• WORKS
• ART IMITATING LIFE
• MOMADAY’S WORKS IN HISTORY
• ADAPTATIONS OF MOMADAY’S WORKS
• PUBLIC RESPONSE
• NOTES

Works

The Journey of Tai-me. Santa Barbara, Cal.: Privately printed, 1967.

Before House Made of Dawn appeared, Momaday published a small edition, limited to one hundred handprinted copies, of The Journey of Tai–me. Tai–me, the Sun Dance fetish of the Kiowas, is a medicine bundle whose power is inherent and whose safekeeping is the responsibility of an official tribal Tai–me keeper. As Momaday explained in an interview, it is “a fetish which is medicine. And it was the most powerful medicine in the tribe. The only time it was exhibited to view was during the Sun Dance.”¹The journey of the title refers to the generations–long migration of the Kiowas from the headwaters of the Yellowstone River in northwestern Wyoming to Rainy Mountain in southwestern Oklahoma. The book provides an account of that migration, an account that served as the basis for Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, published two years later. Like that later book, The Journey of Tai-me includes several short episodes that re–create the mythology, legends, history, and lore of the Kiowas, from their emergence through a hollow log near the headwaters of the Yellowstone River to episodes from the lives of Momaday’s paternal grandmother and grandfather, Aho and Mammedaty.

Of the thirty episodes recounting the migration, nineteen appear almost exactly as they do in The Way to Rainy Mountain. The others are unique to The Journey of Tai–me. An episode not recounted in the later book is the story of Botone’s death. According to Momaday, Botone was the last Tai–me man, and when he died, his daughter—who had dreamed of doing so—“brought Tai–me home to live with her.” She had dreamed that her grandmother gave her some mushrooms, which Betone interpreted as representing the sacred bundle; hence, she was awarded the responsibility of keeping this “grandmother” bundle. A subsequent episode tells about how Mammedaty, the grandson of Guipahgo, had a Tai-me bundle about his neck: “if someone failed to show proper respect for the grandmother bundle, it grew very heavy around his neck.”²

Momaday devotes six episodes to Ko–sahn, the ancient woman who makes her appearance at the end of The Way to Rainy Mountain. Ko–sahn tells the story of a man who cleverly hides in a tree from which he later jumps to kill his enemy. She tells of old White Bear‘s passing on of a sacred arrow to a well–known young man with a good reputation: “When the people saw that, they all yelled out, for they were very happy”. Aho relates a controversy over whether an arrow can be borrowed, bought, or sold. Ko–sahn recalls participating in the sacred worship, the Tai–me ceremony. The people told her what to do with the small piece of ceremonial cloth she had been given: “they said that I should tie it to the Tai–me tree. There were other pieces of cloth on the tree, and so I put mine there as well.” As in the epilogue of The Way to Rainy Mountain, Ko–sahn tells of the celebration upon finishing a lodge:

We have brought the earth.
Now it is time to play;
As old as 1 am, 1 still have the feeling of play.

Ko–sahn concludes, “That was the beginning of the sun dance. . . . It was all for Tai–me, you know, and it was a long time ago.”³

House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

House Made of Dawn, Momaday’s first novel, was published in 1968, and it won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. The novel has been reprinted several times and was published as an audiobook in 1976. In addition to the many English–language editions, the book has been translated and published in Russian, German, Polish, Italian, and Turkish.

The novel consists of a prologue and four major sections: “The Longhair,” “The Priest of the Sun,” “The Night Chanter,” and “The Dawn Runner.” The most obvious and crucial narrative device that Momaday uses to link these sections is flashback. In a sense, one can interpret the entire novel as a series of flashbacks that Abel, the protagonist, has as he runs. The prologue—which begins with the traditional opening for a Pueblo story, “Dypaloh”—describes Abel running at dawn: “Abel was running. He was alone and running, hard at first, heavily, but then easily and well.”⁴

The first section, “The Longhair,” recounts seven days in July and August 1945. On the first day, 20 July, the canyon landscape around Walatowa (the native name of Jemez Pueblo) is described as Francisco, Abel’s maternal grandfather, drives his wagon along the old road on his way to meet Abel, who has just returned from World War II. On 21 July, Abel wakes before dawn and climbs a hill, where he reminisces, leading to a series of flashbacks to his childhood and youth. On the same day Angela Grace St. John, the wife of a Los Angeles doctor named Martin St. John, drives to the local mission to ask Father Olguin if she can get someone to chop wood for her. On 24 July, Abel chops wood for Angela, and later Father Olguin visits her at the Benevides house, which she has rented. (She has moved to the area to try the mineral baths; her husband has remained in Los Angeles.) On 25 July the pueblo celebrates the Feast of Santiago; the celebration includes a rooster pull, in which several Indians on horseback ride past a rooster buried alive up to its neck and attempt to pull it from the ground. An albino contestant named Juan Reyes successfully pulls the rooster from the ground; in keeping with the game, he singles out Abel and beats him with the bird. The 28 July episode begins with a detailed description of the landscape of the valley. On this day Abel returns to Angela’s house and continues chopping wood. When he finishes, he and Angela have a brief, one-time sexual encounter, after which he simply walks away. On 1 August, Abel stabs and kills the albino. The next morning, as Francisco works in his field, he senses an indefinable loss.

The second section of the novel, “The Priest of the Sun,” is set in Los Angeles on 26 and 27 January 1952. Like the first section, this one consists of a series of recollections. Because Abel has these flashbacks as he lies on the beach after having been severely beaten by a corrupt policeman named Martinez, they are not as ordered as those in the first section. They blend so intricately into the present moment that it is sometimes difficult to tell past from present, and in this way they seem to reflect Abel’s own confusion and sense of displacement. Lying on the beach, battered and bruised, Abel thinks about his experiences in Los Angeles. He remembers a sermon delivered by J. B. B. Tosamah, “Pastor & Priest of the Sun” (89), who runs the Los Angeles Holiness Pan-Indian Rescue Mission. Tosamah took as his text John 1:1—“In the beginning was the word.” Abel thinks back to his trial for the murder of the albino and other more recent events. The subsection headed “January 27” consists of Tosamah’s Sunday sermon, “The Way to Rainy Mountain.” This sermon was later used as the prologue to “The Way to Rainy Mountain”. It is the story of the Kiowa migration from the headwaters of the Yellowstone River to their present homeland in Oklahoma.

In the third section of the novel, “The Night Chanter,” the perspective and style of storytelling change; instead of an omniscient narrator using flashback as a primary literary device, there is a first-person stream-of-consciousness account. Ben Benally, Abel’s roommate and close friend, recalls Abel’s experiences in Los Angeles. The entire section is set on the night of 20 February, beginning just after Ben has seen Abel off on his train trip home.

