SOURCE: "Tai-me, Christ, and the Machine: Affirmation through Mythic Pluralism in House Made of Dawn," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 11, No. 1, Spring, 1983, pp. 61-71.

Raymond is an author, critic, and educator. In the following essay, he discusses the role of technology, Christianity, and the Kiowa Tai-me in House Made of Dawn.

Many critics interpret N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn as depicting disharmony, alienation, and the need for spiritual redemption in a squalid, hellish, temporal world. Martha Scott Trimble, for example, sees it [in her 1973 N. Scott Momaday] as a story of how differences in "language and culture tend through their own territorial imperatives to encompass one, sometimes to a point of isolation." Even those critics not advocating themes of alienation see House Made of Dawn as an insider's novel. To them, it portrays "the orderly continuum of interrelated events that constitute the Indian universe" and...