House Made of Dawn is set in the US in the mid-20th century. Many of the characters are Indigenous Americans, and they feel alienated from the society built by the colonizing forces from countries such as Great Britain, France, Spain, and other European countries. In this sense, the novel takes place in the shadow of the European colonization of the Americas. This process of colonization began soon after Christopher Columbus’s Spanish expedition to the Caribbean in the 1490s inadvertently reached the Americas—a journey that began a scramble by European powers for wealth and treasure in the “New World.” In the ensuing centuries, European nations sent ships filled with people to colonize North America. They claimed the land and extracted wealth from the continent that they sent back to their home countries.

The arrival of European colonizers in the Americas had tragic consequences for the people already living in the region—people who had lived in North, Central, and South America for thousands of years. After their contact with the Europeans, the estimated Indigenous population of the Americas fell from 50 million people to eight million in just 150 years because of active warfare, disease, enslavement and deportation, and the systematic killing of people who refused to convert to Christianity and instead held fast to their own spiritual beliefs.