House Made of Dawn (22 page)

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N
OVELIST
,
POET
,
TEACHER
,
PAINTER
, and storyteller—N. Scott Momaday is the dean of Native American writers. His accomplishments in fiction, poetry, scholarship, painting, and printmaking have established him as an enduring American master. A staunch believer in the restorative and reconciliatory power of words, Momaday has built a monumental career in the arts, using his familiarity with Native American life and legend and with the ways of non-Native America to build a bridge between the two worlds.

Navarre Scott Momaday was born on February 27, 1934, in the Indian Hospital in Lawton, Oklahoma. His mother, Mayme Natachee Scott, a teacher and writer of children's books, was descended from early American pioneers and a Cherokee great-grandmother. Alfred Morris Momaday, her husband, a Kiowa, was a painter and an art teacher. Within days of their son's birth, they took him to live on his paternal grandmother's Depression-stricken
farm on the Kiowa reservation, where the family lived for a year in severe poverty. While still in his first year, the youngest Momaday was honored with the name Tsoaitalee (Rock Tree Boy), a name derived from the Kiowa name for the rock tower in Wyoming sacred to the Kiowa and commonly known among non-Native Americans as Devil's Tower. The Indian view of this name, as of every name, as an “emblem and ideal, the determining source of a man of a woman's character and course of life” (in the words of Edward Abbey) seems, more than sixty years later, well justified.

When Momaday was one year old, his parents took teaching jobs with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and moved to the Southwest; over the next several years the family lived on several Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo reservations, in whose hardscrabble schools the elder Momadays taught and their son began his formal education. “I lived on the Navajo reservation when I was little,” Momaday would later comment, “and I lived on two of the Apache reservations, and lived at the Pueblo of Jemez [in New Mexico] for the longest period of time…. I had a Pan-Indian experience as a child, even before I knew what that term meant.” Momaday's parents composed the entire teaching staff of the Jemez school for twenty-five years.

In addition to being a teacher and painter, Momaday's father “was a great storyteller and he knew many stories from the Kiowa oral traditions” (as his son later reported), and he told his son his tales over and over. At the same
time, Momaday's mother passed on to her son her love of writing and literature and very early on introduced him to good books and encouraged his own incipient talents. “I knew that I wanted to be a writer from a very early age, because my mother was a writer, and encouraged me to write,” Momaday told an interviewer in 1996. He would also later recall the joys of reading Classic Comics and the cowboy-and-Indian novels of Will James. (“The writing was terrible, but the books were wonderful.”) From his earliest years, then, Momaday received the cultural best of both worlds, Native and Anglo, while at the same time witnessing the deprivations and sorrows of reservation life. He witnessed enduring tradition as well. “From birth, I grew up being in touch with sacred matters,” he would later comment. And in an
American Poetry Review
interview with Joseph Bruchac, he further recalled: “I saw people who were deeply involved in their traditional life, in the memories of their blood. They had, as far as I could see, a certain strength and beauty that I find missing in the modern world at large. I like to celebrate that involvement in my writing.”

Momaday's schooling continued in both reservation and off-reservation schools through his junior year of high school. Frequently, “I was the only person for whom English was a first language,” he later recollected. He went to four different high schools before deciding that if he wanted to enter college he had to find a high school that would prepare him. And so he spent his senior year at Augusta Military Academy in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Apparently, being a western Indian and traditionalist at overwhelmingly white Augusta caused him little trouble. “If it had happened to me at a later time in my life I probably would have been terrified,” he later told an interviewer. “But going back and forth between the Indian world and the white man's world was a piece of cake at the time.”

In 1958, Momaday received his B.A. degree from the University of New Mexico and then spent a year teaching seventh through twelfth grades at the Dulce Public School of the Jicarilla Apache reservation at Dulce, New Mexico. In September of that year, he entered the graduate program at Stanford University, where the celebrated critic, poet, and scholar Yvor Winters had first
selected Momaday as the year's only creative writing fellow in poetry and then became the aspiring poet's advisor. Momaday would later look back on that fellowship as “my first big break. It was an opportunity that I was not expecting, and it turned out to mean a great deal to me.” A master's degree in 1960 was followed by a Ph.D. in 1963. His doctoral thesis was published in 1965 as
The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
, with a typically polemical foreword by Winters. (“Of Poe and Whitman, the less said the better.”) Even before he began his long and distinguished career as a teacher, with a 1963 appointment as an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he began to collect prizes and awards. In 1962, he received the Academy of American Poets prize for his poem, “The Bear.”

A Guggenheim Fellowship allowed Momaday to take a leave from Santa Barbara during 1966 and 1967. In 1967 he published
The Journey of Tai-me
, an early version of 1969's expanded
The Way to Rainy Mountain
, which—illustrated by his father—wove together Kiowa legends and stories, historical narratives, and personal recollections. Then came the great and wonderful surprise. In 1968, the year in which he returned to Santa Barbara as associate professor,
House Made of Dawn
appeared to nearly universal acclaim. (The
New York Times Book Review
found the novel “as subtly wrought as a piece of Navajo silverware.”) When the novel received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969, Momaday instantly became a writer to reckon with—a man possessed of impressive literary skills and an equally obvious understanding of the two cultures he sought to bridge.

