• OVERVIEW
• MOMADAY’S TIME IN HISTORY
• LIFESTYLE AND CULTURE
• NOTES

OVERVIEW

Momaday was born during the Great Depression in Oklahoma, the land of dust bowls, bankruptcies, and farm repossessions. The year of his birth, 1934, was also the year of the Indian Reorganization Act, a piece of legislation that embodied the federal govern-ment’s effort to alleviate some of the hardships caused by the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887 and other detrimental policies initiated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in previous decades. (The allotment act had provided for the distribution of reservation land among individual Indians, but it actually led to a worsening of conditions on the reservations.) It had been only ten years earlier, in 1924, that Congress had finally awarded citizenship to American Indians.

During World War II, Momaday lived in New Mexico, where scientists were developing the atomic bomb. Although he was too young to serve in the military, other reservation Indians were signing up for the armed services, fighting in both the Pacific and Europe. In the Cold War years of the 1950s Momaday was receiving his education in places across the country: New Mexico, Virginia, and California. During the Indian rights, Civil Rights, and Vietnam War protest movements of the 1960s, he taught at the politically active University of California, Santa Barbara, and then at the University of California, Berkeley. In short, Momaday’s early life straddled several important and politically varied decades in twentieth-century American history. In terms of literary history, he was born into and came of age during the modern period, which began around 1915 and lasted into the late 1950s or early 1960s. He became a mature writer during the postmodern period, which arguably began sometime in the 1960s.

Although modernism survived into the 1960s, it flourished between the two world wars in the works of writers such as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and Eugene O’Neill. The movement was taken up by an international group of writers, mainly from Western Europe and the United States, who knew and interacted with one another. Catalysts for a break from earlier literary traditions—and what could have been perceived as an easy, naive past—were manifold. Of course, World War I inspired a break from the past as trench warfare and other horrors ravaged the European and American consciousness. The Great Depression, which began in 1929 with the American stock-market crash, caused many writers to lose faith in capitalism. These authors tended to be socially conscious and politically active, and their writings reflected the sociopolitical atmosphere of their era.

In the United States the women’s movement and the extension to women of the right to vote in 1920 introduced a new feminism into the social consciousness of many writers. Gains in civil rights (despite enduring Jim Crow laws and continued segregation and racism all across America) coincided with the modernism of the black writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940) and his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), as well as Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), articulate the consequences of racism, and these books set a precedent for later important literature by minority writers. Benefactors of Wright’s and Hurston’s successes include such authors as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker.

The extent to which American Indian writers before Momaday participated in and contributed to literary modernism is not so easy to assess. Two important Native American writers of the modernist era are D’Arcy McNickle, who wrote the novels The Surrounded (1936) and the posthumously published Wind from an Enemy Sky (1978), and John Joseph Mathews, who wrote several books, including the novel Sundown (1934). Recent scholarship has found a central place for these two writers, but it is not clear that they had much of an impact on the modernist era during their lifetimes. Charles R. Larson suggests that in “the early assimilationist novels by Native authors, one finds none of the overt protest that dominates the fiction of their Afro-American counterparts. . . . the more vocal criticism against white America in the works of the post-Momaday writers is simply absent from the earlier novels.”¹ Other critics have disagreed with Larson’s assessment, however. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, for example, argues that both McNickle and Mathews “emphasized the importance of tribalism and the devastating impact on tribes of the government’s assimilationist policies.”² Despite the obvious merit of their work and importance of their voices, readers had to wait until the 1960s and 1970s for reprints of the novels of McNickle and Mathews and the long-overdue critical attention they began to receive in the 1970s and 1980s.

An immediately popular text that was reprinted throughout the twentieth century was the autobiography Black Elk Speaks (1932). The book is in many ways considered a modernist text, but, as recent scholarship has shown, its modernism is due not to Black Elk, a Sioux elder, but to the immediate audience for his spoken narrative. The modernist poet and ethnographer John G. Neihardt transcribed Black Elk’s account and shaped it into the popular text. According to Raymond J. DeMallie in The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt (1984), readers must remember that Black Elk Speaks was “written by Neihardt, not by Black Elk, and that [it bears] the stamp of Neihardt’s genius and his sense of organization and detail.”³ At the same time, however, the book has influenced generations of readers, Indian and non-Indian. According to Vine Deloria Jr., Black Elk Speaks achieved the status of a Native American bible: the two Black Elk books, Black Elk Speaks and The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux (1953), transcribed by Joseph Epes Brown, “formed a kind of sacred national Indian religious canon by themselves.” Readers, Deloria continues, “believed them to be an accurate statement about Indian religions.”⁴