In the fourth section, “The Dawn Runner,” the scene returns to Walatowa in 1952. Like the “Longhair” section, this one begins with a description of the river and the landscape. Abel sits at Francisco’s deathbed and listens to his dying grandfather’s stories. On 27 February, Abel wakes to find that Francisco has died. Knowing what has to be done, he performs the appropriate Pueblo death rituals, preparing the old man for burial. He then goes to Father Olguin, telling the priest that his grandfather has died and that he must bury him. After performing these duties, Abel prepares himself for another ritual, the dawn run. He rubs his still-aching body with ash from an oven before going to where the rest of the runners are waiting for the sun to rise over the black mesa. At sunrise they begin to run, and Abel accompanies them. At the same time, however, he runs alone. He can see the landscape, and, like his grandfather before him, who also ran the race as a young man, he runs beyond pain. The final word in the novel, “Qtsedaba,” is the conventional Pueblo formula for the ending of a story.

Critical reception and recognition of Momaday’s House Made of Dawn began with a brief essay by Marion Hylton in Critique, “On a Trail of Pollen: Momaday’s House Made of Dawn” (1972). Although the article primarily offers a plot summary, Hylton initiated a critical trend of reading Abel’s “real suffering and purgation” as beginning only “after he leaves prison and wanders to Los Angeles.”⁵ Subsequent readers have challenged this view by considering the suffering and learning experiences recorded in the “Longhair” section of the novel.

In N. Scott Momaday (1973), a volume in the Boise State College Western Writers series, Martha Scott Trimble touches briefly on several issues that later critics have developed more fully: the effect of the structure of House Made of Dawn, the changing point of view, symbolism, the importance of language, and Momaday’s presentation of both Indian and non-Indian traditions and lifestyles. Also important in Trimble’s reading is her willingness to accept the open-endedness of some aspects of the novel. In several instances, she argues, especially those involving Pueblo ritual, Momaday “presents the mystery that must remain.”⁶

Floyd C. Watkins made an important contribution to scholarship by including a critique of House Made of Dawn in a study of works in the modern American literary canon. Rather than making an interpretative assessment, Watkins points out the many sources for the novel. He does argue, however, that “the tragedy of the book is that for Abel, as for modern Americans, place and culture are vanishing from their ken.” He also maintains that “the novel is about man’s loss of traditions, past, community, nature, fellow man, religion, even meaning.”⁷ In this sense, Watkins places Momaday’s novel in the modernist tradition at the same time that he outlines its native sources.

Charles R. Larson calls House Made of Dawn “the most complex and the most obscure novel written by an American Indian.” In his discussion he offers a summary of the plot and then argues that meaning and structure are “irrevocably bound.” According to Larson, “the novel should not be interpreted without reference” to The Way to Rainy Mountain and Momaday’s memoir, The Names.”⁸ He thus suggests that the reader must have a sense of the Kiowa context in order to appreciate House Made of Dawn. Most notable about Larson’s reading is that he sees the novel as an expression of Momaday’s pessimistic vision of the American Indian: “Again and again he shows us Indians who are the last members of a dying race.” Larson reads the dawn run that frames the novel as Abel’s “ritual suicide.” Indeed, almost all of the Native American characters in the novel are “headed toward spiritual suicide. . . . Abel returns home in order to die.”⁹Paula Gunn Allen makes a similar assessment, suggesting that the early popularity of the novel with mainstream Americans was owing to its pessimisticportrayal of Native Americans’ ability to survive: “I understood the record Momaday had made. The one about how the Indian vanishes, with a fine, soundless song; the one that got him the Pulitzer Prize.”¹⁰

For Matthias Schubnell the thematic center of House Made of Dawn is a search for identity; the novel is “a detached portrayal of the tragic consequences when identity cannot be formed or begins to disintegrate.” But it is also hopeful, argues Schubnell. Redemption finally comes, but only when Abel “renews his attachment to his tribal heritage.” Schubnell traces the conflicts that result from Abel’s initial departure from the community, the young man’s attempts to resolve his confusion, and his return to Jemez Pueblo, which is a sort of “rite of passage.” In this context, his struggle is both universal and specific, both communal and individual. Abel’s search is emblematic of any teenager’s growing pains, but his failure also “reflects a crisis in Pueblo culture.” When he comes back to Jemez after the war, Abel tries to reenter the community, but according to Schubnell, he fails to do so. Other than the rooster pull, in which he is humiliated, he does not take part in the traditional ceremonies associated with the Feast of Santiago. He does not speak to his grandfather, and he is unable—as is evident from his encounter with Angela—to establish a meaningful relationship. Most significantly, Abel kills the albino, an act that Schubnell attributes to his inability to deal with complexity and “the confusion he is subject to in his personal and cultural isolation.”¹¹

Lawrence Evers refers to two important traditions as they relate to House Made of Dawn: Native Americans’ relationship with the land and their special regard for language. As Evers puts it, “A sense of place derives from the perception of a culturally imposed symbolic order on a particular physical topography.” From this landscape one draws strength and authority. Restoration and harmony for the Navajo come through “Chantway rituals”; thus, the word becomes of fundamental importance not only in healing but also in perceiving the landscape: “It is only through words that a man is able to express his relation to place.“¹²

In “Who Puts Together” (1980) Linda Hogan also explores the use of language, which she sees as central to House Made of Dawn. She identifies a linguistic universe of positively and negatively charged words, and she points out the many ways in which Abel has been undone or wounded by words (at court and through his loss of imagination, for example). Hogan is in agreement with Evers in her assessment of how Tosamah, Benally and Francisco reintroduce Abel to language and thereby help him on his return to health. Through these characters, Hogan suggests, Abel learns that when the word is properly used, language becomes deed and is thus “a force of dynamic energy, able to generate and regenerate.“¹³ Through this use of language, then, Abel is restored to his proper place in the universe.

In Landmarks of Healing: A Study of House Made of Dawn (1990), the first book-length study devoted exclusively to the novel, Susan Scar-berry-Garcia argues that “healing constitutes both the matter and the mode of the novel’s being.” She describes the book as a “study of the Navajo, Pueblo, and Kiowa oral traditions that provide the symbols, structures, and themes of the healing patterns that Momaday has embedded” in it.¹⁴ Allen makes a similar point about the novel, arguing that it is “an act of the imagination designed to heal.”¹⁵ For this healing to occur, the reader must take into account Pueblo and Navajo belief systems. Complementing these two readings of Momaday’s use of Native American traditions, James Ruppert argues that Momaday’s “mediation is not in eliminating the psychological underpinnings of the modern novel but in finding a way to make them serve Native purposes.” Ruppert explores how Native American texts “create a dynamic that brings differing cultural codes into confluence to reinforce and re–create the structures of human life.” What he has contributed to scholarship on House Made of Dawn is the idea that the novel serves as a means of healing, not only for Abel but for the reader as well. Ruppert sees the dawn run that frames the novel as Abel’s triumph: “He has an identity, a mythic identity which readily fulfills Native expectations but also gives meaning to a non–Native sense of identity.”¹⁶

