Navarre Scott Momaday - known as N. Scott Momaday - is a Kiowa novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance.
Background
Born in a Kiowa Indian hospital in Lawton, Oklahoma, on February 27, 1934, Navarre Scott Momaday was the only child of Kiowa artist Alfred Morris Momaday and teacher Mayme Natachee Scott Momaday. A descendant from early American pioneers, Momaday's mother derived her middle name from a Cherokee great-grandmother, Natachee. His father inherited the Kiowa family name "Mammedaty" from Momaday's grandfather. "At that time, " Momaday explains in an essay which appears in Something about the Author, Volume 48, "people had but one name. That was the name that was given to him as a child, and that was the only name he had. But during his lifetime the missionaries came in, and the Indians adopted the Christian tradition of the surname and the Christian name. And so my grandfather was given the name John, and he became known as John Mammedaty, and Mammedaty simply became the surname of his family. It was passed down. Some of my relatives in Oklahoma still use that spelling, but my father abbreviated it to Momaday. "
Growing up on Indian reservations in the American Southwest, Momaday attributes many of his childhood and lifetime memories to his parents. "Some of my mother's memories have become my own. This is the real burden of the blood; this is immortality, " he relates in The Names: A Memoir. Born of mixed blood, Natachee began to identify with her Indian heritage around the age of sixteen. A beautiful girl, she called herself "Little Moon" while her cousins referred to her as "Queen of Sheba"—both of which pleased her mightily.
Education
To pursue a degree and to learn more about her Indian heritage, Natachee attended the Haskell Institute, the Indian school at Lawrence, Kansas, in 1929.
Uncertain about his future after graduating from high school, Momaday contemplated attending West Point before deciding to enroll in the University of New Mexico in 1952. He earned a bachelor's degree in Political Science in 1958, while distinguishing himself as a public speaker and creative writer. Taking a one year break from his studies, Momaday taught school on the Jicarilla Apache reservation before pursuing a graduate studies program in literature. By this time, he had received his first academic recognition as a talented writer when he was awarded the John Hay Whitney Fellowship in creative poetry writing and the Stanford Wilson Dissertation Fellowship at Stanford University. While at Stanford, Momaday met Yvor Winters, who later became a close friend and adviser. Momaday obtained his Master's degree in 1960 and his Ph. D. three years later. In 1965 he published his first book, The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, which was based on his doctoral dissertation. Momaday credits Winters for his decision to analyze the writings of Tuckerman, a reclusive New England naturalist. According to the 1971 edition of the Penguin Companion to World Literature, Momaday's thesis led to an increased awareness of Tuckerman's poems on the part of poets and critics alike.
Career
Following his graduate studies, Momaday joined the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1963 as assistant professor of English. Further literary research led him to pursue a Guggenheim Fellow at Harvard University during the 1966-67 academic year, after which he returned to Santa Barbara to resume teaching. Two years later, he was named professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught creative writing and introduced a new curriculum centered around American Indian literature and mythology. Also during this period, Momaday published his influential novel House Made of Dawn (1968). The story follows the adventures of Abel, a disenchanted Native-American World War II veteran who attempts to balance his identity between culturally disparate native and non-native worlds. Unable to exist peacefully in either world, Abel gradually reaches the conclusion that he is lost, and he returns to the reservation to heal his shattered psyche. In an analysis of House Made of Dawn published in the June 9, 1968, New York Times Book Review, Marshall Sprague observes that "while mysteries of culture different from our own cannot be explained in a short novel, " nevertheless Momaday's book is "as subtly wrought as a piece of Navajo silverware. " The next year, Momaday was accorded one of literature's highest honors when he was named the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for House Made of Dawn.
In his next novel, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), Momaday incorporated several Kiowa myths and legends into a quasi-fictional account of the 300-year-old migration of the Kiowa tribe from their place of origin in the Yellowstone region to the plains, where they learned to domesticate horses and developed into a sophisticated society. Relating the legend of how the Kiowas came into the world through a hollow log, Momaday explains that the Kiowas are a small tribe because when they entered the log "there was a woman whose body was swollen up with child, and she got stuck in the log. After that, no one could get through, and that is why the Kiowas are a small tribe in numbers. " The Way to Rainy Mountain features illustrations by Momaday's father, Alfred, and it has been characterized by a reviewer for Choice (September 1969) as "a beautiful book—honest, unique, dignified, and told with a simplicity that approaches the purest poetry…. It is a book for all seasons, for all readers. "
In subsequent years, Momaday's reputation has ascended to the international level. In 1979 he was awarded Italy's highest literary award, the Premio Letterario Internationale "Mondello. " Moreover, in 1990 Momaday was selected to be a keynote speaker in Moscow before the Conference on Environment and Human Survival, the Global Forum and the Supreme Soviet. That same year, he was asked to be a member of the Pulitzer Prize Jury in Fiction. The father of four daughters, Momaday continues to write and teaches classes on oral tradition at the University of Arizona.
In 1993, Momaday published In the Presence of the Sun. This book includes 70 poems and 16 new stories about the "great tribal shields of the Kiowas and a strange, arresting section on Billy the Kid, " according to The New York Times Book Review's Barbara Bode. Bode further says that "the reader will not find here the 'political' Indian, the Indian as 'victim' or the romanticized Indian. Rather, we hear the voices of people like Otters Going On and the woman Roan Calf, of people raided and killed, worshipped and wept. Yet the images, the voices, the people are shadowy, elusive, burning with invention, like flames against a dark sky. "
The following year saw the publication of Circle of Wonder. The is a poetic story that "skillfully blends Christian and Native American traditions, " according to Publishers Weekly. The book also features Momaday's artwork.
Views
Quotations:
"I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian. "
"I simply kept my goal in mind and persisted. Perseverance is a large part of writing. "
“Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it. ”
“A word has power in it of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things. ”
“The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred. ”
“For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival. ”
“Indians are marvelous story tellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition. ”
“In the beginning was the world, and it was spoken. ”
Membership
Momaday is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.