Literary modernism was to a large extent a response to the social, historical, and political climate of the early to mid twentieth century, often offering an account of some of the major political events and social concerns of the day. The 1950s and 1960s were a time of significant social change and ushered in a new era of politics. Indeed, after World War II it became increasingly difficult to separate international politics and the global economy of postindustrial society from the social and cultural movements of the era. The literature of the time reflected a growing awareness of how the political and the social had an important impact on culture. Momaday has said, “Almost all writing is political. . . . But my writing is not motivated by political considerations.”⁵ Despite these protestations, political concerns are evident throughout his writings. The subject of World War II veterans, as represented by Abel in House Made of Dawn, is by its nature political. Momaday depicts the veteran Abel as alcoholic and mentally distraught after his return from the war, thereby implying that his involvement in the conflict is at least partly the cause of his problems. Momaday has declared that he did not set out to make a political statement with that characterization: “I never envisioned becoming a spokesman for those veterans—I am not political enough and I knew that writing was what I should be doing—but I just felt the urge to tell their story.”⁶ Telling their story, describing the difficulties they had with readjustment, however, is itself unavoidably political. Like other modernists, then, Momaday recognizes connections between social concerns and art in his writing.

Following World War II, the Cold War came about as a consequence of the world powers entering the nuclear age—an age that altered political relationships among nations, especially the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Concurrent with the beginnings of the Cold War was the national paranoia surrounding communism. This paranoia resulted in loyalty programs, lists of subversive organizations, and the highly suspect and controversial criminal indictments of Americans because of their political views. Many artists, intellectuals, and political activists were arrested or were denied passports. Although Momaday himself, of course, did not suffer as a result of anticommunist paranoia, he was acutely aware of what he calls the era’s “morality of intolerance.” In the essay “The Morality of Indian Hating” (1964), for example, he identifies Eisenhower’s attempts to force Native Americans to assimilate as cruel and ridiculous: “It is dangerous to assume that cultural assimilation can occur under ideal conditions over a period of many years; it is patently absurd to suppose that it might occur immediately in downtown Chicago or Los Angeles.” In an afterword written for the 1997 republication of the essay in The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages, Momaday acknowledges that his essay is “political in character.”⁷ Writing of his ethnic origins and appearance in his 1976 memoir, The Names, he remembers that in Hobbs, New Mexico, “in 1943 I was suspected of that then dreadful association. Nearly every day on the playground someone would greet me with, ‘Hi’ya, Jap,’ and the fight was on. Now and then two or more patriots would gang up on me.”⁸

If some of the furor over communism had subsided by the early 1960s, the Civil Rights movement was just gearing up. In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that separate educational facilities for white and black students were inherently unequal. In 1955 Rosa Parks momentously refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, and in 1960 four African American students in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. In August 1963 some 250,000 people marched on Washington, D.C., and in 1964 Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and on the job and gave the U.S. attorney general the power to enforce school desegregation. The following year Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which reformed voter-registration practices and suspended the use of literacy tests as a means of determining voter eligibility. Congress did not pass the Indian Civil Rights Act, which includes a bill of rights for 1968, the year that Momaday’s House Made of Dawn was published.

While civil rights were at the fore of domestic policy, the United States was becoming ever more deeply involved in the conflict in Vietnam. In 1965 troop strength was increased by 125,000, and America engaged in its first offensive. As the conflict escalated there were massive antiwar demonstrations across the United States, beginning especially in 1967. By 1968 there were more than five hundred thousand American soldiers in Vietnam. Student riots occurred across the United States. In 1969 the United States carried out secret bombings of Cambodia, an act that inspired more student protest and rioting. That same year President Richard Nixon began troop reductions. Although Momaday never wrote overtly political works in response to the war, he was teaching during this period at the Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses of the University of California, both of which were active with student protests and demonstrations. The protagonist of House Made of Dawn, Abel (who was transformed into a Vietnam veteran in the 1987 movie adaptation of the novel), constitutes a statement about the devastating effects of the war on a personal level.