In “Acts of the Imagination” (1992) Louis Owens argues that with Momaday’s book, “the American Indian novel shows its ability to appropriate the discourse of the privileged center and make it ’bear the burden’ of an ’other’ world–view.” In this regard Owens agrees with Ruppert’s reading of the novel as one of mediation between two cultures. Like most other readers and critics, Owens argues that the novel is one of healing: “The prologue tells us that Abel’s quest will be complete and successful. . . . As in traditional storytelling we know the outcome at the beginning.”¹⁷

Looking carefully at characters in the novel other than Abel, Jane P. Hafen argues that the three main Indian characters retain their tribal distinction, through which “each finds reconciliation by claiming his own specific tribal tradition and identity.” She maintains that “Momaday never subordinates the individual tribe to a Pan–Indian communal whole.”¹⁸ Bernard Hirsch also focuses on the urban Indians’ relationships with Abel. As suggested by his essay’s title, “Self–Hatred and Spiritual Corruption in House Made of Dawn” (1983), Hirsch argues that “Martinez, Tosamah, and Ben have been spiritually corrupted by the white world, and they make Abel their scapegoat; he is both the victim of their hatred and the example to them of what they are not.”¹⁹

In Place and Vision: The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction (1993), Robert M. Nelson devotes a long chapter to the role of the landscape in House Made of Dawn. In Nelson’s view, Abel’s dislocation results not from exposure to white culture or from his experiences during the war but from “his unwillingness to be held by the land, that is, his resistance to the snake spirit of the place.”²⁰

Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez argues that in Momaday’s novel, Abel’s antagonists (such as Tosamah and the trial lawyers) use language to treat him as an object of their prejudice and thereby dispose of him through their language. They deny him his “personhood,” writes de Ramirez. In contrast to this objectifying discourse, the reader, like Benally and Francisco, for example, sees Abel in an inclusive sense that acknowledges him as an individual person. By treating Abel as an individual, Benally is able to introduce the reader to the “tribal traditions [and] sacred rituals,” that are fused through storytelling.²¹

The Way to Rainy Mountain. Illustrated by Al Momaday. Albuquerque:University of New Mexico Press, 1969.

Although the beginnings are clearly evident in The Journey of Tai–me, it is in The Way to Rainy Mountain that Momaday most successfully (both artistically and commercially) recounts the history of the Kiowa tribe. Through artful juxtapositions of story, history, and autobiography, he records the tribe’s origin and migration as they relate to his own and his family’s past. The book is framed by two poems, “Headwaters” and “Rainy Mountain Cemetery,” which was previously published in 1968. It includes a prologue; an introduction (Tosamah’s Sunday sermon from House Made of Dawn); three sections, “The Setting Out,” “The Going On,” and “The Closing In”; and an epilogue. The three sections are divided into short chapters, which are numbered continuously throughout the book. Momaday’s careful use and recombination of materials is suggestive of how he conceives his work. It is an ongoing project, a telling and retelling; like oral narrative, it is always evolving. This narrative vivifies the past while it incorporates the new.

In the prologue Momaday offers an overview of the Kiowa journey recorded in the book: “The Way to Rainy Mountain” is preeminently the history of an idea, man’s idea of himself, and it has old and essential being in language.”²² The journey itself is an evocation of “a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit which endures” (4). In the introduction Momaday begins with a description of the Kiowa migration from the headwaters of the Yellowstone River, and he tells of the life of his paternal grandmother: “Her name was Aho, and she belonged to the last culture to evolve in North America” (6). He describes the coming of the Tai–me and the Sun Dance culture and tells the legend of the formation of Devils Tower in northeastern Wyoming: running from their brother, who had become a bear, seven sisters climbed onto “the stump of a great tree”; the bear “scored the bark all around with its claws. The seven sisters were borne into the sky, and they became the stars of the Big Dipper” the scored trunk of the giant tree became Tsoai, or Rock Tree, now known as Devils Tower in northeastern Wyoming: running from their brother, who had become a bear, seven sisters climbed onto “the stump of a great tree” the bear “scored the bark all around with its claws. The seven sisters were borne into the sky, and they became the stars of the Big Dipper” (8); the scored trunk of the giant tree became Tsoai, or Rock Tree, now known as Devils Tower.

The tripartite structure of The Way to Rainy Mountain, which carefully juxtaposes different types of history, can only be fully appreciated as one experiences the complete text. In “The Setting Out,” as in the two other sections of the book, each numbered chapter is divided into three parts: an account of a Kiowa legend passed down to Momaday, a related “historical” anecdote, and a personal reminiscence. The first chapter of “The Setting Out,” for example, consists of the tribe’s emergence narrative—“the Kiowas came into the world through a hollow log” (16); an anthropological description of the Kiowa tribal name; and Momaday’s recollection of his own “coming out upon the northern Great Plains in late spring” (17). He devotes several chapters of this section to the leg–ends surrounding the son of an unnamed woman and the sun. The young woman is lured into the sky by a redbird and has a child with the sun, who then kills her as she tries to escape from him and flee to earth. Although she dies, her son lives and is raised by a spider grandmother. The son splits himself into twins and kills a snake, who, unbeknownst to him, is his grandfather. Each of these episodes is accompanied by related historical and personal accounts.

The second section, “The Going On,” includes Momaday’s much–cited story of an arrow maker. While making an arrow, a man notices someone outside his tepee and speaks “as if to his wife,” who is also in the tepee with him: “I know that you are there. . . . If you are Kiowa you will understand what I am saying, and you will speak your name” (46). When the person does not speak, the man knows he is an enemy and so kills him with the arrow he has just made. This section also includes a story about a horse of clay that understands and heeds the difficult Kiowa language; another describes a powerful buffalo that has horns of steel and attacks a hunter.

In the final section, “The Closing In,” the separation of legend, history, and autobiography becomes marvelously fused. Momaday moves from presentations of the power and importance of a legendary horse that knew shame to descriptions of his own paternal grandfather, Mammedaty. Momaday makes an important transition from legendary to historical personages. The effect of such a transition is twofold. On the one hand, it demonstrates that the Kiowa people have survived into the present; on the other hand, it implies the legendary, even mythic, stature of actual historical people, such as Mammedaty and Aho. In the first paragraph of chapter XXI, for example, Mammedaty seems to have a vision. In the historical paragraph that follows, Momaday describes a photograph of his grandfather, a move that marks Mammedaty as an important historical person. Finally, in an autobiographical paragraph, Momaday describes his grandfather’s visions, phenomena that might, in another context, be construed as legendary or mythological. Once Momaday makes this transition, the remainder of the book continues in this vein, fusing and overlapping the formerly distinct genres. In the final paragraph of chapter XXIV, the concluding chapter of “The Closing In,” Momaday even more overtly links history, myth, and personal perception of the landscape: “Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. ... He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it” (83).

