Native American Novelist

His combination of authoring fiction, nonfiction and essays was well regarded by most literary critics and by the reading public, all of which opened doors for other Native American writers to believe that their efforts to preserve their cultural heritage would be valued by modern society. But it took a bold move to offer to a book publishing company a sample of his writing (a novel) in one form when a different form (poetry) had been requested.

FAMILY BACKGROUND

N. Scott Momaday (NSM) was born Navarre Scott Mammedaty in Lawton, Oklahoma. He later explained that the name “Mammedaty” (singular – being simultaneously both a first and last name) was his grandfather’s only name, meaning “walking above” in his native American language, Kiowa. 

During his grandfather’s lifetime, the Kiowa people began to designate surnames (last names) so NSM’s father, Alfred Morris Momaday, a full-blooded Kiowa, changed the family surname to ‘Momaday’ for “reasons of his own,” according to NSM. 

The father was an artist and teacher who contributed illustrations to a fictional book written by NSM as an adult, “The Way to Rainy Mountain.” 

NSM’s mother, Mayme Natachee Scott Momaday was a teacher who descended from early American pioneers as well as a Cherokee great-grandmother.

CHILDHOOD

NSM was originally raised among Kiowa relatives on a family farm in Oklahoma. His parents later found work at the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, where NSM spent part of his childhood. 

(Editor’s note: A “pueblo” – the Spanish word used for ‘town’ or ‘village’ and for ‘people’ – is a North American Indian settlement in the southwestern US, usually consisting of multistoried adobe houses built by the Pueblo people, such as the Hopi. Their prehistoric period is known as the Anasazi culture. The permanent buildings are known as ‘pueblos.’ Pueblo, Colorado is an example of modern society adopting a Native American term for a home rule municipality which is not merely a Native American settlement area. The Pueblo of Jemez is a federally recognized tribe located in north-central New Mexico, about 50 miles northwest of Albuquerque. It is one of the 19 pueblos of New Mexico, encompassing over 89,000 acres of land and home (in 2023) to over 3,400 tribal members. The people of Jemez cherish their ancestral traditions and are proud to integrate their culture with modern society.)

EDUCATION

NSM was a dedicated school student who attended the University of New Mexico, from which he graduated with a degree in political science, later earning a Master’s degree and a Doctorate in English from Stanford University in California. 

ARTIST AND TEACHER

Following completion of his formal education which resulted in three education degrees (Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctorate), NSM’s first adult job was as a professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Berkely and Standford. He later taught English and comparative literature at the University of Arizona in Tucson. 

In addition to his writing career, NSM was also an artist, who contributed 60 drawings to his book, “In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems.” 

A literary critic for The New York Times praised both the drawings and the written novel, describing the book as “a refined brew of origins, journeys, dreams, and the landscape of the deep continental interior. But it is words that Mr. Momaday is in love with.” 

MULTI-TALENTED AUTHOR

A poet, memoirist, and essayist, NSM is best known for writing novels which are tributes to his Native American heritage. His explorations of identity and self-definition, of the importance of the oral tradition in literature, and of his Kiowa heritage were interwoven with reverent evocations of landscape in passages of soaring, lyrical prose. 

NSM began his first novel, “House Made of Dawn” – which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (in 1969) – with a one-word sentence: “Dypaloh.” That word is a traditional invocation of storytellers at the Jemez Pueblo (called by its Native name, Walatowa, in the book) to which the young Native American protagonist, Abel, returns in 1945. That opening is followed by a short prologue that describes runners on a ritual morning run. 

To tell Abel’s story, NSM combined modern literary techniques – stream-of-consciousness, a disjointed narrative featuring multiple character perspectives (he acknowledged the influence of William Faulkner) with a near-mythical, circular structure common in traditional Native American tales. 

In another book, NSM borrowed the title, “House Made of Dawn” from the Navajo “Night Chant,” an ancient prayer / song that a friend of Abel’s in Los Angeles recites to remind Abel of his traditional Native American roots. 

TAKING A CHANCE TO DEMONSTRATE YOUR TALENT

Winning the Pulitzer Prize was a surprise for NSM and for others in the publishing world. Originally asked to submit poetry by an editor at the Harper publishing company, NSM sent instead the relatively slender manuscript of his novel as an entry in the company’s poetry contest. Although NSM had missed the publisher’s deadline to enter the fictional novel contest, an editor at the publishing company immediately saw the novel’s merit and urged that it be accepted for publication. 

NSM pursued the theme of self-definition further, in “The Way to Rainy Mountain” a book based on tales told to him by his Native American grandmother. His writing drew on ethnology (an academic field that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different people), history, and personal recollection to reimagine the southward migration of his nomadic Kiowa forebears from the headwaters of the Yellowstone River to their ultimate home near a small rise called Rainy Mountain in Oklahoma. 

The Kiowa, he wrote, “had dared to imagine and determine who they are.” He added: “In one sense, then, the way to Rainy Mountain is preeminently the history of an idea, man’s idea of himself, and it has an old and essential being in language.”

A literary critic for the journal Southern Review explained the appeal of Rainy Mountain, citing the somewhat mystical nature of the book and NSM’s assertion that in Native tradition, words are individually sacred. “The Indians,” wrote the critic, “took for their subject matter those elusive perceptions that resist formulation, never entirely apprehensible, but just beyond the ends of nerves.”

In a collection of his essays, “The Man Made of Words,” NSM offered several eloquent defenses of the oral tradition. In his essay “A Divine Blindness” he delineated the long reach of writing and printing in human history, but added that “In America there is something else” which he called “A continuum of language that goes back thousands of years before the printing press – back to the times of origin – an Indigenous expression, an utterance that proceeds from the very intelligence of the soil: the oral tradition.” 

CHALLENGE – SOME LITERARY CRITICS

NSM’s work was sometimes criticized for being repetitive, but he said that was intentional. “I’ve written several books, but to me they are all part of the same story,” he wrote. “And I like to repeat myself from book to book, in the way that Faulkner did – in an even more obvious way, perhaps. My purpose is to carry on what was begun a long time ago; there’s no end to it that I see.”

CAREER SATISFACTION

NSM’s Pulitzer Prize was the first for a Native American author, heralding a more prominent place in contemporary literature for Native writers. 

Said a younger Native American writer who had been inspired by NSM, “Momaday was a multigenre writer – poetry, fiction, nonfiction – as were nearly all the Native American writers of his era. He made it seem like it was the thing that Native American writers do. Like it was a natural part of our identity.”

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This career story is based on an obituary written by John Motyka, published by The New York Times on January 31, 2024, plus internet research.