N. Scott Mqmaday (1934-). Biography and Creativity

Navarre Scott Momaday, the only child of Alfred (Al) Morris and Mayme Natachee Scott Momaday, was born on February 27, 1934, at the Kiowa and Comanche Indian Hospital in Lawton, Oklahoma. Momaday’s family history spans several cultures and ethnicities. Growing up on reservations and in pueblos in the Southwest, Momaday lived among Navajo, Apache, Hispanic, and Anglo families. These experiences, along with his father’s Kiowa and to some extent his mother’s French, Scottish, and Cherokee heritage, have had a great impact on Momaday’s works, which often fuse diverse cultural beliefs.

When he was six months old, Momaday traveled with his parents to the Black Hills, a solitary mountain range straddling the South Dakota-Wyoming border. In the shadow of Devil’s Tower, the first U.S. national monument, they met Pohd-lohk, a Kiowa elder, who gave Momaday his Indian name, Tsoai-talee. The name links Momaday to a Kiowa myth in which a young boy transforms into a bear and hunts his seven sisters. In order to escape their bear-brother, the sisters scramble up a magic tree stump, which grows as they climb. Frustrated, the bear rends the bark from the tree, which becomes Tsoai, or “rock-tree,” the Kiowa name for Devil’s Tower, a large rock formation in Wyoming (for pictures of the Devil’s Tower monument visit the National Park Service’s Web site: http://www.nps. gov/deto/).

Fascinated with the mythic origins of his Kiowa name, translated as “Rock-tree Boy,” Momaday incorporates the myth in all four of his longer works: House Made of Dawn (1968), The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), The Names! Memoir (1976), and The Ancient Child (1989). The bear myth connects him with Kiowa oral tradition and culture, and the bear-boy’s metamorphosis mirrors Momaday’s struggle to negotiate oft-conflicting cultures.

When he was two, Momaday’s parents left the Kiowa people for the Southwest, where they found work as teachers. For the next 10 years, the Momadays found jobs near the Navajo Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. In 1946, they settled in Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, where Al and Natachee ran a two-teacher day school. Momaday traveled to Bernalillo and Albuquerque, 30 and 60 miles from their remote home, to attend high school. With encouragement from his parents, who wanted him to experience financial and artistic success outside the reservation, Momaday spent his senior year at the Augustus Military Academy, an elite, predominately white private school in Fort Defiance, Virginia.

After first attending the University of New Mexico (UNM), Momaday transferred in 1956 to the University of Virginia, where he intended to study law. He abandoned this plan a year later, returning to UNM, where he graduated in 1958 with a degree in political science and minors in English and speech. Recruited by the State Department of Education, Momaday taught English to Apache students at a K-12 school in Dulce, New Mexico, a small town on the Jicarilla Reservation. On the advice of a friend, Momaday applied for and received the Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University during his first year of teaching.

There, he studied under Yvor Winters, a leading mid-20th-century poet and literary critic. Winters immediately noted Momaday’s talent, predicting he would be “a famous man . . . perhaps even a great one.” While under Winters’s tutelage at Stanford, Momaday wrote several poems later collected in Angle of Geese (1974) and The Gourd Dancer (1976). Although Momaday planned to stay in California for only one year, the close relationship he developed with Winters led him to pursue an advanced degree. Having written his dissertation on the little-known 19th-century American poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Momaday received a doctorate in English literature four years after arriving at Stanford.

Momaday took his first university teaching position at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he created a course on the American Indian oral tradition and researched Kiowa history and myth. During this period, Momaday’s grandmother informed him that the Tai-me bundle, a sacred Kiowa relic, existed. According to Kiowa tradition, a keeper or priest is charged with guarding Tai-me. Until 1887, the keeper performed an essential role in the Sun Dance, an ancient ceremony vital to the tribe’s cultural identity. In the late 19th century, facing the U.S. Cavalry and increasing pressure to assimilate with white culture, the Kiowa abandoned the Sun Dance ritual.

By the time Momaday grew interested in it, Tai-me was virtually forgotten. Learning of its location, Momaday traveled to Oklahoma, visited the home of the keeper, and, using customary, ritualistic gestures, viewed the medicine bundle. The experience had a profound effect on him. His attempts to uncover the history and importance of Tai-me led to his first major work, The Journey of Tai-me (1967), a collection of Kiowa myths and legends privately printed.

In 1966, while composing The Journey of Tai-me, he traveled to Amherst, Massachusetts, on a Guggenheim scholarship. There he prepared a critical study on Emily Dickinson. He also worked on a third project, one he completed in 1968. That year Harper & Row invited Momaday to submit a collection of poetry. Instead, he submitted a novel entitled House Made of Dawn. Set in two locations—on the Jemez Reservation and in Los Angeles—House Made of Dawn explores the alienation contemporary Native Americans often experience when trying to assimilate into white society and also when following traditional ways far removed from modern life.

