morse’s use of redface leads to a situation in which a white actor tells Indigenous people (and Indigenous audiences) about the trauma of colonization—a hypocritical perpetuation of double consciousness, and a disturbing silencing of Indigenous voices (especially when considering that Momaday himself read for this role (Hearne 257)). Saxon, a white actor in redface, also inadvertently doubles the Albino, a Native American with white skin; thus, the Albino’s poisonous mouth and the alcohol that he introduces to Abel are doubled and played out in Los Angeles as a religious poison in Morse’s portrayal of Christianity.
The particular bodily site in which Abel’s double consciousness presents—along with the various poisonous iterations and signifiers of this double consciousness—is his mouth. For most of the film he appears to be incapable of speech, no doubt due to various past circumstances, such as his time spent in the military (as an incoming soldier he was most likely conditioned to listen rather than speak, to obey commands of superiors rather than having vocal agency), and his time in the American judicial/penitentiary system (in which Abel is spoken for by systemic agents). Momaday provides an interior vocalization of Abel’s frustration at his inability to speak to himself in the justice system, one that Morse fails to adequately capture and display in the film. (Hearne, meanwhile, does note this, even citing Momaday’s novel (244)). Momaday writes that, at his trial in which a white military comrade testified, Abel grew “angry and confused that this white man should talk about him, account for him, as if he were not there” (Momaday 102). Throughout the novel and the film, colonizing forces have spoken for Abel, and, resultingly, have essentially spoken him out of existence as an Indigenous person. Momaday writes, “Word by word by word these men were disposing of [Abel] with language” (Momaday 90). Similarly, though, and unintentionally, the redface Saxon poisons Abel with Christian doctrine; and, just as The Albino threatens Abel’s mouth with alcohol, Saxon’s double, Tosamah, disposes of Indigenous spirituality with language. Momaday writes, additionally, that the Albino himself had a threatening mouth: “Now and then the white man laughed [during the knife fight], and each time it carried too high on the scale and ended in a strange, inhuman cry—as of pain…It issued only from the tongue and teeth of the great evil mouth, and it fell away from the blue lips and there was nothing left of it” (Momaday 72-3). While Morse represents this in the film with the Albino’s inhuman and threatening smile, he once again inadvertently presents a double to the white man with an “evil mouth” when casting John Saxon in redface. This not only necessitates a constant awareness of the use of redface when viewing the film, but also necessitates a consultation with Momaday’s source material to gain an awareness and appreciation of Momaday’s portrayal of Indigenous double consciousness.
The most explicit example of a lack of linguistic sovereignty and articulation present in Morse’s adaptation of House Made of Dawn occurs during the peyote ritual. This scene is once again complicated by Saxon’s presence; it has a negative impact on Indigenous visual sovereignty in the film, as once again a white actor explains the significance of peyote in Native American spirituality to both Indigenous actors and audiences. This is further complicated by the confusing invocation of Jesus’s name in the elder’s prayer—in Momaday’s original novel, the elder simply prays to Great Spirit (Momaday 100). Morse does little to recognize Native American spirituality in the film; here, once again it lacks Momaday’s personal association, but one cannot know the differences between Morse and Momaday’s script and the final cut of the film. Nevertheless, Momaday’s novel must be consulted as a valuable source in conveying the importance of Indigenous spiritual practices post-colonization, material that illuminates elements of Morse’s adaptation:
[E]verything would be restored to an older age, and time would have returned upon itself and a bad dream of invasion and change would have been dissolved in an hour before the dawn. For man, too, has tenure in the land; he dwelt upon the land twenty-five thousand years ago, and his gods before him.
…
Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky (Momaday 52).
Morse’s decision to not include these tribally-specific spiritual traditions, and his unnecessary inclusion of Jesus in the elder’s prayer, are both potentially a symptom of the long-lasting influence of Christianity on Indigenous nations; Momaday’s source text reminds us that when Indigenous tongues pray to old deities, it is another act of linguistic sovereignty.
Despite the influence of Christianity on the scene, the film does accurately capture Abel’s inarticulate nature. In the book, Abel does not speak at all during the peyote ceremony. The film’s slight deviation in the same scene is a powerful addition on Morse’s part. In the film, Abel feels compelled to speak, but trauma, anxiety, and fear all serve to render him speechless: desperate to voice his interiority and admit his grief, trauma, and guilt, Abel can only stammer endlessly and horrifically on a single word: “I.” In this scene, as Abel sputters out “I…I…I…”, Morse powerfully captures the Indigenous identity crisis, proffering Abel’s inarticulation as an example of linguistic interpellation due to trauma. Abel’s repetition of the word communicates not only an anxiety around the self, but a general inability to articulate his interiority due to a failure of the voice. It is also a powerful reminder of double consciousness, as Abel appears caught in two minds: whether to speak as an Indigenous man, or remain silent as a colonial subject. Morse’s deviation during this scene is a poignant amendment to Abel’s silence in the book; it cinematically captures both the subtlety and the intimacy with which Momaday treats linguistic sovereignty throughout the text, displaying it openly for the audience to see.
