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Motifs
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
The novel features two main settings: Walatowa, New Mexico (home to the Jemez Pueblo), and Los Angeles. These two places represent, roughly, the traditional world of the American Indian reservation and the modern world of the industrial city. The action of the novel takes place primarily between 1945 and 1952, a period when the divide between these two worlds was being challenged and renegotiated on the political stage.
For more than a century, the United States had forced American Indian nations to shrink themselves onto small reservations to stay out of the way of colonial land development. By the 1940s, the United States was eager to expand its territory. Instead of waging war at its outer borders, the country turned inward, to the Indian reservations that were supposed to be protected by treaties. A series of laws began to strip American Indian nations of their federal recognition and encourage American Indian people to move to cities like Los Angeles. There, they were expected to assimilate to "modern" colonial settler life and leave their traditions behind. These laws turned into the policies of "Termination" and "Relocation." Abel, Ben Benally, Tosamah, and many other characters in the novel all struggle to find their place in a world that is newly defined by these policies.
Characters occasionally have flashbacks to other times and places, including a World War II battlefield in Europe and the Walatowa of the 19th century. These flashbacks help give the reader a sense of how history has shaped Walatowa and Los Angeles in the present. Abel struggles to feel like he belongs in Walatowa after he returns from World War II: the traumatic influence of industrial colonialism has changed him too much for him to return to traditional life. His drunken, violent return even seems to threaten Walatowa as a stronghold away from industrial colonialism. Nowhere, it seems, is safe from the machine of modern warfare—not even a people who are said to be stuck in the past.
However, as Francisco and others' flashbacks demonstrate, there is no living memory of a Walatowa that was truly untouched by colonization, industrialization, and modernity. American Indian reservations only exist because of these forces. By the end of the novel, Abel realizes that his traumatic experiences do not have to make him an outsider to his people's traditions. In fact, many of the traditions Francisco has tried to share with Abel all along have to do with survival and resistance in the face of colonial violence. Survival and resistance have become their own traditions. While land remains a sacred, central component to many American Indian traditions, even Tosamah and Ben Benally find ways to survive and resist colonial violence in Los Angeles. Momaday thus offers the reader the image of a world that is changing but where American Indian people and traditions are far from being left behind.