Another important concern of the 1960s, one noted by Momaday, was environmental degradation. René Dubos, who received a Pulitzer Prize in the same year as Momaday for the nonfiction work So Human an Animal (1968), lamented the way Americans mistreated the environment. Dubos was concerned with more than just air pollution, oil spills, and urban waste. Indeed, in So Human an Animal he articulates what many writers and intellectuals were concerned about throughout the 1960s: “All thoughtful persons worry about the future of the children who will have to spend their lives under the absurd social and environmental conditions we are thoughtlessly creating; even more disturbing is the fact that the physical and mental characteristics of mankind are being shaped now by dirty skies and cluttered streets, anonymous high rises and amorphous urban sprawl, social attitudes which are more concerned with things than with people.”⁹ Momaday articulates a similar concern when he describes what he calls a Native American attitude toward the land: “the Native American ethic with respect to the physical world is a matter of reciprocal appropriation: appropriations in which man invests himself in the landscape, and at the same time incorporates the landscape into his own most fundamental experience.”¹⁰ He argues that the technological revolution has uprooted the people from the soil: “We have become disoriented, I believe; we have suffered a kind of psychic dislocation of ourselves in time and space.” Because of this dislocation, Momaday argues that people must “formulate an ethical idea of the land ... I believe, moreover, that it is absolutely necessary to do so.”¹¹

Momaday himself has summarized his era by noting that he was born between the two world wars and has seen

the civil rights movement, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King, the footprints of man on the moon, the assault of AIDS upon the human race, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a growing awareness, as yet vague, that human beings, for all their assumed superiority over the plants and animals of the earth, have inflicted wounds upon the environment that are surely much more serious than we have realized, that may indeed be mortal. As a poet, a painter, and a man I care about these things. My life is involved in them.¹²

MOMADAY’S TIME IN HISTORY

Momaday’s era includes important developments in the United States government and mainstream American society concerning Native Americans. Although in conversation with Charles L. Woodard in 1986 and 1987 Momaday said that he had “to some extent lost touch with the contemporary Indian world,” the political and social concerns of Native Americans have surely affected both his life and his writing.¹³ His birth coincided with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act. Inspired by the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, John Collier, the act was approved by Congress in 1934. It aimed to correct some of the mistakes of earlier policies concerning Native Americans, allowing for self-government and enabling Native Americans to take greater responsibility for their own affairs. It promised to provide funds for training and education. The Indian Reorganization Act also aimed to address the consequences of the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887. Based on arguments for assimilating Native Americans into mainstream America, this law had established the policy of allotting reservation land to private individuals (whereas formerly it had been communally or tribally owned). As these lands were subdivided, non-Indians were allowed to buy and settle on unclaimed or unassigned tracts. The effect of this policy was to destroy reservations as land held in common by particular tribes.

Acknowledging that the Dawes Act had been a mistake, Congress used the Indian Reorganization Act to call for an end to allotment and to provide $2 million annually for repossessing former reservation lands. Not all groups responded favorably to Collier’s Indian “New Deal.” The Navajos, for example, who had been burned by previous deals with the federal government, voted against it. Collier had advocated stock reduction on Navajo land, and many shepherds and cattlemen watched the slaughter of their livestock. The Navajos also watched as the government took their land for the building of the Boulder Dam (renamed Hoover Dam in 1947) at the border of Arizona and Nevada. Though the Indian Reorganization Act was far from perfect and suffered from modifications by Congress, and although members of many Indian tribes resented and resisted it, the act did represent an important change in governmental attitude and policy toward America’s first peoples. It was a measure toward acknowledging their inalienable rights. In Collier’s words, the act was aimed “at both the economic and the spiritual rehabilitation of the Indian race.”¹⁴

In the midst of the reform efforts of Collier and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the United States entered World War II. Like the general population, Native Americans were directly affected by and involved in the war effort. During the course of the war some 25,000 American Indians served in the armed forces. Besides the famed Navajo code talkers, who transmitted coded messages in their native language for the Marine Corps, and Ira H. Hayes, the Indian Marine who participated in the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima, the vast majority served in the army. More than 500 American Indians were killed in action. Another 40,000, including Momaday’s parents, worked in war-related industries, many moving to cities to do so.

