About N. Scott Momaday
CHILDHOOD
N. Scott Momaday was born on 27 February 1934 at the Kiowa and Comanche Indian Hospital in Lawton, Oklahoma. He is the only child of Mayme Natachee Scott Momaday and Alfred Morris “Al” Momaday, whose Kiowa name was Huan-toa, or War Lance. The newborn’s name on the birth certificate appeared as Navarro Scotte Mammedaty, even though his father had changed his last name from Mammedaty to Momaday two years earlier. On the certificate Momaday had first been written in but was then crossed out. When the infant was only six months old, his parents took him to Devils Tower, a rock formation in northeastern Wyoming for which he received his Kiowa name, Tsoai-talee,’or Rock-Tree Boy. In his memoir, The Names (1976), Momaday writes that his great-grandfather Pohd-lohk (Old Wolf) gave him this name to commemorate the Kiowa story of Tsoai (Rock Tree, the Kiowa name for Devils Tower). Momaday stresses the significance of the name in the memoir: “My name is Tsoai-talee. I am, therefore, Tsoai-talee; therefore I am.” In a conversation with Charles L. Woodard, he described the importance of his naming: “It [Devils Tower] is the sacred place in Kiowa tradition, and it is the place where the boy turned into a bear. I identify with that boy. I have for many years.”1
After the trip to Devils Tower, Momaday and his parents lived for two years near his father’s Kiowa relatives in Mountain View, Oklahoma; they then moved to the Navajo reservation at Shiprock, New Mexico. In the next few years, the Momadays lived in Tuba City, Chinle, and the San Carlos reservation, all in Arizona. In 1943 the family moved to Hobbs, New Mexico, where Momaday’s father worked for an oil company and his mother worked for the U.S. Army at Hobbs Air Force Base. About his moving around as a child, Momaday has said, “I’m convinced that it was good for me to experience so many different places when I was growing up. It was an important part of my education.”2 One aspect of that education was his experience of the racism and paranoia that resulted from the fighting in the Pacific during World War II. His schoolmates associated him with the Japanese; in response to this taunt, Momaday recalls, he was in several playground fights.3 By his own account, he also had time for more peaceful reflection. In Hobbs, he remembers, “I grew tall, and I entered into the seventh grade. I sat looking into books; there were birds on the lawn, chirping. Girls ambled in the dark corridors in white socks and saddle oxfords, and there were round, sweet syllables on their tongues.”4
The most important move for Momaday came in 1946, when his parents both accepted teaching jobs at Jemez Pueblo, situated in a mountain valley in north-central New Mexico. Here Momaday grew up: “My parents lived and taught at the Jemez Day School for more than a quarter of a century. It was my home from the time I was twelve until I ventured out to seek my fortune in the world.” In describing the beauty of the landscape around Jemez Pueblo, Momaday comments on his daily walk to school: “I loved to walk there in the morning, for on the way there were interesting and beautiful things to see. The old man Francisco Tosa kept a flock of sheep, and as I passed by his corrals I often saw him there, tending them. He always greeted me heartily in Spanish, and there was much good humor in him. There are certain people whom you are simply glad to see at any moment, anywhere, for they hold themselves to their lives very peacefully and know who they are.”5 With this movement between Navajo and Pueblo communities, as well as frequent trips to visit his father’s Kiowa family in Oklahoma, Momaday became acquainted with many of the landscapes, cultures, and languages that later served him as a writer.