In the epilogue Momaday associates three historical occurrences with the demise of Kiowa culture: a meteor shower in 1833, the temporary loss of Tai–me to the Osage, and the signing of treaties with the U.S. government. Although these events suggest the end of the golden age of Kiowa culture, Momaday insists that the culture is “within the reach of memory still” and “is even defined in a remarkably rich and verbal tradition” (86). At the end of the epilogue Momaday recalls the old woman Ko–sahn, who reminds him of the beginning of the Sun Dance and of the importance of play.

The most logical place to start with criticism of The Way to Rainy Mountain is with Schubnell’s account of the genesis of the book. He cites the influence of Yvor Winters, who made an early suggestion that Moma-day combine the historical, the legendary, and the personal in an account of his Kiowa ancestry.²³ As other critics have done, Schubnell comments on the issue of memory in the blood: “By an individual and imaginative act [Momaday] has raised the latent ‘blood memory’ to a conscious level.” Momaday achieves the conscious level from having heard Kiowa legends from his grandmother Aho and others, from literally traveling the migration route himself, and from his own acts of the imagination. Schubnell compares Momaday with Wallace Stevens and Frederick Goddard Tucker-man, and he provides a detailed summary of The Way to Rainy Mountain. Referring to the last sentence of the introduction—“Looking back once, I saw the mountain and came away” (12)—Schubnell sums up what he sees as Momaday’s major point: this coming away “is the fourth stage of Kiowa evolution, a coming away from a glorious past the spirit of which continues to have a powerful presence in the life of modern Kiowa people. The Way to Rainy Mountain is the assertion of this point.”²⁴

Kenneth Lincoln’s essay “Tai-Me to Rainy Mountain” (1986) picks up where the first several pages of Schubnell’s account of the genesis of The Way to Rainy Mountain leave off. Lincoln introduces the manuscript history and records Momaday’s interaction with his editor at the University of New Mexico Press. Lincoln refers to the reports of the several anonymous readers of the early manuscript, chronicles Momaday’s responses, and adds the comments of several established writers who also read the book in manuscript. Lincoln’s essay establishes the mood prevalent in the late 1960s concerning American Indian writing. One unidentified anthropologist, for example, claimed that “Momaday’s relation to Kiowa culture is too marginal for him to give either an objective portrait or a really valid ‘inside view.’”²⁵ Lincoln juxtaposes this and several such remarks with either Momaday’s response or with reference to Vine Deloria Jr., who, at the time of the writing of The Way to Rainy Mountain, was scoffing at the “massive volume of useless knowledge produced by anthropologists attempting to capture real Indians.”²⁶ Lincoln characterizes the importance of Momaday’s publishing success: “The Way to Rainy Mountain represents a hybrid set text emerging through the hollows of cultural history. The makings of the book itself. . . generate a paradigm for writers to come.”²⁷

In an important early review of The Way to Rainy Mountain, “More Than Language Means” (1970), Kenneth Fields suggests that through the book’s tripartite structure Momaday controls his nostalgic desire for a past that he cannot recover except imaginatively: his form “forces him to relate the subjective to the more objective historical sensibility.” Fields argues that the book, like Momaday’s poem “Angle of Geese” (1968), is “thoroughly Indian” in that it suggests “the extreme value of words . . . at the same time it suggests their limitations.” He also touches on an issue that critics have picked up in relation to both The Way to Rainy Mountain and The Names: Momaday “is dealing with . . . an intensely felt experience something on the order of racial memory, an inheritance that he feels in his blood.” Perhaps for this reason, the “real subject of the book,” Fields maintains, “is the recognition of what it means to feel himself a Kiowa in the modern American culture that dis–placed his ancestors.”²⁸

Trimble offered one of the earliest critical discussions of the book in her brief monograph on Momaday. Though her discussion is primarily a summary, she does provide insights that subsequent critics have further developed. Trimble identifies the tripartite structure of the book, for example: the first part of each numbered chapter tells a Kiowa legend, the second submits anthropological or historical lore, and the third presents the author’s personal reminiscence. She maintains that “the book’s structure is both tragic and epic” in that it describes the whites’ destruction of a culture. Trimble also argues that as one reads the book, “the inadequacy of the ’scientific’ information grows more apparent, whereas Momaday’s experiences and memories begin to resemble the legends.“²⁹

In Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor (1982) Alan R. Velie emphasizes that The Way to Rainy Mountain is a book about the sacredness of language; it is a “testament to the power of the word, and to the Indian oral tradition.” Thus, in the context of the Kiowa journey, “the story of The Way to Rainy Mountain, is as important as making the journey in the first place.” Velie also suggests that another “extremely important motif in the book is the relationship between the Kiowas and the horse,” which Momaday’s ancestors acquired from other Plains tribes during the literal migration toward Rainy Mountain.³⁰

In a brief discussion of The Way to Rainy Mountain in The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (1989), Arnold Krupat also finds Momaday’s treatment of language central to the book. It represents “a determination . . . to the establishment . . . of a single authoritative voice, with its own ’unique’ or ’personal’ style, sufficiently distinctive to subordinate all other voices.” There is in Momaday “a tone of high portentousness” insofar as every sentence “is capable of the ‘yes’ of mythic affirmation.” At the same time, however, “his texts remain possible only in relation to the speech of others.” For Krupat, the power of Momaday’s words comes from their relation to the words of others: “[James] Mooney, [George] Catlin, Euramerican artists, and even Momaday’s own earlier works, as well as the words of a great many Kiowa people living and dead.”³¹

Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain (1988), edited by Kenneth M. Roemer, is a collection of essays about the book. In addition to providing a brief biography and a bibliography, the collection includes ten short critical essays concerning topics such as biography, culture, genre, form, and theme. Though written as a rhetoric for teachers of Momaday’s book, these essays explore many of the issues that other scholars have discussed in the criticism of The Way to Rainy Mountain. Roemer’s book also features seven additional essays about teaching Momaday’s book in composition and literature courses.

