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51 THREE The Native Presence in Film House Made of Dawn The Native presence, when it’s allowed to express itself, is very powerful. I knew that that’s what was going on, and it helped me to be encouraged. I know that movies can be made about Indians and they’re going to look different, they’re going to sound different, and this is the beginning of it. —Larry Littlebird, in Hearne, “Larry Littlebird Interview” N. Scott Momaday published his novel House Made of Dawn in 1968, and in 1972 non-Native filmmaker Richardson Morse directed a film adaptation. The respective receptions of novel and film could hardly have been more different . The year after its publication, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature and has been in print and widely available ever since. In addition to clearly launching Momaday’s own literary career, the novel initiated “what is called the renaissance of American Indian literature,” according to LaVonne Ruoff, who also writes “Momaday became the most influential American Indian writer in the late 1960s and early 1970s. . . . [His novel] provided an example that several later Indian novelists followed” (American Indian 76). Kenneth Lincoln defines an American Indian literary renaissance from the publication of Momaday’s novel. Scholarly acclaim and critical attention grew every decade for thirty years after the novel’s publication. Including a few book-length studies, the MLA Bibliography lists twelve scholarly works devoted to the novel in the 1970s, twenty-three in the 1980s, more than two dozen in the 1990s, and another dozen or so in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In contrast to the novel’s success and centrality in the world of American Indian literatures, the film adaptation, produced by first-time director-producer Richardson Morse at his own expense, could not find a distributor; and after a few initial screenings to small audiences, it was essentially shelved. Momaday reported in an interview in 1975 that the film “has never been distributed ” (Morgan 54), and as Jacquelyn Kilpatrick writes in 1999, “In attempting to locate a film copy of House Made of Dawn, researchers generally have serious difficulty. It is simply not available. . . . It seems to have simply The Native Presence in Film 52 ‘vanished’ from all but a few university video libraries” (182). The film is finally more widely available, but as Morse himself reports in a 2005 interview, “it was quite totally unseen for damn near 30 years” (Hearne, “Richardson Morse Interview”). As a result of its relative obscurity, the film has received very little scholarly attention. Nancy Schmidt lists the film in the mid-1970s as an example of “using films as the core of an anthropology course,” and includes it in the section on “Intersocietal Relationships” (34), but she is able to incorporate it into her syllabus only because there was a special screening at her university, not because the film was otherwise available. In the introduction to a section called “The Indian in the Film: Later Views” in The Pretend Indians (1980), Gretchen Bataille and Charles Silet mention but do not discuss the film in any detail, noting that it “is available but has been shown only to limited audiences .” The authors do make the important argument, however, that it is an Indian film: [b]ased on a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel written by a Kiowa Indian, directed and produced by Harold Littlebird [sic] and featuring many new Indian actors, this film demonstrates what can be done despite a low budget and a lack of “Hollywood ” experience. Although the film may receive criticism on selected technical issues or resentment from some Native Americans who would have preferred that the religious peyote ritual be omitted, it is generally a fine film which visually presents Native American experiences as something other than the usual fare of “cowboys and Indians.” (73) That neither Beverley Singer nor Kirsten Knopf mentions the film in their respective studies is further indication of its relative obscurity. Rollins and O’Conner provide the film a sentence or two (14, 23), and both Hilger and Kilpatrick devote a few pages to helpful plot summaries, but neither offers further analysis of the film. (See Hilger, American 143, and From Savage 253–55; and see Kilpatrick 180–82). House Made of Dawn, although not an award-winning film nor widely distributed in its time, stands out now, in retrospect, as marking an important moment in the history of American Indian cinema. It...

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