By the end of the war the mood of the United States regarding Native Americans had changed. Where formerly there had been support for Indian rights and for restoring reservations (though assimilation was certainly at the heart of Collier’s reorganization plan), now American Indians faced a population and a Congress that privileged conformity and feared and resisted notions of difference or tribal sovereignty. Out of this chauvinistic, nationalist mood came a push to terminate American involvement in Indian affairs by ending federal services and dissolving reservations altogether. At the same time there was a disregard for Native American veterans. Momaday recalls seeing the returning American Indian soldiers: “They were terribly confused, uprooted from their traditional life, estranged from their friends and families. Most of them found it very difficult to resume their former lives. They had lost their values. They had no jobs, no hope for a decent future. Many of them were eventually destroyed by violence and alcohol. They were victims of dramatic historical circumstances.”¹⁵

“In the wake of a postwar America entering the atomic age,” summarizes Donald Fixico in his study of the policy of terminating U.S. involvement in Indian affairs, “the new attitudes of a Republican leadership in Congress and an assimilationist Bureau of Indian Affairs rendered a new direction in federal-tribal relations . . . which reversed the federal Indian policy of the earlier 1900s.”¹⁶ The new commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Dylan S. Meyer, was the former head of the War Relocation Authority, which had been responsible for the internment of Japanese Americans during the war. He advocated total assimilation of Indian people and strove to end all federal services for them. In 1958 a single law terminated forty-one California reservations at once. Along with this termination policy came a hard-headed relocation effort. In 1951, the first year of the relocation program, the Bureau of Indian Affairs placed 442 Native Americans in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Denver. Between 1952 (the year Abel in House Made of Dawn comes to Los Angeles) and 1960 the bureau moved some thirty thousand Native Americans from reservations into the cities. Los Angeles County’s Indian population grew from about five thousand in 1940 to about fifty thousand by 1980.

Although post-World War II urbanization affected everyone, the circumstances for people from the reservations was unique. The relocation of American Indians was not completely voluntary. As could be expected, the rural reservation immigrants to the cities faced severe problems of adjustment, both short-term and long-term. The new arrivals tended to be from small communities where they belonged to close-knit, extended families; suddenly, they faced the anonymity of living in huge, alien urban areas. In many cases they came from a culture of communal responsibility and communities that valued sharing; thus, many were unprepared for the force of individual competition they suddenly faced. The immigrants often experienced an unremitting urban routine to which they did not feel they belonged. Rather than participate in the social and economic struggle, they endured alienation, racism, unemployment, poverty, and a marginal existence in the urban slums. Ben Benally in House Made of Dawn describes the problems of urbanization:

Everything is different, and you don’t know how to get used to it. You see the way it is, how everything is going on without you, and you start to worry about it. You wonder how you can get yourself into the swing of it, you know? And you don’t know how, but you’ve got to do it because there’s nothing else. And you want to do it, because you can see how good it is. It’s better than anything you’ve ever had; it’s money and clothes and having plans and going someplace fast. You can see what it’s like, but you don’t know how to get into it; there’s too much of it and it’s all around you and you can’t get hold of it because it’s going on too fast.”¹⁷

As a result of the failed governmental policy of termination, as many as one-third (by some counts as many as three-fourths) of those who had relocated returned to their reservation homes, despite the fact that many of them had been transported hundreds or even thousands of miles across the nation.¹⁸

Speaking of Abel’s generation (which closely parallels the author’s own), Momaday has talked about the risks one took in leaving the reservation:

At the time of Abel’s generation the pueblo probably had a population of one thousand or twelve hundred or fifteen hundred people at the most. So it is a small community as compared to other communities. It is very much self-contained; the whole world of the pueblo somewhat resides within a very tight geographical area, and it is very different from the world just beyond. One who is born into that world has a certain kind of security. . . . Once he ventures outside that space, he risks a great deal. . . . he forfeits his security: he forfeits his tribal identity. He has to live in the world on other terms, and they are terms with which he is not familiar.¹⁹

In the long run the relocated Native Americans faced the loss of their heritage. Successful relocation would include replacing traditional values and lifestyles with mainstream America’s values of competition and materialism. George Woodard, a Native American relocated to California, says, “we discovered that there was an ulterior motive behind the earlier relocation program. It was designed, in fact, to get all Indians off all reservations. . . . So, then we started digging in our heels to prevent total assimilation; assimilation to the degree that we would lose our identity as Indian people, lose our culture and our [way] of life.”²⁰ In “The Morality of Indian Hating” Momaday comments on the relocation program, noting that its failure “resided with the premise upon which it was based: that the Indian becomes a white man by virtue of living in the presence of white men. . . . The Indian in the city was victimized by the very things that define urban existence.”²¹

An unlooked-for result of relocation was the development of a Pan-Indian movement in the cities, indicative of American Indian cans but essentially disregarding the workers’ health while polluting the land.