In an essay in Roemer’s collection that employs a biographical approach, Schubnell suggests that The Way to Rainy Mountain “grew out of a personal and historical need for self-definition.”³² Like Schubnell, Lawana Trout emphasizes the importance of Momaday’s 1970 essay “The Man Made of Words” because it formulates the author’s ideas on the criteria for defining an Indian identity. Referring to the early essay “The Arrowmaker,” which recounts the arrow-maker legend given in The Way to Rainy Mountain, Trout acknowledges the importance of Kiowa history and culture, both sacred and secular, especially the importance of the oral tradition.³³ In a discussion of traditional forms of American Indian autobiography, H. David Brumble urges that to understand The Way to Rainy Mountain the reader must have an understanding of and an appreciation for Plains Indian autobiography, especially as evident in Plains coup tales. (To count coup meant to touch one’s enemies in battle.) Through these tales of battlefield deeds “the tellers become who they are essentially.” It is not enough that they perform these deeds; they must also tell about them, “not once but many times. Only by telling their tales can they achieve ’consummate being.’”³⁴

Several essays in Roemer’s collection articulate responses to the structure of The Way to Rainy Mountain. According to Joan Henley, the book is an “epistemological exploration”; that is, it investigates “the ways available to human beings to understand themselves and the world around them.”³⁵ Henley suggests that the very tripartite structure of the book teaches that there are different ways, or different combinations of ways, to know Rainy Mountain and its significance. Robert Berner argues that Momaday’s decision to give the book its three-part structure is related to “his conception of language.” The movement of the book is from a time when language served to preserve the Kiowas (when, for example, the arrow maker knew the man outside his tepee was an enemy because he did not know the Kiowa language) to a time when language “has fallen to earth,” that is, a time when language can no longer save the people from destruction.³⁶

William Oandasan compares the internal three-part structure of The Way to Rainy Mountain with the structure of other works by Momaday, especially House Made of Dawn. In making this comparison, he argues that “Momaday must resolve three dialectics involving the mythic, historic, and personal. Momaday brings these oppositions into harmony through memory, renewed respect, and an act of the imagination.”³⁷ Helen Jaskoski focuses on how The Way to Rainy Mountain “creates its reader. . . . To be comprehensible, the book requires cultivation of silence and of visual as well as verbal attentiveness.” Emphasizing her point, Jas-koski quotes a passage from Momaday’s essay “To Save a Great Vision” (1984), in which Momaday writes that “the storyteller . . . creates himself . . . through the power of his perception, his imagination, his expression, and his devotion to important detail.”³⁸

Three other essays in Roemer’s collection introduce themes concerning identity formation, oral tradition, and a sense of the sacred. Gretchen Bataille sees The Way to Rainy Mountain as a means for readers to understand Momaday’s “approach to defining the elusive nature of ’Indianness.’” She argues that the “values and memories from the past determine identity in the present,” and Momaday’s book offers at least three ways of perceiving that past.³⁹ Both Norma Wilson and Scar-berry-Garcia stress the importance of language and landscape in the text. Wilson argues that “Momaday presents a convincing and creative argument for esteeming the spoken as the most powerful form of literature, just as he argues for a new-old reciprocal relation to nature.”⁴⁰ Scar-berry-Garcia notes that Momaday emphasizes sacred events: “when recalled through story, they become models of human involvement with the dynamic processes of nature.”⁴¹

In the essay collection Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures (1989), edited by Gerald Vizenor, Kimberly Blaeser applies a reader-response critique to The Way to Rainy Mountain. In an essay titled “The Way to Rainy Mountain: Momaday’s Work in Motion,” Blaeser describes the book as an open text because it resists definitive explication. It works on two levels at once, activating “the imagination of the reader” and at the same time providing an example of how the author himself “acts out the reader/creator role within the text.” Through the structure of the book, Momaday invites the “imaginative participation” of the reader, but the text also “demands” the reader’s response. Indeed, argues Blaeser, the book can “realize its full dynamic potential” only through the response of the reader. Referring to Wolfgang Iser and Umberto Eco, two reader-response theorists, Blaeser suggests that the text remains open to a reader’s interpretation but at the same time “never allows the reader to move outside the strict control of the author.” Just as The Way to Rainy Mountain challenges the reader’s methods of reading and knowing, it also changes the author’s own way of thinking. If, at the beginning of the book, Momaday accepts conventional distinctions between past and present and those who are alive versus those who are dead, by the end of the book “myth and history become alive in him.” The text shows how Momaday comes to “understand the imagination’s power to transcend time.”⁴²

In the same collection Elaine A. Jahner calls for investigations of Momaday’s book much like Blaeser’s. For Jahner The Way to Rainy Mountain exists as a dialogue between author and reader, but it is a “dialogue with tradition,” and it “dramatizes the tensions and intensities of one effort to situate the subject as sense-maker of lived experience that would otherwise disappear into an inaccessible past.” She presents passages from The Way to Rainy Mountain along with theoretical passages from other contexts, thereby creating an imagined dialogue between Momaday and several “major critics.” The Latin American writer Carlos Fuentes and the Native American Momaday present the “diverse forms through which the past survives into the present”; through this presentation Momaday “demonstrates the animating potential of longing.” Jahner also compares Momaday with the critical theorist Jacques Derrida, arguing, in essence, that their relation can be noted in the way both are “engaged in a process which seeks the hidden implications of the way European philosophy has formulated its ideas.” Momaday’s literary journey, Jahner writes, “exists in some intermediate position between the oral and the written traditions,” and one of his fundamental enterprises is to investigate ways in which people of different cultures attain knowledge. He exposes the fact that there are diverse ways of knowing.⁴³ Jahner makes a connection between Momaday and the feminist critic Julia Kristeva, noting that both emphasize how words function depending on particular contexts. She quotes Kristeva: “The word as minimal textual unity thus turns out to occupy the status of mediator, linking structural models to cultural (historical) environment.”⁴⁴ Jahner then turns to a scholar of the American Renaissance, Donald Pease, to suggest that a look at different ways of reading and interpreting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s visionary experience helps readers better understand Momaday in relation to critical theorists such as Derrida and Kristeva. Jahner sums up her essay by suggesting that the time has come to fit American Indian literature in a “broader critical enterprise.”⁴⁵

Kurt Spellmeyer briefly mentions The Way to Rainy Mountain in his essay “Language, Politics, and Embodiment in the Life-World,” collected in Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World: Language, Culture, and Pedagogy (1998), edited by Michael Bemard-Donals and Richard R. Glejzer. Spellmeyer notes that Momaday uses the English language to suggest “its ability to silence those who give things other names.”⁴⁶ In an essay published in American Literature in 1999 Chadwick Alien also briefly mentions The Way to Rainy Mountain, arguing Momaday develops “the process of blood memory as a method for re-collecting and re-membering as text his indigenous identity.”⁴⁷

In “’Dancing the Page’: Orature in N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain,” Arlene Elder suggests that the book is “a deeply intertextual and interoral narrative that illustrates orature’s dual composition and performance values.” Elder makes the point that even the buffalo-shield drawings on the cover of the 1976 paperback edition are part of the overall intertextuality. The three buffalo shields anticipate “the three narrative segments we find within.” Like oral performance, too, the structure “is changing and indeterminate.” Even the blank space, she argues, replicates the silence endemic to oral narration. Finally, the educative nature of the narrative’s “dynamic involvement of the reader in the story’s meaning” most significantly places the book in the tradition of oral narrative.⁴⁸

Colorado: Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring. New York: Rand McNally, 1973.

