What happens in Chapter 10 of House Made of Dawn?
Chapter 10 finds Abel in Los Angeles in 1952, where he has been moved through the federal Indian relocation program. He’s living in a rooming house, holding down a low-paying job, and trying to navigate an urban landscape that feels completely foreign to him. This chapter focuses on his friendship with Ben Benally, a Navajo man who has at least outwardly adjusted to city life and narrates much of this part. Ben keeps a watchful eye on Abel, offering him steady support by taking him to bars, talking him through long nights, and softly singing the old Navajo Night Chant to maintain a connection between them. Meanwhile, Abel is drinking heavily and feeling lost, struggling to fit his identity into the city’s framework. A social worker named Milly comes into the picture—she's earnest and well-intentioned but ultimately unable to connect with Abel. The chapter ends with Abel nearly beaten to death on a Los Angeles beach, left broken in the sand—this act of violence echoes the earlier murder of the albino back in Walatowa, underscoring the idea that the city has become a predatory place in its own right.
Analysis
N. Scott Momaday structures this chapter as a multi-voiced lament: Ben Benally's first-person storytelling intertwines with Abel's silence, creating a profound contrast. Ben's voice is warm, meandering, and rich with the rhythms of oral tradition—he embodies the Night Chanter of the title, carrying ceremony within him even in places where it can't be performed. His narration captures the very continuity it grieves, weaving Navajo songs into the prose like a weaver concealing a spirit line in a rug.
Momaday depicts Los Angeles with intentional flatness: streets, fluorescent lights, and the geometry of displacement. The city isn't depicted as evil in a gothic way; rather, it is indifferent, and that indifference proves to be the more harmful force. In contrast, Ben's Night Chant fragments—half-formed memories, sung softly so the other bus passengers won't overhear—transform into acts of radical preservation.
The beach beating is presented as a ritual inversion. Unlike the earlier communal violence represented by the Jemez Pueblo rooster pull, this violence is random and senseless, robbing Abel of the dignity of a recognizable foe. Milly's subplot introduces a liberal-humanist perspective that serves as another form of erasure: her concern is genuine, but her understanding can't grasp what Abel has truly lost. Throughout, Momaday maintains an elegiac tone, steering clear of polemics and relying on the weight of small, precise details—a paper bag, a neon sign, the sound of traffic—to convey the full impact of dispossession.
Key quotes from Chapter 10
“He was alone, and he wanted to make a sound, a word, but he did not know what word to make.”
Ben reflects on Abel's paralysis in the city, capturing the novel's central crisis of language and belonging in a single, spare sentence.
“House made of pollen, house made of dawn.”
Ben murmurs lines from the Navajo Night Chant, the ceremonial prayer that gives the novel its title and that persists here as a fragile counter-world to the Los Angeles grid.
“They have a lot of words, and you know they mean something, but you don't know what, and your own words are no good anymore.”
Ben describes the linguistic dispossession that relocation enacts, articulating how the city renders Indigenous speech not wrong but simply inaudible.