As a boy Momaday attended the Franciscan mission school in Jemez and then went to Leah Harvey Junior High School in Santa Fe. He also attended Our Lady of Sorrows School in Bernalillo, New Mexico, and Saint Mary’s School in Albuquerque. About these Catholic schools Momaday says that there were no lasting ill effects. He admits, however, that “the Catholic Church would not approve of the Indian religion,” and that disapproval resulted in religious tension in the pueblos. Momaday also recalls that “among the worst teachers I’ve ever had were some nuns with very poor preparation in teaching their subjects.” After replying correctly to a teacher’s question about whether or not the Soviet Union was larger than the United States, for example, he was told that America was the larger country. “And to prove her point she held up two maps, one of each country, which bore no relation to each other in terms of scale.” Despite such shortcomings in his schooling, Momaday observes that it was a time of great learning for him: “As I think of it, it was the most common and essential kind of learning, purely natural and irresistible.” One of the things he learned was horseback riding. When he was thirteen his parents gave him a horse, and the boy named him Pecos: “On the back of my horse I had a different view of the world.”6
Momaday ends his memoir with the point at which he was ready to leave his parents’ home: “At Jemez I came to the end of my childhood.”7 At this time he entered another phase of his life that began with his crossing the continent to attend another school. He knew that he wanted to get a college education and, as he says, he had been attending “second-rate schools because I lived in remote areas,” so he decided, in consultation with his parents, to transfer for his senior year to Augustus Military Academy in Fort Defiance, Virginia. In recalling his year at this school, Momaday says that it was difficult for him because he had not developed good study habits: “I was pressed and under stress there because the challenge was great. I had to compete in a way that I had not had to before.”8
COLLEGE AND WRITING CAREER
After graduating from Augustus Military Academy, Momaday returned to his home state, where he matriculated at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He began working toward a major in political science and a minor in English and speech. With plans to study law, Momaday returned to Virginia in 1956 to enroll at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. After deciding that law was not a field he wanted to pursue, he returned to the University of New Mexico and finished his bachelor’s degree, graduating in 1958 with a major in English. Before he left Charlottesville, he met William Faulkner, who was then a writer in residence at the university. Momaday later noted, “I like Faulkner, and I’ve read a lot of Faulkner, and I want to write like Faulkner; . . . I’m sure that I have tried to, but to what extent Faulkner is an influence on me, I really don’t know.”9 Momaday also remembers that after a public lecture in which Faulkner read from his novel The Hamlet (1940), he approached the famous writer: “I drew myself up and asked him, ’Mr. Faulkner, what do you read?’ He replied, contemptuously, I thought, ’Young man, I don’t read.”’10
Upon graduation from college, Momaday taught for a year on the Jicarilla Apache reservation in Dulce, in northern New Mexico. In 1959 he received a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship and began graduate work at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Momaday recalls that he heard about the Stegner Fellowship through a friend and decided to apply: “I had an outline of a collection of poems with maybe four or five samples. And I applied, and I won it.” At Stanford he met and worked closely with the poet Yvor Winters, beginning a close and important relationship: “I didn’t know Yvor Winters at the time—I’d never heard of him—but he’s the one who wrote to me and said, ‘There is only one fellowship in poetry this year—You’re it.’”11 As Momaday notes, “We came close together in a short time.”12 He received a master’s degree in 1960 and finished his doctorate in 1963. Although he began his studies as a poet, Momaday ultimately studied literature and wrote a dissertation on the nineteenth-century American poet Frederick Goddard Tucker-man. The dissertation, which collected and introduced Tuckerman’s poetry, was published by the Oxford University Press as The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1965).
After finishing his doctorate at Stanford, Momaday moved a few hundred miles south to begin teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In the fall of 1966 he traveled to Amherst, Massachusetts, on a Guggenheim Fellowship in order to continue his study of Tucker-man in the context of the works of Emily Dickinson and William Cullen Bryant. As Matthias Schubnell reports, “The main objective of his research was to show the way in which Tuckerman and other writers remained outside the mainstream of nineteenth-century transcendental literature.”13 By 1969 Momaday’s proposed book, “The Furrow and the Glow: Science and the Landscape in American Poetry, 1836-66,” was advertised, but it was never published.