Between the publication of The Way to Rainy Mountain and his 1976 memoir, The Names, Momaday wrote the text to accompany a book of photographs by David Muench: Colorado: Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring. In his commentary Momaday asserts his affinity for 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 home-land,” by which he means the Rocky Mountains.⁴⁹ As in other instances, Momaday stresses the importance of the imagination in relation to the landscape: “Time and again I have entered into that landscape, taken possession of it in my imagination, given myself up to it” (7). In a description of the bristlecone pines of the high country, he speaks again of the power and importance of imagination: “by means of some extraordinary act of the imagination, I came suddenly upon a full awareness of the life force within me, intensely conscious of my being alive, of sharing the irresistible continuum of life itself. . . . Such moments are concentrated in these trees” (51).

The book begins with summer and moves season by season through the year as Momaday skips around from descriptions of mountain flowers to ghost towns, trains, and cities. Rather than the man–made, he emphasizes the raw, natural beauty and the geology of the state. Characteristically, he identifies the spirit in the land: “There is a legend which has it that the mountains were conjured up from the depths of a dark, primordial sea. Water touches a holiness to the mind and sight. Indeed it is appropriate to believe in the legend; such beliefs are integral to the soul” (43).

Momaday carries this sense of the legendary or mythic from summer into fall. He sees hawks and a haze on the skyline and asks whether it is rain? “Or is it something else, an apparent sheen upon the near side of infinity, a pale wash like rain?” (72). In winter the cold and consequently clear vistas stir the mind and the blood: “Here is my imagination realized to its whole potential. Nothing that I behold is lost upon me here” (86).

In the spring section Momaday sounds another of his characteristic themes: a person carries knowledge or a vision of place in the blood, and thus has a racial memory: “A child who is born in the mountains has them forever in his mind. . . . I have seen evidence of this in my own racial experience. The Kiowa, when they entered upon the Great Plains, were a long time—many generations—in holding the mountains in their view ” (100). Although Colorado: Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring is primarily a collection of photographs—and is thus something of an exception in Momaday’s published writings—it is also a part of his work as a whole because he explores issues and themes in the book that have engaged him in his other writings. Most notable among these are his interest in landscapes as an integral part of human existence, the power of the imagination, and the notion of memory in the blood.

Angle of Geese and Other Poems. Boston: Godine, 1974.

The Gourd Dancer. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Motifs concerning landscape, the power of the imagination, and blood memory surface repeatedly in many of the poems Momaday had been writing during the 1960s and early 1970s that were published in two early collections, Angle of Geese and Other Poems and The Gourd Dancer. The Gourd Dancer consists of three sections, the first of which comprises the contents of the previously published Angle of Geese and Other Poems. In an interview with Joseph Bruchac, Momaday described the grouping of the poems in The Gourd Dancer: “There is a chronological progression. . . . The early poems, recogniz–ably traditional forms, I think, are contained in the first section, then the second section is of a very different character, informed by a native voice, and the third section is, or was then, quite recent work. Much of it was written in the Soviet Union.”⁵⁰ In the poems of the first section, “Angle of Geese and Other Poems,” Momaday explores two apparently contradictory themes: he acknowledges the finality of death, but he also presents situations in which death is somehow transcended after all. Although other issues are clearly involved in this section of the book, a look at the relationship between these two issues helps the reader to recognize in part Momaday’s underlying poetic worldview.

Schubnell compares Momaday’s “Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion” with Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” (1915), arguing that in both poems “the poet is forced to conclude that death is final, immortality a fiction.”⁵¹ For Christ, Momaday suggests, “The Passion wanes into oblivion,” whereas for humans “The hours advance / Like flecks of foam borne landward and destroyed.”⁵² Several other poems suggest a similar theme: the vanity of the hope for eternal life. In “Rainy Mountain Cemetery,” for example, a visitor to the graveyard seems unable to call forth the memory even of the deceased’s name: “The wake of nothing audible he hears / Who listens here and now to hear your name” (30). That silence is associated with the shadow cast by the gravestone itself during “the long approach of noon” when, of course, there is no shadow.

The title poem of the first section of The Gourd Dancer, “Angle of Geese,” is also about death. The first three stanzas describe a human response to a child’s death, which the speaker meets with custom and civility. Despite the custom, however, the speaker finds little comfort: “I am slow to find / The mere margin of repose” (31). The second half of the poem describes the death of a goose, evidently shot during a November hunt. Here, to a certain extent, the poet describes the death with the bird—rather than the hunter—at the center:

Quit of hope and hurt,
It held a motionless gaze
Wide of time, alert,
On the dark distant flurry. (32)

According to Roger Dickinson–Brown, the overriding theme of this poem is not the speaker’s apparently futile attempt to find comfort in the face of death but rather “the extended understanding of the significance of language and its relation to identity.” The poem shows “the tragic conflict between what we have felt in wilderness and what our language means.”⁵³

Critics have suggested that “Earth and I Gave You Turquoise” is equally dismissive of the speaker’s ability to conjure up a satisfying belief in eternal life. Schubnell writes that the “three final lines suggest that the passing of time has not eased the sense of loss, and that the longing for a speedy reunion remains unfulfilled:”⁵⁴

The years are heavy
I will ride the swiftest horse
You will hear the drumming hooves. (16)

From another viewpoint, however, the poem might suggest that a reunion is imminent, one that does not require the speaker’s death. The final three lines may be taken to imply such a reunion, especially since the departed “will hear the drumming hooves.” The second stanza implies that the woman addressed in the poem lives insofar as the speaker remembers her; she survives through his imagining:

I will bring corn for planting
and we will make fire
Children will come to your breast
You will heal my heart
I speak your name many times
The wild cane remembers you. . . . (15)

More hopeful than these poems about human death are those about animals’ will to survive. In “The Bear,” for example, the poet describes a bear as old and scarred, riddled with pain, but nonetheless “whole” and “without urgency.” The bear is out of sight, suggests the poet, but he is not necessarily dead; rather, the imagery is suggestive of survival through a power that humans cannot perceive:

Then he is gone, whole,
without urgency, from sight,
as buzzards control,
imperceptibly, their flight. (11)

Similarly, in the “Pit Viper]’ the viper seems to transcend death through a kind of metamorphosis. The snake has seen death “come nigh and over–come” (12). In “Comparatives,” though one fish dies on the planks of a wharf, the essence of the fish survives as a fossil on the “inland sea” and thus outlasts death, exists forever (13). Fish and fossil are perhaps “the same thing,” suggests the poet. In the prose poem “The Horse That Died of Shame,” Momaday includes as an epigraph a paragraph from The Way to Rainy Mountain about that same horse. In the poem he gives the horse life even after it has died of shame: “And that evening it broke away into the long distance, running at full speed. And so it does again and again in my dreaming” (26).