Following the publication of his now classic first novel, Momaday continued in his ways, blazing the trail he would follow for the next thirty years. In 1969 he was initiated into the Gourd Dance Society, an ancient Kiowa ceremonial fellowship, and he continues to participate in the Society's annual gatherings. Also in 1969, Momaday became an associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he designed a graduate Indian studies program and developed a course in Indian oral tradition that he has taught every year since at Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of
Arizona. That same year, he was named Outstanding Indian of the Year by the American Indian Exposition. A grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972 coincided with Momaday's first stint as a twenty-nine-year consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Momaday moved from Berkeley to Stanford University the following year, beginning a nine-year stay as a professor of English and comparative literature.
Colorado: Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring
, combining Momaday's words with the photographs of David Muench, was published in 1973 and won the 1974 Western Heritage Award.

Angle of Geese and Other Poems
, Momaday's first collection of poems, appeared in 1974, followed by
The Gourd Dancer
in 1976. Reflecting and reinforcing Momaday's belief that his poetry emerges from and sustains oral tradition, the poems in both volumes also emphasize the radical mystery of nature beyond humankind's ability to master. In
Southern Review
, Roger Dickinson-Brown commented that the title poem of
Angle of Geese
“presents, better than any other work I know…perhaps the most important subject of our age: the tragic conflict between what we have felt in wilderness and what our language means.” As for Momaday, poetry is his first love. “Poetry is the crown of literature,” he has insisted. “It's the highest of the literary arts…. I'd rather be a poet than a novelist, or some other sort of writer.”

Many of the poems in
The Gourd Dancer
were written during Momaday's year as the first American to teach American literature at the University of Moscow (1974-1975). And it was during the early to mid-1970s that he seriously took up drawing, painting, and printmaking, making use of another set of his father's lessons. “My father was a very gentle man, and he never told me he expected this or that of me,” Momaday has told an interviewer, “but he encouraged me. I learned a lot about painting by osmosis, by watching him. I didn't follow in his footsteps for a long time, but now I'm a painter and a printmaker, and it all comes from him.” Many of Momaday's subsequent books carry original illustrations by the author, and his paintings, prints, and drawings have been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad,
including a retrospective in 1992-1993 at Santa Fe's Wheelwright Museum.

In
The Names: A Memoir
(1976), Momaday explored his heritage through a mélange of tribal tales, boyhood memories, and genealogy, with a double focus on the possibility of reconciling Indian-white conflicts and tensions and on a rediscovery of the lost unity of natural world and self. He later commented that one of the things that concerns him most deeply “is the way we treat our environment. We haven't done a very good job in protecting our planet. We have failed to recognize the spiritual life of the earth.” A reactivation of the sense of this “spiritual life of the earth” remains one of Momaday's pressing objectives.

In 1978, Momaday became a trustee of the Museum of the American Indian, a part of the Smithsonian Institution. Honors continued to come his way, in the United States and elsewhere. In 1979, he received Italy's highest literary award, the Premio Letterario Internazionale Mondello; the Distinguished Service Award of the Association of Western Literature followed in 1983, one year after Momaday's move from Stanford to the University of Arizona, Tucson, as professor of English and comparative literature. (He was named Regents Professor of English in 1985.) Momaday has also been a visiting professor at Columbia and Princeton universities and at the University of Regensberg, Germany. He holds seventeen honorary degrees from various American universities and was named to the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1987. He is founder and chairman of the Buffalo Trust, a nonprofit foundation for the preservation of Native American culture and heritage for young people coming of age today.

Among Momaday's more recent writings, his second novel,
The Ancient Child
(1989), stands out, as does
In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems
(1992). In
The Ancient Child
, the legend behind the author's Indian name, Tsoai-talee, adds resonance to the story of a contemporary Indian artist in search of his identity.
In the Presence of the Sun
collects—with illustrations by the author—stories and poems written between 1961 and 1991. These two books were followed first by
The Native Americans: Indian Country
(1993) and then by
Circle of Wonder: A Native
American Christmas Story
(1994), Momaday's only book for children.
The Indolent Boys
, a play first given staged readings at Harvard in 1993, was given its world premiere at the Syracuse Stage in 1994, and
Children of the Sun
, a play for children, was commissioned and produced by the Kennedy Center in 1997.
The Man Made of Words
, collecting Momaday's essays and short prose, also appeared in 1997. An additional book of poems and dialogues,
In the Bear's House
, was published in 1999.

Momaday views himself still as a Kiowa Indian
and
a Western man. “I am an Indian, and I believe I'm fortunate to have the heritage I have,” he has said. “I grew up in two worlds and straddle both those worlds even now. It has made for confusion and a richness in my life. I've been able to deal with it reasonably well, I think, and I value it.”