The Longhair
In 1945, Abel's grandfather, Francisco, rides his horse-drawn wagon into town and picks up Abel from the bus station. The young man is returning from his service in the army during World War II. So drunk that he does not recognize his own grandfather, Abel slips off the bus and into his grandfather's wagon.
Waking the next day at Francisco's house, he recalls frightening images from his early life and wartime experiences.
The story shifts to Father Olguin, the Catholic missionary assigned to the reservation at Walatowa. He is visited by Angela St. John, a pregnant white woman from Los Angeles. She asks Father Olguin to recommend a local person looking for work who can chop wood for her. A few days later, Abel comes to her house. He chops the wood, but does not talk to her.
At the feast of Santiago, Abel participates in a competition that is based on a folk story about Santiago, who founded the town by sacrificing a rooster. The townspeople believe that the discarded feathers and blood of the rooster produced plants and animals from the ground. At the feast, contestants ride horses toward a rooster that is buried up to its neck in the ground, trying to reach down and pull it out. Abel does poorly at the competition. The winner is an albino on a black horse, who takes the rooster over to Abel and beats him with it.
A few days later, Abel walks to Angela St. John's house. She invites him in, gives him coffee, and asks if he would like to make love to her. He accepts, and the two become lovers. Father Olguin comes to talk to her about her sin a few days later, but she does not regret her actions.
After a festival in town, Abel sits in a bar and
has a few drinks expecting albino to arrive. In the climactic moment of the
first chapter, when Abel kills albino, who
has previously taunted him at the feast of Santiago What they say
to each other is never revealed, we only know that
Abel stabs albino and dies emotionless. Later he is sent to prison in Los Angeles.
The Priest of the Sun
Seven years later, the story shifts to Los Angeles. Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah, the pastor of the Holiness Pan-Indian Rescue Mission known as the Priest of the Sun, preaches to Native Americans in the city. Tosamah is a Kiowa (north America near to Mexico and oklahoma), and he recalls stories told him by his grandmother. He passes these Indian stories along to those in his congregation, many of whom are from other native groups.
Abel has served his jail time for the murder of the albino. He is trying to start a new life in Los Angeles. Abel has a close friend, Benally, who is an Indian; Abel also has a girlfriend named Milly, who is the social worker assigned to his case. He struggles to stay out of trouble and survive in a white man's world.
The Night Chanter
Benally clarifies some of the details of Abel's life in Los Angeles. He is familiar with many of the members in the Native American community and mentions their names in the process of telling the story. He remembers that after his release from prison, Abel was brought to the factory where Benally worked. Benally gave him a place to live and went out to bars and to the beach with him.
One night they are stopped by Martinez, a local police officer. When Abel does not respond appropriately, Martinez hits his hands with his nightstick. He got seriously injured, soon he stops going to work, and spends his days drinking and wandering the streets.
He loses a succession of jobs, and eventually is attacked and beaten up on the street.
Benally contacts Angela St. John. She visits Abel in the hospital. Benally puts Abel on a bus back to the reservation.
The Dawn Runner
When he returns to the reservation, Abel discovers that his grandfather is dying. Abel listens to him murmuring in his delirium for six days about a bear hunt from his youth. The old man dies on the seventh morning.
Abel wakes Father Olguin before dawn and makes arrangements for the old man's funeral service. He takes off down the road south of town. When he spots the figures of men running, he strips off his shirt and runs after them.
Characters Analysis
Abel
The protagonist of the story, Abel is a Native American war veteran who struggles to find his space in the world. The story begins when Abel returns to the Walatowa reservation on a bus, so drunk that he can hardly stand or recognize where he is. Shortly after his return, Abel is hired by Angela St. John to chop wood. The two quickly start an affair. After being humiliated in a festival competition, Abel drinks in a bar with his chief rival, the albino. As they leave the bar, the albino takes a step toward him and Abel stabs him.
After spending seven years in jail for the murder, Abel moves to Los Angles. He takes a job at a factory and meets Benally, who becomes his friend. He also becomes romantically involved with Milly, the white social worker assigned to his case. Much of the story told in Los Angeles is interspersed with sights of Abel wandering around, severely injured from a beating, with his thumbs broken it does not explicitly say what happened (fragmentation).
In the end, Abel leaves the city and returns to the reservation. A week after his return, Francisco dies. After arranging his funeral, Abel goes running to the point of exhaustion.
Albino
The albino (also called The White Man) is a mysterious but important person in this story. He is frequently called "the white man." At the feast of Santiago, the albino beats Abel in a competition, humiliating him. A week later, Abel drinks with the albino in a bar. They leave together, and Abel hallucinates that the man is turns into a snake. He takes out his knife and stabs the albino to death.
Ben Benally
Benally is a Native American man and a good friend to Abel. Raised on a reservation, Benally adapts the life in Los Angeles and appreciates the benefits of urban culture. He is sympathetic to the way life is on the reservation, but he also recognized the benefits of assimilation: "You know, you have to change. That's the only way you can live in a place like this. You have to forget about the way it was, how you grew up and all."
Francisco
Francisco is Abel's grandfather. A believer in the traditional ways, he is described as a "longhair." The novel opens with him trying to capture a sparrow so that he might have its feathers to use for ceremonial purposes. An elderly man, Francisco is mentioned in an old journal, written by Fray Nicholas. In the 1940s, when the novel begins, Francisco is a farmer working on the communal land owned by the reservation. Francisco was instrumental in raising Abel, and has been his only relative since his mother died when he was five. As such, he holds an important place in Abel's life and acts as a role model for the confused young man.
Martinez
Martinez is the brutal, sadistic police officer who traps Abel and Benally. He cracks his finger with his nightstick. It is that senseless and brutal act that alienates Abel from white civilization.
Milly
A white social worker, Milly becomes Abel's girlfriend. Eventually, he drives her away with abusive behavior.
Father Olguin
Father Olguin is the Roman Catholic priest at the mission at Walatowa. He is a confused man, torn between the traditions of his religion and those of the society around him. He lives with a physical handicap as a result of a childhood illness.
Because of his unique position, Father Olguin functions as an intermediary between the outside culture and the people of the reservation. When Angela St. John arrives at Walatowa, she asks Father Olguin to help her hire an Indian worker.
A large part of the book is devoted to the pages that Father Olguin reads out of the diary of Fray Nicholas, a priest who was at the reservation in the 1870s. At the end of the novel, when Abel comes to him at dawn to arrange the funeral of his grandfather, Father Olguin does not hesitate to accept the responsibility, but he is disturbed that he has been waken up so early.
Angela St. John
Angela is the white woman who comes to the reservation and ends up having an affair with Abel. Although she is pregnant, her husband never visits her at the reservation. Seven years after their affair, Abel sees her walk by on the street in California and tells Benally about her. After Abel is beaten and hospitalized, Benally contacts Angela, and she goes to visit him in the hospital. She explains that she has raised her son with an awareness of Indian culture, telling him a story about a bear and a maiden that resembles the story that runs through Francisco's mind as he is dying.
John Big Bluff Tosamah
A pastor of the Los Angeles Holiness known as the Priest of the Sun, Tosamah gives sermons on both Biblical stories and Indian folklore, often mixing the two. Like N. Scott Momaday, he is a Kiowa.
Tosamah has a vast knowledge of Indian folklore and Biblical stories, but he was raised in the city; therefore, his knowledge of the Indian ways is mostly theoretical. Tosamah expresses scornful admiration for the ways in which white society has controlled and obliterated the Indian.