Water, another precious resource, has been a point of contention between government hydroelectric-power and irrigation interests and tribal sovereignty. Government agencies or private ranchers have continually diverted water from Indian lands. In 1950 the federal government bought Indian land for the Garrison Dam in North Dakota, and the Crees in Quebec have suffered from Canada’s damming project near James Bay. People have lost thousands of acres to flood-waters behind these dams.

In addition to land-use issues, Native Americans have struggled in courtrooms over issues of repatriation and gambling rights. In 1990 Congress passed the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act, which stipulates that museums must provide tribes with inventory lists of their holdings and that they must work with tribes to return religious artifacts and skeletal remains. In another legal success for many Indian tribes, courts have tended to uphold their right to operate casinos and other gambling operations. Profits from gambling have greatly enhanced tribal economies and given opportunity for investment back into reservations in the form of museums, schools, and community centers.

Certainly, strides have been taken toward a more equitable relationship between the state and federal governments and Native Americans, but many important issues remain unresolved. According to Momaday, “in some ways the situation for Indians is better now than it was one hundred years ago.” Nevertheless, he has said, “the Indian is about in the same position he was in during the fifties. . . . It’s bad because the things that ought to change don’t.”²⁷ In another interview Momaday suggested that times have changed a little since the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s: “As time goes on, the land base the security of the reservation, means less because more people are having experience of the larger world; they know better how to exis beyond the reservation than they did a generation or two ago. So the risk is diminishing but it is still there.”²⁸ Reservation unemployment and poverty levels remain exceedingly high. The high-school dropout rate for American Indians is the highest of any ethnic group in the United States. Alcoholism and fetal alcohol syndrome remain serious and prevalent problems in Indian communities across the nation. Environmental degradation across many reservations has endangered the people and the food chain. Survival of American Indians, and of Americans in general, Momaday insists, may depend on successful and continued efforts to heal these wounds.

LIFESTYLE AND CULTURE

Like assimilation and termination policies of previous decades, the self-determination policy of the 1970s threatened to cut Native Americans off from the cultural practices of their ancestors. But whereas earlier attitudes of “kill the Indian, save the man” disallowed or discouraged native cultural and artistic practices, denounced the practice of native religions, and prohibited the speaking of native languages, policies and attitudes in the 1960s and 1970s not only tolerated but often encouraged preservation or revitalization of such practices.

After nearly five centuries of Western efforts to Christianize Native Americans, Congress signed the Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, during the administration of Jimmy Carter. Although it did not guarantee complete freedom of practices—it did not legalize the use of peyote in religious ceremonies, for example—the act did protect and formally acknowledge the validity of native religions and their practices. In 1993 (501 years after Columbus reported that the Indians would be easily converted, for they had no religion of their own) Native Americans were invited to the meeting of the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago. In 1994 Congress passed the Native American Free Exercise of Religion Act, which did permit the use of peyote in traditional ceremonies. Despite these apparent successes, Deloria paints a grim picture of mainstream America’s acceptance of Native American religions. He does acknowledge, however, that one “result of the Indian activist movement was the tremendous surge of interest in traditional religions and customs.”²⁹ As is evident from the carefully researched The Way to Rainy Mountain, for example, Momaday shares in this surge of interest in Native American cultures. He Canada. Powwows and dancing have been important to Momaday. In the essay “To the Singing, To the Drums” (1975), for instance, he recalls that “Always, there comes a moment when the dance takes hold of me, becomes itself the most meaningful and appropriate expression of my being. And always, afterward, there is rejoicing among us.”³⁵

