House Made of Dawn 2
Marcia Keegan's book, Enduring Culture: A Century of Photography of the Southwest Indians, beautifully portrays the Pueblo culture's strength. By juxtaposing antique photographs from the early 1900's, with photos of the same scene taken as much as a hundred years later, Keegan powerfully demonstrates how the Pueblo culture has endured the torment of the ages. In Momaday's The House Made of Dawn, we see how these fragile customs and rituals managed to survive a century of momentous change. Throughout the 1960's, 70's and 80's, Keegan photographed scenes and events of Southwestern Indian life. Unbeknownst to her, some of these images were closely identical to those taken by the frontier photographers at the turn of the century. Seen side by side, these images make poignant statements about the deeply imbedded culture of the Pueblos. The photographs are so strikingly similar that it is uncanny to think Keegan had not made a conscious attempt to replicate the frontier photographers' images. The photos capture women in their daily tasks, s
They must learn the whole contour of the black mesa. They must know it as they knew the shape of their hands, always and by heart. The sun rose up on the black mesa at a different place each day. . . They must know the long journey of the sun on the black mesa, how it rode in the seasons and the years, and they must live according to the sun appearing, for only then could they reckon where they were, where all things were, in time. . . These things he had told his grandsons carefully, slowly and at length, because they were old and true, and they could be lost forever as easily as one generation is lost to the next, as easily as one old man might lose his voice, having not spoken enough or not at all. (173) The introduction to Keegan's collection of images, states that when frontier photographers began their "project to document all the remaining North American Indian peoples, [they] believed that [they were] preserving a record of vanishing culture." (9) The almost identical images found on the Pueblo reservation a century later are visible p
Some common words found in the essay are:
Campo Santo, Southwestern Indian, House Dawn, Unlike Benally, Southwest Indians, American Indian, Culture Abel, Buffalo Dances, pueblo culture, Learning Abel's, Marcia Keegan's, black mesa, house dawn, fragile customs, enduring culture, life reservation, frontier photographers,
Approximate Word count = 709
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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