What happens in Chapter 5 of House Made of Dawn?
Chapter 5, "The Longhair: March 1–2," shifts the focus of the novel from Abel to the thoughts of Tosamah, the Priest of the Sun and a self-proclaimed Kiowa orator who leads a peyote ceremony in Los Angeles. Tosamah presents a two-part sermon: first, an impressive reflection on the Gospel of John, drawing from the opening line "In the beginning was the Word," followed by a heartfelt story about his grandmother Aho's life and the Kiowa people's migration south onto the plains, their brief flourishing under the open sky, and their eventual defeat and confinement. Through Aho's memories, Tosamah brings to life the Sun Dance culture, the sacred Tai-me bundle, and the defining moment when the Kiowas embraced their identity as a people of the horse and the sun. The chapter concludes with the image of a single cricket at Rainy Mountain, symbolizing both diminishment and, paradoxically, a form of survival. Momaday weaves into Tosamah's sermon the novel's core themes: the connection between language and existence, the price of dispossession, and the fragile yet persistent hope that cultural memory can help prevent erasure.
Analysis
Momaday's skill in this chapter shines through its bold structure: a novel that appears to focus on one Pueblo man takes a moment to feature a Kiowa trickster-preacher whose sermon unfolds as a story within the story. This shift isn’t just a detour—it serves a purpose. Tosamah's interpretation of John 1:1 illustrates his point: language, when used with care and respect, has the power to create meaning; when mishandled, it becomes a tool for oppression. The tone shifts from a mock-evangelical fervor ("Now get this") to a spare elegy that feels like it’s been carved from bone, and Momaday transitions between these tones seamlessly.
Grandmother Aho acts as a vessel for communal memory rather than as a fully fleshed-out character, and Momaday is intentional about this choice. Her blind eyes, turned toward the sun, embody a paradox that lies at the heart of the novel—sight and blindness, presence and absence, coexist as fundamental aspects of Indigenous experience in the twentieth century. The Rainy Mountain landscape is depicted in the rich, vivid prose that Momaday honed in The Way to Rainy Mountain (released the same year), suggesting that these two works are interconnected rather than separate endeavors.
The cricket at the end of the chapter serves as a quietly powerful tonal shift: following the grandeur of the Kiowa migration story, the only sound left is that of a single insect. Momaday avoids sentimentality; this reduction feels genuine. Yet the cricket is present—small, persistent, still singing—and its refusal to fall silent constitutes the chapter's final, subtle argument.
Key quotes from Chapter 5
“In the beginning was the Word. . . . Now get this. . . . The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in upon him.”
Tosamah opens his sermon by seizing the Gospel of John's first verse and turning it against the culture that canonized it, arguing that the white world's verbal excess has drained language of its sacred power.
“She was a small, wrinkled woman with great vision, blind and nearly so. She was an old woman, and she had lived long enough to have seen the last of the great Kiowa Sun Dances, and she had known the old men and warriors who had been a part of it.”
Momaday introduces his grandmother Aho through Tosamah's voice, positioning her as a living archive of a culture already receding into history at the moment of her own memory.
“The last Kiowa Sun Dance was held in 1887 on the Washita River above Rainy Mountain Creek. My grandmother was there. Without bitterness, and for as long as she lived, she bore a vision of deicide.”
The word 'deicide'—the killing of a god—lands with controlled ferocity, equating the U.S. government's suppression of the Sun Dance with an act of theological annihilation.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Chapter 5
- deicide
- The killing of a god or a divine being; here it refers to the U.S. government's forcible suppression of the Kiowa Sun Dance, which the narrator's grandmother experienced as the destruction of something sacred.
- Sun Dance
- A major annual religious ceremony of the Plains tribes, including the Kiowas, involving communal prayer, fasting, and ritual sacrifice; the U.S. government banned it in the late nineteenth century.
- literatures
- Here used in the broad sense of written and spoken verbal traditions — stories, sacred texts, and oral records — that a culture takes for granted as the natural medium of meaning.
- commonplace
- So ordinary and familiar that it is no longer noticed or valued; taken completely for granted as part of everyday life.