In “The Delight Song of Tsoai–talee” (Rock–Tree Boy, Momaday’s Kiowa name), the speaker describes his identification with many of the animals and images that appear in the poems:

I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child. . . . (27)

Through the act of writing the poems, the poet imbues these characters—people, animals, and landscapes—with life. Similarly, perhaps, the poet gives himself life: “You see, I am alive, I am alive / I stand in good relation with the earth . . .” (27).

The second section of The Gourd Dancer, “The Gourd Dancer,” consists of blank verse and prose poems. The title poem describes Mammedaty’s participation in the traditional Kiowa dance. The first of four parts of the poem, “The Omen,” rehearses the fact that an “owl ascends.” The second part, “The Dream,” introduces Mammedaty: “He dreamed of dreaming and the summer breaking upon his spirit.” In “The Dance” the speaker makes a transition from an apparent fusion of dancing and dreaming to the moment when Mammedaty is actually dancing. In the final part, “The Giveaway,” the speaker tells the story of Mammedaty’s receiving “a black horse.” Momaday describes this same incident in The Names and in an essay he wrote for the magazine Natural History, “To the Singing, to the Drum” (1975). Each telling has its special contextual meaning. In the prose poem, for instance, the giving of the horse is an objective means for the poet to demonstrate the honor due to Mammedaty: “And all of this was for Mammedaty, in his honor, as even now it is in the telling, and will be, as long as there are those who imagine him in his name” (37).

In general, the poems in the “Gourd Dancer” section seem more hopeful than those in the previous section in that, like the title poem, they celebrate Kiowa people and tradition. In “Carriers of the Dream Wheel,” for instance, rather than hearing the silence in a Kiowa graveyard, the speaker feels the power of the wheel and hears the voices of the old men

Saying: Come, come
Let us tell the old stories,
Let us sing the sacred songs. (42)

Similarly, in “The Eagle-Feather Fan” the poet seems to fuse the eagle itself with the poet-dancer. Initially, the speaker says, “The eagle is my power.” But further into the poem, there is a fusion of speaker and bird:

The bones of my hand are fine
And hollow; the fan bears them.
My hand veers in the thin air. . . . (43)

The poet thus becomes the bird and thereby celebrates the strength and beauty of himself, the dancer, the eagle, and the dance: “All afternoon it circles / To the singing, to the drums” (43).

According to Schubnell, Momaday explained the eight prose poems that make up “The Colors of Night” as his attempt “to associate all the colors of night into one thing.”⁵⁵ In the interview with Bruchac, Momaday described this prose-poem sequence as “really a collection of quintessential novels, I suppose—very short, lyrical stories.”⁵⁶ Although several of the poems (or colors that make up the night) deal with dying, death is presented as a means of transcendence rather than as a finality. In “White,” for instance, a man discovers that the life of his son “consists in his bones” (44). In “Yellow” a drowned boy becomes a howling dog: “a black dog emerged from the river, shivering and shaking the water from its hair. All night it stood in the waves of grass and howled the full moon down” (44–45). Similarly, in “Red” a mistreated woman—who was created from sumac leaves in the first place—becomes again “a thousand withered leaves scattered in the plain” (45).

The third section of The Gourd Dancer, “Anywhere Is a Street into the Night” consists of poems written during Momaday’s stay in the Soviet Union in 1974. As the writer has explained, this sojourn was a high point in his life, and he recalls that the time was inspirational: “I wrote numerous poems, some on the landscapes of my native south-west, urged, I believe, by an acute homesickness.”⁵⁷ Many of the poems in this section describe Russian strangers or old friends— people Momaday knew, saw in passing, or admired from a distance. “Forms of the Earth at Abiquiu,” for example, is dedicated to the painter Georgia O’Keeffe and describes Momaday’s friendship with O’Keeffe and both artists’ love of the landscape. The poet gives the painter a small brown stone which she knows at once to be beautiful. Momaday writes,

. . . you knew,
As you knew the forms of the earth at Abiquiu:

That time involves them and they bear away,
Beautiful, various, remote,
In failing light, and the coming of cold. (60)

“The Gift” is dedicated to Momaday’s old college friend Bobby Jack Nelson: “We give each other hope” (62). “Abstract: Old Woman in a Room” is dedicated to a new friend, Olga Sergeevna Akhmanova, the head of the English Department at the University of Moscow, where Momaday taught during his stay in the Soviet Union.

Other poems in the third section of The Gourd Dancer describe people Momaday may have seen or met in passing or people he imagined. The character introduced in “That Woman and This Woman,” for example, is not identified beyond the description itself:

She sits at a small, round table,
rather far away, against the sunlit wall.
I see that her mouth is expressive,
that she is certainly beautiful. (57)

In “Krasnopresnenskaya Station” Momaday describes “a girl not yet dis–appointed, perhaps,” who, unlike others on the subway, does not seem to be afraid of him. She approaches, and the poet imagines their actually meeting:

She would speak of ordinary things;
I would listen
for the hard resonances of the river,
the ice breaking apart in the afternoon. (63)

As in the poem describing his friendship with O’Keeffe, here the delightful, imagined meeting is imbued with the stark beauty of the landscape, in this case, the Russian landscape in winter. What remains unclear, how–ever, is whether or not the poet attributes to the brave woman the ability to recognize the beauty of the world above the underground station. With this ambiguity, a distance remains between the speaker and the girl.

The title poem of the third section, “Anywhere Is a Street into the Night,” evokes a similar sense of distance that can be overcome only through imagining. Again, perhaps on a subway train, the poet uses the dark, reflecting glass of the window for his imagining:

Desire will come of waiting
Here at this window—I bring
An old urgency to bear
Upon me, and anywhere
Is a street into the night. . . . (54)

These lines suggest the power of the poet’s imagination—after all, as a poet he can create any image he wishes on that glass, but because it is merely on the glass, what he has imagined remains only an image: “evenly it will pass/Like this image on the glass” (54).

The most thorough critical response to Momaday’s early poetry remains Schubnell’s N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background (1985). Schubnell traces Momaday’s poetic development from his days before attending Stanford University, through his work with Winters, to the later free-verse and prose poems. These different stages, however, are not, in Schubnell’s view, “strictly chronological or mutually exclusive."⁵⁸ He examines in some detail most of the poems collected in The Gourd Dancer and the poems from the “Billy the Kid” series, which, though not published in The Gourd Dancer, were originally part of the manuscript of the collection. (These poems were later included in Moma-day’s 1989 novel, The Ancient Child, and they were also published as a section of his 1992 collection, In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991.)