In the meantime Momaday returned to Santa Barbara. All the while he had been working on the book that was to become his first novel, House Made of Dawn. It was published in 1968 and won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction the following year. In 1969 Momaday published The Way to Rainy Mountain, a collection of what could be called prose poems in which he chronicles Kiowa history and legend, offers anthropological responses to Kiowa culture, and describes his own quest for his tribal heritage as he retraces the tribe’s migration route.
In the fall of that year he left his position at Santa Barbara to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1972 Momaday accepted a teaching position at Stanford but spent the academic year as the first Distinguished Visiting Professor of Humanities at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. While back in New Mexico, Momaday wrote a weekly column for Viva: Northern New Mexico’s Sunday Magazine. During this time he also provided the text for a collection of photographs by David Muench, Colorado: Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring (1973). In the introduction Momaday writes of his feelings of closeness to the Colorado landscape: “My mind has been involved in the landscape of Colorado for a long time—from the moment I was old enough to conceive an idea of my homeland (I have lived most of my life in view of the Rocky Mountains); my blood even longer.”14
After this productive year in New Mexico, Momaday returned to teach at Stanford in the fall of 1973. In the spring of 1974 he left Stanford again, this time for a six-month teaching sojourn at the University of Moscow in what was then the Soviet Union. This visiting professorship was especially important for the young author because it was in Moscow that he wrote most of the poems comprising the collection The Gourd Dancer (1976). As Momaday recalls, “I lived in Moscow, in what was then the U.S.S.R., for six months. It was an experience, a high point in my life. I had much more time to myself than I thought I would, and I spent many, many hours riding the trains and walking the streets with the Muscovites. . . . Something about that time and place made for a surge in me, a kind of creative explosion. I wrote numerous poems, some on the landscapes of my native Southwest, urged, I believe, by an acute homesickness.” It was also in Moscow that Momaday began to draw seriously: “Drawing became suddenly very important to me, and I haunted museums and galleries. . . . When I came out of the Soviet Union I brought with me a new way of seeing and a commitment to record it.”15
Although Momaday dates his serious interest in his own artwork from this period in Moscow, he began learning about drawing and painting much earlier. In an interview with Camille Adkins in 1993, he recalled that his father, Al, was not only an accomplished artist himself, but he was also a good teacher of the young. Momaday grew up watching his father paint, and other artists came to the house and painted with him: “I learned a lot, I think, watching him and his friends paint. Something that became realized in me much later, but that I learned very early.”16 Writing about this early learning experience, Momaday comments about how he observed his father at work: “I learned to see the wonderful things in his mind’s eye, how they were translated into images on the picture plane.”17
Perhaps another sort of homesickness during the next several years, which he spent teaching at Stanford, inspired Momaday to write his 1976 memoir, The Names. His next significant book-length publication did not come until his second novel, The Ancient Child, appeared in 1989, more than twenty years after House Made of Dawn. In 1985 Schubnell suggested that Momaday’s concentration “on his development as a painter may be one reason why his literary output has been scarce in recent years.”18 By Momaday’s own account, he has worked steadily on his writing, keeping an even pace for more than thirty years.
During the 1990s several books by Momaday were published, often using old material in new contexts or in new ways. A collection of stories and poems, In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961–1991 (1992), includes poems from earlier publications as well as several new ones. It also includes “The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid,” most of which had already appeared in The Ancient Child, where it is presented as having been written by the character Grey. A collection of pieces describing Momaday’s drawings of shields, “In the Presence of the Sun: A Gathering of Shields,” is also part of the volume. In addition to writing, the book features reproductions of Momaday’s shield drawings and other paintings and drawings. In 1994 a children’s story by Momaday, Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story, was published; it had appeared earlier as part of The Names. The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (1997) is a collection of previously published essays spanning thirty years. In the Bear’s House, a collection of Momaday’s dialogues, poems, and drawings, was published in 1999. All of these publications demonstrate that Momaday is still hard at work, both writing and painting.
