SOURCE: "Bringing Home the Fact: Tradition and Continuity in the Imagination," in Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, University of California Press, 1987, pp. 570-78.

Allen is a Pueblo Laguna and Sioux poet, critic, essayist, novelist, and editor. In the following excerpt, she discusses the inclusion of Navajo and Pueblo beliefs in House Made of Dawn, arguing that Momaday's focus in the novel is sickness, healing, and harmony.

As familiarity with the Bible makes Western culture accessible to the understanding, the basic texts of the Pueblo or the Navajo make their cultures, especially their literature, accessible to scholarly interpretation. It is a nearly hopeless task to explicate House Made of Dawn without such a familiarity, though an understanding of historical processes in the Southwest and of Western attitudes and lore is also important to this task. The basic meanings important...