What happens in Chapter 8 of House Made of Dawn?
In "The Priest of the Sun: January 26–27," Abel finds himself drawn into the world of John Big Bluff Tosamah, the self-proclaimed "Priest of the Sun" and Peyote Road Man who leads a makeshift church in a Los Angeles storefront. Tosamah delivers two rapid-fire sermons. The first sermon focuses on the Gospel of John—"In the beginning was the Word"—and Tosamah launches into it with biting irony, claiming that St. John was a white man who twisted words until he suffocated the sacred. The second sermon shifts to his Kiowa grandmother Aho, recounting the journey of the Sun Dance culture from the high plains to Rainy Mountain, a migration that's both mythic and personal. Abel sits among the congregation—a loose collection of urban Indians navigating the bright chaos of Los Angeles—taking in Tosamah's delivery without feeling fully part of it. This chapter also deepens the portrayal of the relocation community, including Milly, Benally, and other displaced individuals connected to Abel's fragmented life. Time flows in Momaday's typical layered style, with the January dates grounding a present that continually fades into ceremony and memory.
Analysis
Momaday's skill in this chapter shines through with the bold choice to weave two complete sermons into the novel's fragmented timeline. Tosamah embodies both a trickster and a true spiritual leader—his ridicule of St. John serves as a serious critique of the excessive use of language. The irony is twofold: while Tosamah criticizes white culture for its inflated language, his own speech is extravagant, performative, and nearly baroque. Momaday leverages this contradiction to challenge any simplistic divide between Native oral traditions and Western written forms.
The transition from the first sermon to the second is a masterclass in shifting tone. The aggressive rhetoric of the John passage gently transforms into a quiet, elegiac tone as Tosamah reminisces about Aho and Rainy Mountain. The prose slows down, sentences stretch out, and readers recognize the familiar voice from Momaday's companion piece The Way to Rainy Mountain—a purposeful merging of novel and memoir that emphasizes how autobiography is inherently tied to myth.
Abel's near-silence throughout serves as a deliberate stylistic choice. He stands as the novel's wounded core, with Tosamah's verbal richness highlighting Abel's lack of speech. The chapter maintains the theme of the Word as both a sacred gift and a tool of dispossession. Los Angeles—characterized by its artificial light and grid-like streets, indifferent to the changing seasons—acts as an anti-landscape, creating a stark contrast that amplifies the significance of Aho's journey to Rainy Mountain. Momaday avoids lecturing; instead, the contrast speaks for itself.
Key quotes from Chapter 8
“In the beginning was the Word. . . . Now, brothers and sisters, old John was a white man, and the white man has his ways.”
Tosamah opens his first sermon by quoting the Gospel of John, then immediately pivots to a cutting racial and epistemological critique of Western logocentrism.
“A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Wichita range. For my people it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain.”
Tosamah begins his second sermon, invoking his grandmother Aho's homeland in language that mirrors Momaday's own prose in *The Way to Rainy Mountain*, fusing fiction with autobiographical myth.
“He was alone, and he wanted to make a sound, a word, and he could not.”
Abel's interior condition is rendered in a single, devastating sentence that counterpoints Tosamah's torrential eloquence with the protagonist's utter linguistic dispossession.
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