After living in Tucson, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, and Albuquerque and after traveling across much of Europe and Asia, Momaday moved to Jemez Springs, just a few miles north of Jemez Pueblo, which he has described as “the last, best home of my childhood.”19 He lives in the house to which his parents retired. From Jemez Springs, Momaday commutes once a week to Tucson, where he teaches courses in literature and Native American oral tradition at the University of Arizona. About living
in Jemez Springs, he says, “It seems so natural for me to come here. If I could choose one place in the world to live, it would be here. It’s on the street, so it’s like a brownstone in New York. But it’s in a canyon, so it is wild. I consider it my permanent residence now.”20
In this house, which served as the model for Benevides, where the character Angela St. John stays in House Made of Dawn, Momaday has a remodeled kitchen (he likes to cook) and has added a Jacuzzi. In his study he has replaced the typewriter of previous years with a computer, at which he works for about three hours each morning, writing about three hundred words on a good day. From the house Momaday can hike into the mountains or visit the seventeenth-century Franciscan mission church, now a state monument. From the bell tower, he can look across the valley and into the mountains. Perhaps, like Angela, he acknowledges the specialness of his home: “In fact it was secret like herself, the Benevides house. That was its peculiar character.”21
ANALYZING MOMADAY
In the preface to In the Presence of the Sun Momaday writes, “I have been called ’the man made of words,’ a phrase that I myself coined some years ago in connection with a Kiowa folktale. It is an identity that pleases me. In a sense, a real sense, my life has been composed of words. Reading and writing, talking, telling stories, listening, remembering, and thinking (someone has said that thinking is talking to oneself) have been the cornerstones of my existence. Words inform the element in which I live my daily life.”22
As words are of fundamental importance to Momaday’s sense of identity, it follows that names also form an important part of his character. His Kiowa name, Tsoai-talee, refers to a Kiowa story concerning Devils Tower; thus, the name connects him both literally and symbolically to the landscape. The story is about a boy becoming a bear at Devils Tower, establishing Momaday’s close association with bears. When asked about his bear identity, Momaday once remarked, “There is much to be said about that... . I identify with that boy. I have for many years. And I have struggled with my bear power through those years. I think I have come to terms with it. I feel good about it.” Momaday has discussed the bear’s role in The Ancient Child, which “is about the boy who turns into a bear, and in a sense I am writing about myself. I’m not writing an autobiography, but I am imagining a story that proceeds out of my own experience of the bear power. It is full of magic. But sometimes the bear is very difficult.” Despite the difficulties, Momaday recognizes his close association: “I am a bear. I do have this capacity to become a bear.”23
Momaday’s bear identity grows out of his naming, out of language itself, and out of his sense of a specific landscape. Momaday’s childhood was shaped by the landscape of the Southwest. As he has said, “You have to spend time in a place and come to know it as it changes in the hours of the day and in the seasons of the year. And if you put yourself into it, it absorbs you and you come to know it and depend upon it in numerous ways. In spiritual as well as physical ways.” Momaday also explains the importance of place for him: “I identify very strongly with places where I have lived, where I have been, where I have invested some part of my being. That equation between man and nature or between writer and place—I don’t think there is a relationship that is more important than that.”24 In the essay “An American Land Ethic” (1970) Momaday notes the importance of the landscape, insisting that one must know where one is in relation to the stars and the solstices: “I believe that it is possible to formulate an ethical idea of the land . . . and I believe moreover that it is absolutely necessary to do so.”25
