76 pages 2 hours read

House Made of Dawn

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1968

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Before Reading

Reading Context

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

What does it mean when someone says history is written by the victors? What are some tropes you are familiar with relating to the history of Indigenous people? Where and how do these stories get perpetuated? What stories have you heard that challenge these tropes?   

Teaching Suggestion: These questions best serve to segue into reading the following resources and discussing or reflecting on the concepts of dominant narratives and counternarratives. To make the prompt more accessible and engaging, students may appreciate the opportunity to choose a related concept to research and report on in pairs, such as tropes in the history of Indigenous people, the differences between dominant and counternarratives, and/or how these concepts are being challenged in literature, film, or other mediums.

  • This video explains the differences between dominant and counternarratives with examples.
  • This article from the EdCan Network provides a visual framework for counternarratives that challenge dominant narratives of erasure, victimization, and conquest of Indigenous people in Canada.

Short Activity

In this activity, you will conduct research to create a timeline of Federal policies related to Indigenous people in the 20th century and reflect on how those policies impacted Indigenous communities.

Teaching Suggestion: This activity should help contextualize conflict, character, and references within the novel. Students may benefit from a digital or physical template to use for their timelines. Providing examples in advance or modeling a timeline of a related topic may strengthen students’ understanding of the task.

  • This Britannica article provides an overview of United States’ Federal policies toward Indigenous people through the 20th century.
  • This article from the National Congress of American Indians provides an Indigenous perspective on the United States’ Federal policies toward Indigenous people through the 20th century.

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the text.

In a journal, story, or poem, describe where you go when you return to your roots. This could be a physical space, such as a room or church, or it could be an abstract space, such as a daydream or memory. Then reflect on the following: What connects you to this place? What, if anything, could change your relationship with it? How would a change in your relationship to the space change you?   

Teaching Suggestion: Students may feel more comfortable with this prompt if they know they will not have to share, though they may benefit from a discussion afterward in which they could discuss their reflection responses more abstractly. Students may benefit from directly relating this prompt to the novel’s central protagonist returning home after the war.

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