As a direct point of contrast to Abel’s inability to speak at the peyote ritual, Morse quickly shows us a scene in which Abel and Benally sing. Where speech fails, music allows a vocalization of Abel’s troubled interior; the tender moment in which Abel recalls a song which Benally has forgotten represents a lingering connection to Indigenous culture. These once forgotten songs are recalled, evoking the reservation, a home; yet, as they sing powwow songs loudly over the cacophony of Los Angeles traffic, Morse clearly displays how Abel and Benally live ever in two worlds. The two men clearly long for their lost home, and ponder against the bright cityscape and the noise of traffic if they will ever return. In her criticism of the film, Hearne suggests that the narrative of House Made of Dawn isn’t simply a journey followed by a nostos. However, she (and, perhaps even Morse himself as a non-Indigenous man) drastically underestimates the impact of this scene, in particular the significance of Abel’s yearning for home through song and eventual homecoming. Momaday writes about Abel’s relationship to song and home in a powerful passage about his grandfather:
Your grandfather was another year older and he cried; he cried because your mother and father were dead and he had raised you and you had gone away and you were coming home. You were coming home like a man, on a black and beautiful horse. He sang about it. It was all right, everything, and there was nothing to say. (Momaday 148)
Momaday represents how returning home mitigates the effects of the colonization of language—that fact that there is “nothing to say,” is, by comparison, a positive and healthy example of speechlessness.
In the book, Abel’s mother, father, and brother Vidal (who do not feature in the film) are all dead; his only living relative is his grandfather. The homecoming, and its importance to the text, may be rooted in Momaday’s decision to name his main character Abel. Just as Morse complicates the film with an inappropriate inclusion of Christianity, Momaday shows in the novel how Indigenous stories, songs, and culture can stand against Christianity, providing Indigenous people with a sense of family, community, healing, and a sense of home. Momaday not only borrows from the Judeo-Christian story in naming his main character Abel, but he subverts it to fulfill the needs of Indigenous people telling their own story, singing their own song: Momaday presents a new brother of Cain—the first murder victim in the Bible—and gives him new life in House Made of Dawn. Abel and Benally singing, and remembering their home, takes on a new significance; suddenly they stand in for two living postlapsarian brothers, wondering how to return to a prelapsarian state. In this context, even the Albino, an Indigenous man in his own right, is seen to be the victim of murder after the colonial fall; in which case, Abel is also a figure of Cain. Abel’s return to his reservation and his grandfather is, in light of the Edenic connection, essentially a reunion with a divine father.
This reunion with home, and the associated sense of divine spirituality in reclaiming an Indigenous voice, is essentially what Abel and Benally discuss when talking on the bridge, singing and dreaming of a return home. However, by suggesting in the novel that Abel’s grandfather had “nothing to say” (148) about his return, Momaday takes us back to a pre-linguistic place in which language is ineffable, in which singing is the more appropriate form of expression. This is once again a subversion, a revision, of John’s gospel and Tosamah’s sermon about the speaking of the divine word. If non-Indigenous language was used to colonize Indigenous languages—and, as Momaday intimates, to destroy language—then perhaps singing is the form of linguistic sovereignty required to recreate and rebuild Indigenous cultures and communities. It is for this reason that Abel and Benally so frequently try to sing in the book and the film—they sing because they cannot speak; they sing because they need to speak, but have been rendered speechless. Indigenous people sing. Animals sing. Children sing. We sing to children. To modify Heidegger, language sings. There is, in fact, an ongoing conversation around neurology, language, and musicality. In 2003, Daniel J. Levitin and Vinod Menon published an article positing that musical structure is processed by the areas of the brain responsible for language. Levitin and Menon write, “According to theories of musical aesthetics, music does not represent specific, verbalizable emotions, such as pity or fear[…] That is, music represents the dynamic form of emotion, not the static nor specific content of emotional life” (Levitin and Menon 2149). Levitin and Menon suggest that this musical use of the neurological area responsible for linguistic articulation creates a comparable connection between the making and structuring of meaning in both speech and music. Thus, keeping Levitin and Menon in mind, (in conjunction with Altamirano-Jiménez and Kermoal’s sentiments above about the interconnectedness of Indigenous language, culture, community wellbeing, and oral tradition) Abel and Benally represent a dynamic form of Indigenous emotion through song: an attempt at vocally emoting where specific linguistic articulation has failed—a reclamation of linguistic sovereignty through singing in post-colonial North American Indigenous culture.
