Arrow to the Sun is a 1973 short film and a 1974 book, both by Gerald McDermott

Gerald McDermott

Gerald McDermott is an award-winning filmmaker, children’s book author & illustrator as well as an expert on mythology. His work often combines bright colors and styles with ancient imagery...

. The book was printed in gouache

Gouache

Gouache[p], also spelled guache, the name of which derives from the Italian guazzo, water paint, splash or bodycolor is a type of paint consisting of pigment suspended in water. A binding agent, usually gum arabic, is also present, just as in watercolor...

 and ink, and won the 1975 Caldecott Medal

Caldecott Medal

The Caldecott Medal is awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to Children , a division of the American Library Association, to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children published that year. The award was named in honor of nineteenth-century English...

 for illustration. Both media are a retelling of a Pueblo

Pueblo

Pueblo is a term used to describe modern communities of Native Americans in the Southwestern United States of America. The first Spanish explorers of the Southwest used this term to describe the communities housed in apartment-like structures built of stone, adobe mud, and other local material...

 tale, in which a mysterious boy seeks his father.

Plot

The Boy (he is never given a personal name) is the son of the Lord of the Sun, who sends the spark of life into a maiden of the Pueblo. He is ridiculed by the other boys because he has no father.

The Boy asks various adults of the Pueblo for help in finding his father. When he asks the wise Arrow Maker, the man transforms the Boy into an arrow and launches him to the Sun. Arriving in the Sun, his identity as the Lord's son is tested by passing through four ritual huts: the Kiva

Kiva

A kiva is a room used by modern Puebloans for religious rituals, many of them associated with the kachina belief system. Among the modern Hopi and most other Pueblo peoples, kivas are square-walled and underground, and are used for spiritual ceremonies....

of Lions, the Kiva of Serpents, the Kiva of Bees, and the Kiva of Lightning.

After the Boy endures these trials, the Lord acknowledges him as his son. The Boy is then sent back to Earth by his father, to bring the Sun's spirit into the world of men.