N. Scott Momaday

Author

• Born: February 27, 1934
• Place of Birth: Lawton, Oklahoma
• Died: January 24, 2024
• Place of Death: Santa Fe, NM

Author Profile

Among the most widely read and studied Native American authors, N. Scott Momaday manifests, in his writings, a keen awareness of the importance of self-definition in literature and life. From 1936 onward, his family moved from place to place in the Southwest, eventually settling in Albuquerque, where Momaday attended high school. He entered the University of New Mexico in 1954 and later studied poetry at Stanford University. In 1963, he received his doctorate in English and since then has held teaching jobs at various Southwestern universities.

Momaday's first and best-known work of fiction, House Made of Dawn (1969), centers on the alienation of a young Pueblo foreign-war veteran who struggles as two very different ways of life seek to draw him in, those of his people and of the American mainstream. The book is set in the New Mexican landscape of Momaday's youth and draws on Native oral traditions and beliefs about the supernatural. It won Momaday that year's Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and was later adapted into an independent film of the same name, released in 1972. Many see House Made of Dawn as the seminal work of the literary movement that became the Native American Renaissance.

In a semiautobiographical work, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1976), Momaday writes that identity is “the history of an idea, man’s idea of himself, and it has old and essential being in language.” Momaday defines his characters in terms of their use or abuse of language; usually his characters find themselves relearning how to speak while they learn about themselves. Even the title of one of Momaday’s essays, “The Man Made of Words,” indicates his contention that identity is shaped by language. “Only when he is embodied in an idea,” Momaday writes, “and the idea is realized in language, can man take possession of himself.”

The forces that shape language—culture and landscape—are also crucial in Momaday’s works. To Russell Martin, Western writing is concerned with the harsh realities of the frontier that “could carve lives that were as lean and straight as whittled sticks.” This harsh landscape is present in Momaday’s work also, but he has a heartfelt attachment to it. Having a spiritual investment in a place, in Momaday’s writing, helps a person gain self-knowledge. To an extent, issues of identity were important to Momaday as well. Son of a Kiowa father and a Cherokee mother, Momaday belonged fully to neither culture. Furthermore, much of his early childhood was spent on a Navajo reservation, where his father worked, and he grew up consciously alienated from the surrounding culture.

To combat rootlessness, the imagination and its expression in language is essential. “What sustains” the artist, he writes in his sophomore novel, The Ancient Child (1990), “is the satisfaction . . . of having created a few incomparable things—landscapes, waters, birds, and beasts.” Writing about the efforts of various people to maintain traditional culture in the face of the modern world, Momaday occupies a central place in the American literary landscape.

In addition to his work as an essayist and novelist, Momaday is an accomplished poet. Among his published volumes of poetry are The Gourd Dancer (1976), a collection of thirty years' worth of short stories and poems; In the Presence of the Sun (2009); In the Bear's House (2010); and Again the Far Morning (2011). A longtime member of the American Academy of Poets, Momaday won the academy prize for "The Bear" in 1962.

Momaday has also ventured into drama, penning several plays and a teleplay, which were collected as Three Plays (2007). The Indolent Boys and The Moon in Two Windows both explore the tragic impacts that government-run boarding schools had on Native people. Children of the Sun is written for children and describes the connection between the people and the sun.

Over the years Momaday's work has been recognized with numerous awards and honors, including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Returning Gift Lifetime Achievement Award of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, and the National Medal of Arts. He was also named a UNESCO Artist for Peace in 2004.

Momaday is the founder and director of the nonprofit organizations Rainy Mountain Foundation and Buffalo Trust, which are dedicated to Native cultural preservation and transmission.

Bibliography

Isernhagen, Hartwig. Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong: Conversations on American Indian Writing. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

Mason, Kenneth C. Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Interviews by Charles L. Woodard. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Mason, Kenneth C. “Beautyway: The Poetry of N. Scott Momaday.” South Dakota Review 18, no. 2 (1980): 61-83.

Mason, Kenneth C. Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Edited by Matthias Schubnell. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

Momaday, N. Scott. Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Interviews by Charles L. Woodard. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Momaday, N. Scott. Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Edited by Matthias N. Schubnell. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

“N. Scott Momaday.” Poets.org. Amer. Acad. of Poets, n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

Roemer, Kenneth J. Approaches to Teaching “The Way to Rainy Mountain.” New York: Modern Language Association, 1990.

Scarberry-Garcia, Susan. Landmarks of Healing: A Study of “House Made of Dawn.” Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990.

Schubnell, Matthias. N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.

Trimble, Martha Scott. N. Scott Momaday. Boise, Idaho: Boise State College, 1973.

Velie, Alan R. Four American Indian Literary Masters. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.