In addition to language and landscape, another important element in analyzing Momaday is his commitment to his Kiowa background and identity. In a 1970 lecture he asked his audience, “What is an American Indian?” He then answered his own question: “an Indian is an idea which a given man has of himself. And it is a moral idea, for it accounts for the way in which he reacts to other men and to the world in general. And that idea, in order to be realized completely, has to be expressed.”26 Momaday suggests that language and identity are inseparable. In another essay he makes a similar point, arguing that an “American Indian—or indeed any man—is someone who thinks of himself in a certain way; he is precisely equal to his own idea of himself.”27 As Momaday acknowledges, he has thought of himself as, or has imagined himself to be, Kiowa. He makes a similar point about his mother’s Indian identity. She made a conscious decision to identify herself with her Cherokee heritage, rather than with her Anglo-American background: “She imagined who she was. This act of the imagination was, I believe, among the most important events of my mother’s early life, as later the same essential act was to be among the most important of my own.”28 In a conversation with Woodard, Momaday elaborated on his notion of who he is: “The Kiowa identity in me is very strong now and secure. I think that there was a time while I was growing up when I might have lost my sense of Kiowa heritage, but that’s no longer so. It’s so deeply entrenched in me now, or I so deeply entrenched in it, that I don’t worry about that. I’m Kiowa, and I’m going to die Kiowa.”29
Momaday’s ability to imagine himself suggests another important characteristic of his identity as a writer. The importance he attributes to imagining the self implies the importance of imagination in general. According to Momaday, an idea must be expressed in order to be realized, and, as he insists, the expression of any idea requires the use of the imagination. Through language, through words, one names oneself and creates an identity, Momaday insists; in turn, that created identity, that clear sense of self, enables one to formulate and use those words. Thus, the man made of words is a man grounded in place, in a specific landscape; he is Kiowa and a man of his own imagining.
AWARDS AND RECOGNITION
Momaday is one of the most recognized of contemporary American writers. He began winning awards while in college and continues to receive them. Some of his many awards are noted here.
1959 Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship.
1962 Academy of American Poets Prize for the poem “The Bear.”
1966 Guggenheim Fellowship.
1969 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for House Made of Dawn.
1970 National Institute of Arts and Letters grant.
1972 Distinguished Visiting Professor of Humanities, New Mexico State University.
1974 Western Heritage Award.
1975 Premio Litterario Internazionale Mondelo, Italy.
1983 Western Literature Association Distinguished Service Award.
1989 Native American Literature Prize (the University of California at Santa Cruz).
1992 Returning the Gift Lifetime Achievement Award, received from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.
1996 New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.
NOTES
1. Charles L. Woodard, Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 13.
2. Ibid., p. 7.
3. N. Scott Momaday, The Names: A Memoir (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 86.
4. Ibid., p. 114.
5. Ibid., pp. 117, 127.
6. Ibid., pp. 127, 128, 155.
7. Ibid., p. 160.
8. Woodard, Ancestral Voice, p. 10.
9. Lee Abbott, “An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, edited by Matthias Schubnell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), p. 30.
10. Camille Adkins, “Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 219.
11. Ibid., p. 225.
12. Woodard, Ancestral Voice, p. 12.
13. Matthias Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), p. 31.
14. Momaday, introduction to Colorado: Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring (New York: Rand McNally, 1973), p. 6.
15. Momaday, preface to In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), pp. xix, xx.
16. Adkins, “Introduction with N. Scott Momaday,” p. 217.
17. Momaday, preface to In the Presence of the Sun, p. xix.
18. Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday, p. 37.
19. Momaday, The Names, p. 117.
20. Momaday, quoted in Ollie Reed Jr., “Return to Jemez,” Albuquerque Tribune, 27 November 1997, sec. B, p. 1.
21. Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York: Perennial Library, 1989), p. 54.
22. Momaday, preface to In the Presence of the Sun, p. xviii.
23. Woodard, Ancestral Voice, pp. 13, 15.
24. Ibid., pp. 50, 67.
25. Momaday, “An American Land Ethic,” in his The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 48.
26. Momaday, “The Man Made of Words,” in Indian Voices, edited by Robert Costo (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1970), p. 49.
27. Momaday, “I Am Alive,” in The World of the American Indian, edited by Jules B. Billard (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1974), p. 14.
28. Momaday, The Names, p. 25.
29. Woodard, Ancestral Voice, p. 4.
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