When drinking in excess, Abel and Benally are fundamentally incapable of constructing a narrative for themselves. Repeating a tired narrative in which they go back home only to sing songs and get drunk, Benally offers a vision of futurity that tragically cannot be divorced from the destructive forces of alcohol and a colonial double consciousness. Abel has to leave this narrative. If—as Abel exemplifies, Tosamah preaches, and Momaday proffers—language is incapable of creating and providing a route to a singular Indigenous self-consciousness, then perhaps it is singing that provides Abel with a route back to his reservation, his land, his lost voice, the act of running. Momaday reminds us that when Abel gets back from war, he begins to think of singing when once again in solitude and peace with his land: “He was alone, and he wanted to make a song…but he had not got the right words together. It would have been a creation song; he would have sung lowly of the first world, of fire and flood, and of the emergence of dawn from the hills” (53-4). Language, generally, is a marker of emotional, neurological, and psychological development; the absence of language, thus, indicates an arrested development in Abel, prohibiting him in his trauma from developing a sense of linguistic sovereignty. The etymological relationship between infant (meaning one who cannot speak) and infantry—considering Abel’s trauma as a soldier—cannot be understated. Abel, a soldier, prisoner, colonial subject, and relocated Native American, cannot speak. He can, however, sing.
Like many other Indigenous authors, N. Scott Momaday offers, in Abel, a character who is separated from his culture, his home, and his tongue through the social, governmental, and political doubling of his consciousness. Momaday, in the introduction to the novel, tells us that Abel was based on individuals from his own personal history:
They struggled to re-enter the world in which they were born and raised and from which they had been suddenly severed. And this was a struggle waged across Indian country at large. For many, too many, the struggle was lost. They died of alcoholism, murder, suicide, and a kind of spiritual isolation. (Momaday x)
The entire book, and large portions of the film, show how Abel’s inability to articulate his interiority is rooted in spiritual isolation. While both Michelle Raheja and Joanna Hearne identify Abel’s isolating double consciousness, neither of them do so from a perspective that considers Momaday’s own double consciousness: his original novel and his words filtered through Morse’s direction; neither do they adequately address Morse’s decision to cast John Saxon in redface from this vantage point. By reinstating Momaday’s own voice against his doubled cinematic voice, audiences can gain a greater appreciation for the struggles against Indigenous double consciousness, the struggle for linguistic sovereignty. We might better understand the sentiment that closes Momaday’s novel: “[Abel] 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). Abel had no voice, but he had a song. Indigenous peoples—many whose voices have been lost and drowned in the whelm of history—have been speaking and singing ever since stepping foot on the land we now call North America. In a way that Morse’s voice simply cannot say, Momaday reminds us of another Indigenous writer’s valuable message in the effort against decolonization: as the Mi’kmaw poet Rita Joe reminds us, all we have to do is listen as Indigenous peoples, still fighting against the colonization of their voices, tell their stories, sing their songs, and long for their homes:
Two ways I talk
Both ways I say,
Your way is more powerful.
So gently I offer my hand and ask,
Let me find my talk
So I can teach you about me.
(Rita Joe, “I Lost My Talk”)
Works Cited
Altamirano-Jiménez, Isabel and Nathalie Kermoal. Introduction. Living on the Land: Indigenous Women’s Understanding of Place, edited by Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez and Nathalie Kermoal, AU Press, 2016, pp. 3-17.
Brass, Eleanor. “Excerpt from I Walk in Two Worlds.” kisiskâciwan: Indigenous Voices from Where the River Flows Swiftly, edited by Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, University of Regina Press, 2018, pp. 136–40.
“Census Shows Native Languages Count.” Language Magazine, 2017, https://www.languagemagazine.com/census-shows-native-languages-count/. Accessed 30 March 2021.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Myers Education Press, 2018.
Hearne, Joanna. “Imagining the Reservation in House Made of Dawn and Billy Jack.” Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western, State University of New York Press, 2012, pp. 219–64.
House Made of Dawn. Directed by Richardson Morse, performances by Larry Littlebird, Judith Doty, Jay Varela, Mesa Bird, Phillip Kenneally, and John Saxon, 1972.
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Jesse Desjarlais is a third-year Honours student studying English and Film at the University of Regina. Situated in Treaty 4 territory, he is of Ojibwe, Métis, Ukrainian, and French heritage. Desjarlais is currently researching for his Honours thesis on Canadian short fiction and the Uncanny. He lives in Regina with his wife and daughter.