The book earned critical acclaim and received the 1969 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. House Made of Dawn marked a major breakthrough not only for Momaday but also for Native American authors, who drew inspiration from Momaday’s text. In fact, critics often refer to the outpouring of Native American texts since House Made of Dawn’s 1969 publication as the “Native American renaissance,” an expression coined by Kenneth Lincoln. In 1969 Momaday left Santa Barbara for the University of California, Berkeley. There he completed and published his next major work, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), which combined personal memoir, Kiowa myth, and tribal history with pictographic illustrations drawn by his father, Al.

Though 20 years elapsed before Momaday published another novel, his career flourished throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1970, he wrote “An American Land Ethic,” the first of several essays supporting the conservation movement. After three years at Berkeley, Momaday accepted a job offer from Stanford, where he taught for nine years. In 1973, he teamed with the photographer David Muench to produce the nonfiction work Colorado, a poetical sketchbook celebrating the Rocky Mountains. The following year, having received temporary leave from Stanford, Momaday accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Moscow, where he taught the school’s first course in American literature. In Russia, he experienced a burst of creative energy; as his father, a successful painter, Momaday began to draw and paint. Since then he has exhibited his work, won awards, and adorned his major written works with sketches and paintings.

At the same time he discovered his talent for visual art, Momaday returned to poetry. While in Moscow, he wrote the poems assembled in part 3 of The Gourd Dancer (1976), the first collection of Momaday’s poetry available to a wide audience. The Gourd Dancer reprinted all the poems published in the chapbook Angle ofGeese and Other Poems (1974), many of which, including “The Bear,” “Buteo Regalis,” and “Angle of Geese,” Momaday wrote as a graduate student, using the rigid syllabic guidelines Winters had taught him. When he returned to writing poetry several years later, his lyrical voice changed. The poems collected in part 2 of The Gourd Dancer document this shift. Although Momaday uses syllabic verse in “The Omen” and “The Eagle-Feather Fan,” most of the pieces are prose poems, a form suitable to the rhythms of Indian storytelling and ceremony. Meanwhile, Momaday continued to write prose.

The same year The Gourd Dancer appeared in bookstores, he published The Names: A Memoir (1976). While The Way to Rainy Mountain blends autobiographical elements with Kiowa myth and history, The Names chronicles Momaday’s youth and adolescence. In this work, Momaday focuses on the power of the imagination, which he considers vital to creating an identity. Growing up among Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache Indians, Momaday had to rely on his imagination to connect with his ancestors’ Plains culture.

Although Momaday has written less since the late 1970s, his reputation continues to grow; his works continue to be taught and read. In 1981 he took a teaching position at the University of Arizona, where he has remained for a quarter-century. He currently occupies the Regents Professorship in the Humanities. In the early 1980s, with the Native American renaissance in full bloom, his works received a great deal of critical attention. By the time Momaday completed his second novel, The Ancient Child (1989), several major studies of his earlier works had been published.

The Ancient Child solidified his literary reputation, particularly with university scholars, who often value complex texts. With its many literary, philosophical, and mythological allusions, The Ancient Child is a demanding novel. The story centers on Set, a Kiowa painter who, as does Abel in House Made of Dawn, has a spiritual awakening when he immerses himself in native cultural traditions. After arriving in Oklahoma for his grandmother’s funeral, Set meets Grey, a young medicine woman, who helps him confront a mysterious “ancient child,” the same mythological boy-turned- bear with whom Momaday himself identifies. As Momaday does, Set discovers an inner spiritual connection not only with the legendary bear-boy but with myth in general.

Throughout the 1990s, Momaday continued to broaden his artistic scope. In 1992, he published In the Presence of the Sun, a collection of poetry, prose, drawings, and paintings. Two years later, he produced a children’s book, Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story. His 1997 essay collection The Man Made of Words offers a comprehensive view of Momaday’s evolving thought on subjects ranging from environmental conservation to racism. With his latest offering, In the Bear’s House (1999), he explores his lifelong fascination with bears, using theaterlike dialogue, formal and informal poetry, short stories, and paintings to express his thoughts. In this work, his many talents are obvious: his command of language, his skill with a paintbrush, his ability to synthesize European and Native American tradition and literary forms, and his ability to transcend conventional literary genres.

In 2005, the University of Oklahoma awarded him an honorary doctorate of humane letters, his 13th honorary degree. The same year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) rewarded Momaday for his work in teaching others about Native American history and traditions, recognizing him as a UNESCO Artist for Peace. Often called the “dean” of Native American writers, Momaday has earned a distinguished place in the American literary canon.

With his use of myth and traditions from many cultures and his respect for the natural world, Momaday speaks to a contemporary world still coming to terms with varying ethnic traditions and cultural differences, a world focused on preserving what exists, recovering what has been lost, and venerating the earth, which, for Momaday, is not only the source of life but also our connection with ourselves and with others: the ground upon which the past has been founded and upon which the future will be made.