SOURCE: "N. Scott Momaday: Story Teller," in The Journal of Ethnic Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring, 1988, pp. 118-26.

In the following excerpt from an interview conducted in April, 1986, Weiler and Momaday discuss various aspects of House Made of Dawn.

[Weiler]: I'd like to talk very briefly about your position as an Indian writer. Last semester, I took an undergraduate class in which we read Leslie Silko's Ceremony and Storyteller, and I remember that some of the students had problems with those works. We also read House Made of Dawn, which I think was the last novel, and they found difficulty there, too. They asked the question: "Where is the message [in House Made of Dawn] comparable to that of an angry woman like Leslie Silko, or that found in some of the poems by Joy Harjo and what enables them to take a stand?" The students seemed to be...