Reclaiming Indian Cultural Identity In The Thirdspace

Navarre Scott Momaday is one of the most distinguished Indians writers in America. Born and raised in the Reservation land, Momaday is closely related to the land and its culture and most of his works are concerned with his living experience as an Indian. And the novel to be studied in this thesis is no exception. The novel House Made of Dawn is believed by many critics as the most representative work of all and won Momaday a Pulitizer Prize in the year 1968; the story takes place in two spaces: the reservation land and the city Los Angeles and the hero, a native young man, named Abel just came back from World War II, broken and depressed and was “advocated” by the government to go to the city Los Angeles for a “better” life. But conversely, things get even worse under the supervision and domination of the ruling white. Suddenly, to leave or to stay becomes an urgent choice for Abel to make.The mid-20 th world witnessed a spatial turn and ever since then, scholars started to view how the world goes not only in light of time but also space. Philosophers embarked on the studies in relation to space: the French philosopher Lefebvre raised the triads of space, which inspired many later scholars and Michel Foucault also tried to associate his theories to space and proposed a general idea on Heterotopia. Later scholars, like Edward Soja also mediate on space and came up with his special theory on Thirdspace based on the triads of space raised by Lefebvre. And the concept “Thirdspace” in turn inspires the composition of this thesis.Even though the novel House Made of Dawn has been studied by scholars home and abroad from varied perspective, this thesis adopts a rather different perspective in the ways that it applies the Thirdspace Theory of Edward Soja to the analysis of the novel House Made of Dawn written by N. Scott Momaday, by exploring the power relations presented in the two spaces depicted in the novel, and the subversion of power relations through resistance of the Indians, with the aim to discover how the Indian cultural identity is reclaimed through struggles of Indians as the marginalized in the Thirdspace. In the first chapter, I will give a general introduction to the writer, the theories to be exploited in the thesis and the general structure of the whole thesis. In chapter two, the power relations between and within the two spaces, the Reservation land and the city Los Angeles will be analyzed with the aim to initiate the resistance of the Indians in the Thirdspace of struggle and resistance and this will be the main arguing body of Chapter Three, in which the resisting efforts of the Indians, especially Abel will be analyzed. Finally, in Chapter four, after losing their identity under the oppression of the white, the Indians struggle and fight back and finally reclaim their lost identity in the Thirdspace.