SOURCE: "N. Scott Momaday: Racial Memory and Individual Imagination," in Literature of the American Indians: Views and Interpretations; A Gathering of Indian Memories, Symbolic Contexts, and Literary Criticism, edited by Abraham Chapman, New American Library, 1975, pp. 348-57.

Strelke is a photographer, poet, editor, and educator who frequently teaches courses on Native Americans. In the essay below, she examines Momaday's thematic focus on personal redemption and identity and discusses his blending of individual history, racial memory, Native art and culture, and Western aesthetics in House Made of Dawn and The Way to Rainy Mountain.

On one level, the writings of N. Scott Momaday, notably the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, House Made of Dawn, and the multigenre books, The Way to Rainy Mountain, center on the responses that Native Americans make to their ethnic backgrounds, their racial memory, their "Indianness." Because of these concerns, and because Momaday is himself a...