In addition to dance, there has been a renaissance in such Native American arts as ceramics, wood carving, and painting. Many artists attempt to incorporate traditional tribal forms and motifs with innovative new styles and techniques. Of his own painting, Momaday says that he began seriously in Moscow: “I began to sketch. Drawing became suddenly very important to me, and I haunted museums and galleries and looked into as many Russian sketchbooks as I could find. When I came out of the Soviet Union I brought with me a new way of seeing and a commitment to record it. ... In Europe I discovered painters who truly inspired me: Emil Nolde, Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso (whose work I thought I knew but did not), Georg Baselitz.”³⁶ As an indicator of his success, Momaday had his own show in 1979 at the University of North Dakota Art Galleries. In 1992 he prepared a retrospective of his work for the Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In August 2000 he had another show at the LewEllen Contemporary gallery in Santa Fe. An untitled 1983 etching by Momaday depicting a smallpox epidemic that the Kiowas endured in 1849 hangs as a part of the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum. Perhaps most notably, his publications of the 1990s are full of reproductions of his own drawings, paintings, and illustrations.

In addition to a resurgence of interest in performing and graphic arts, there has been a renaissance in American Indian literature as well, especially since the publication of House Made of Dawn in 1968. If only a handful of novels by American Indians had been published before 1968, scores have been published in the decades since. This surge includes best-sellers and award winners by such writers as Northrop, Alexie, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Susan Power, Linda Hogan, Louis Owens, and Gerald Vizenor, among many others. There has also been a renaissance in Native American poetry in the past few decades. In 1970 there were only a few published American Indian poets. Now, in addition to novelists such as Momaday, Hogan, Erdrich, and Welch, who also publish poetry, important recent Indian poets include Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, Maurice Kenny, and Lucy Tapahonso.

Momaday is both a leader and a representative of the developments in the lifestyles and cultures of contemporary American Indian artists. He is credited with initiating an artistic renaissance in which he fully participates as a writer, artist, storyteller, and spokesman for American Indian artists and people in general.

NOTES

1. Charles R. Larson, American Indian Fiction (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), p. 169.

2. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990), p. 71.

3. Raymond J. DeMallie, The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), p. xxi.

4. Vine Deloria Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion, revised edition (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 1992), p. 36.

5. Charles L. Woodard, Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 41.

6. Joelle Rostkowski, “Looking Back: House Made of Dawn as the Portrait of a Lost Generation,” QWERTY, 7 (1997): 147.

7. N. Scott Momaday, “The Morality of Indian Hating,” in his The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 69, 72, 76.

8. Momaday, The Names: A Memoir (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 86.

9. Rene Dubos, So Human an Animal (New York: Scribners, 1968), p. xi.

10. Momaday, “Native American Attitudes toward the Environment,” in Seeing with a Native Eye: Essays on Native American Religion, edited by Walter Holden Capps (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 80.

11. Momaday, “An American Land Ethic,” in The Man Made of Words, p. 48.

12. Momaday, preface to In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), p. xvii.

13. Woodard, Ancestral Voice, p. 44.

14. Wilcomb E. Washburn 11, The American Indian and the United States (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 910.

15. Rostkowski, “Looking Back,” p. 147.

16. Donald Fixico, Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945-1960 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), p. xiv.

17. Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York: Perennial Library, 1989), p. 158.

18. Fixico, Termination and Relocation, pp. 135-140.

19. Daniele Fiorentino, “The American Indian Writer as a Cultural Broker: An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, 8, no. 4 (1996): 70.

20. George Woodard, quoted in Fixico, Termination and Relocation, p. 157.

21. Momaday, “The Morality of Indian Hating,” in The Man Made of Words, p. 72.

22. Charles Woodard, Ancestral Voice, p. 38.

23. Peter McDonald, quoted in Collin G. Calloway, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (Boston: Bedford, 1999), p. 436.

24. Calloway, First Peoples, pp. 436-437.

25. Fixico, Termination and Relocation, pp. 202, 203.

26. Ibid., p. 203.

27. Woodard, Ancestral Voice, pp. 42, 44.

28. Fiorentino, “The American Indian Writer as a Cultural Broker,” p. 70.

29. Deloria, God is Red, p. 23.

30. See James J. Rawls, Chief Red Fox is Dead: A History of Native Americans since 1945 (New York: New Press, 1996), p. 177.

31. Momaday, The Names, p. 65.

32. Momaday, “Navajo Place-Names,” in The Man Made of Words, p. 125.

33. Buffalo Trust website.

34. Camille Adkins, “Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), pp. 229-230.

35. Momaday, “To the Singing, To the Drums,” Natural History, 84, no. 2 (1975): 44.

36. Momaday, preface to In the Presence of the Sun, p. xx.