What happens in Chapter 9 of House Made of Dawn?
In "The Priest of the Sun: February 1," Abel finds himself in Los Angeles, feeling lost in the urban Indian community that gathers around the Holiness Pan Indian Rescue Mission led by Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah. Tosamah delivers a powerful, two-part sermon that begins with the Gospel of John—"In the beginning was the Word"—and then shifts to a deeply personal story about his Kiowa grandmother Aho and the peyote road of the Kiowa people. The sermon transitions from the majesty of Christian scripture to the close, oral history of the Southern Plains, following the Kiowa migration from the mountains into the openness of the land. Abel sits in the congregation, listening but still unhealed, carrying the pain of his displacement. Tosamah's voice completely fills the chapter; Abel remains a background, nearly silent figure. The night concludes in the haze of a peyote ceremony, with the congregation caught between two worlds—the neon sprawl of Los Angeles outside and the ancient landscape that Tosamah evokes through his words.
Analysis
Momaday weaves a deep reflection on language and its limitations into the core of the novel. Tosamah's sermon features a dual voice: he starts by honoring the Word as a sacred source, then quickly critiques white Christianity's verbosity, claiming it dilutes meaning through excess. "He [St. John] went on and on, piling word on word," Tosamah remarks—a critique that also reflects Momaday's own approach to using language sparingly. The chapter's structure is striking; it feels less like traditional prose and more like a spoken address, and this intentional blending of genres is significant. Oral tradition serves not just as a theme but as a foundational element of the narrative.
The transition from John's Gospel to Aho's story embodies the novel's key argument: that Indigenous memory, rooted in the body and the land, serves as a truer vessel for the sacred than written texts. Tosamah's grandmother, who never attended school, held "the ancient memory" of her people, formed through stories. This contrast—between written scripture and lived oral knowledge—highlights Abel's own struggle. He is a man whose ties to language and ritual have been broken, and Tosamah's sermon identifies this wound, even if it can't yet heal it.
In terms of tone, Momaday shifts from the soaring rhetoric of the pulpit to a quieter, more mournful tone when Aho enters the scene. The prose slows down, becoming rich with imagery, as the Kiowa landscape envelops the Los Angeles night. This moment represents one of the novel's most confident tonal shifts.
Key quotes from Chapter 9
“In the beginning was the Word. . . . Now, brothers and sisters, old John was a white man, and the white man has his ways. Oh gracious me, he has his ways.”
Tosamah opens his sermon by invoking the Gospel of John, then immediately pivots to ironic critique, exposing the gap between sacred language and its colonial misuse.
“She was a lot like horses. . . . I think she had the ancient memory of the Kiowas.”
Tosamah shifts registers entirely when describing his grandmother Aho, grounding the sacred in embodied, familial memory rather than scripture.
“The sun is at home on the plains. Precisely there does it have the certain character of a god.”
Tosamah's lyrical evocation of the Kiowa homeland transforms the sermon into prose poetry, asserting the land itself as a site of divinity.