Schubnell’s examination includes a summary of the poetic theory of Winters, which “is essential to an understanding of Momaday’s syllabic and postsymbolist poetry.” Schubnell also compares Momaday’s poetry with that of other “postsymbolists” such as Stevens and Paul Valery, as well as Winters himself. Schubnell examines Momaday’s “use of prose poetry for the treatment of his American Indian heritage, mainly in part two of The Gourd Dancer” and he groups the poems written while Momaday was in Moscow, arguing that they show a return to “a more formal technique."⁵⁹

The Names: A Memoir. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

In The Names Momaday narrates the early part of his life and his family heritage, beginning with his Kiowa ancestors and continuing through his last days at Jemez Pueblo before he left for college. To re-create the past, he uses what he calls “an act of the imagination": “When I turn my mind to my early life, it is the imaginative part of it that comes first and irresistibly into reach."⁶⁰ This assertion of the imaginative power appears between a genealogical chart and a photograph of Pohd-lohk, the great-grandfather who gave Momaday his Kiowa name, Tsoai-talee, or Rock-Tree Boy. In this way the text moves back and forth between tribal lore, history, and personal memory aided by imaginative recollection. Although the structure is much looser, the memoir recalls the earlier tripartite structure of The Way to Rainy Mountain.

Momaday initiates the autobiography proper by discussing his father’s Kiowa family and his mother’s European American bloodline, but he begins his mother’s story by detailing her Cherokee ancestry (she was named for her Cherokee great–grandmother, Natachee). Especially important to Momaday is her conscious decision to see herself as an Indian: “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” (25). Momaday remarks that “Some of my mother’s memories have become my own. This is the real burden of the blood; this is immortality” (22).

Similarly, Momaday begins detailing the paternal side of his family by describing Mammedaty, his father’s Kiowa father, whom the grandson never knew: “he came to be imagined posthumously in the going on of the blood” (26). By the time Mammedaty was born, writes Momaday, the glory days of the Kiowas had already passed. The Kiowas “had been routed in the Indian wars, the great herds of buffalo had been destroyed, and the sun dance prohibited by law” (28). Mammedaty therefore became a farmer who worked hard, traded well, and prospered. His son, Alfred Morris Mammedaty (later Momaday), worked his father’s fields as a boy, but he became restless. Momaday remarks, “I believe this restlessness is something in the blood” (36). In what the author calls an act of “profound affirmation” (38), his father made a life for himself; he became an artist and a teacher. He married Natachee Scott in 1933. The next year, on 27 February 1934, their son was born.

Following this account of his birth, Momaday details a history of the Kiowas as his great–grandfather Pohd–lohk might have recorded it. Momaday begins by citing a big meteor shower that was marked in the Kiowa calendar in 1833, some one hundred years before his own birth. He recalls the smallpox epidemic of 1839–1840, the hard winter of 1851–1852, the sun dance, and the coming of the imprisoned Nez Perces in 1883. Ultimately he imagines his trip as an infant with his parents to Devils Tower in Wyoming, a trip that earned him his Kiowa name. Momaday insists that he was taken into “Tsoai’s presence even before the child could understand what it was, so that by means of the child the memory of Tsoai should be renewed in the blood of the coming–out people” (55). Through the naming ceremony “Pohd–lohk affirmed the whole life of the child in a name, saying: Now you are, Tsoai–talee.” Momaday the autobiographer elaborates: “I am. It is when I am most conscious of being that wonder comes upon my blood, and I want to live forever, and it is no matter that I must die” (57).

In the second part of the autobiography Momaday recounts his family’s move to Gallup, New Mexico, in 1936 and his life on the Navajo reservation at Shiprock. During this time, he writes, “Memory begins to qualify the imagination, to give it another formation, one that is peculiar to the self” (61). If, up to this point, Momaday has been writing a communal history supplemented by his imagination, he now begins a personal history, based on his own memories. Although he selects the memories, and although they are continually evolving and mythic, they are what defines the man: “If I were to remember other things, I should be someone else” (63). Momaday remembers visiting his great-grandmother, who held him on her lap, and he finds “great good in such a remembrance” (65). In conjunction with describing members of his family, Momaday recalls the Navajo and Kiowa languages that he heard as a child. He also recalls how his uncle James suddenly became aware of the enchanted landscapes of the Southwest. Momaday seems to project onto his uncle his own feelings when he imagines that James saw “the most brilliant colors in the earth” (60). Like his nephew, James became intensely aware of the beauty of nature. A single moment, writes Momaday, “held more beauty and wonder than he could know” (80).

The third part of the memoir begins with the Momaday family’s move to Hobbs, New Mexico, where Momaday’s parents had worked during World War II. Of the many incidents of his childhood and adolescence that he recounts here, one particularly stands out (and has been commented on by several critics). Once, when visiting at his paternal grandmother’s house, Momaday recalls looking into the green base of a kerosene lamp, where he sees his own reflection, distorted by the glass: “I take up a pencil and set the point against a sheet of paper and define the head of a boy. . . . I like him certainly, but I don’t know who or where or what he is, except that he is the inscrutable reflection of my own vague certainty. And then I write, in my child’s hand, beneath the drawing, ’This is someone. Maybe this is Mammedaty. This is Mammedaty when he was a boy’” (93). After drawing and naming the boy, the ten-year-old boy Momaday walks outside and imagines taking part in a ceremonial give-away in which one of a group of dancers is honored with gifts. Momaday imagines for himself the honorable role of handing over the reins of a black horse to his grandfather: “It is good and honorable to be made such a gift—the gift of this horse, this hunting horse—and honorable to be the boy, the intermediary in whose hands the gift is passed” (94).

Following the recollection of this event (in which Momaday imagines his own participation), Momaday admits, “I invented history” (97). With this statement he begins a long, stream-of-consciousness account of his time at Hobbs, cautioning the reader that “One does not pass through time, but time enters upon him, in his place” (97). In this account Momaday mentions his first encounter with the legend of Billy the Kid: “Billy and me we rode the range together” (111).

The third part of the memoir ends with a description of the view of the great red mesa and the canyon to the west of Jemez Pueblo. The fourth part begins with Momaday’s visit to the pueblo as an adult just after the burning of the Jemez Day School, where his parents taught for more than twenty-five years. He writes that the school “had been my home; it was the last, best home of my childhood” (117). He describes the school, the pueblo, the people, the festivals, and the landscape, recalling the words of Isak Dinesen: “Here I am, where I ought to be” (121). Momaday remembers an old man named Francisco Tosa, of whom he writes, “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” (127). He recalls the Navajos coming to the pueblo for the Feast of San Diego and the expert horsemanship of John Cajero. (These descriptions anticipate the horsemanship of Grey in The Ancient Child.) He also tells of his family’s being honored with invitations to dine in the homes of friends on feast days. After elaborating on the traditional rituals of the pueblo townspeople, Momaday devotes a paragraph to the Christmas dances. Remembering his Christmases at Jemez, he tells a story about “a poor mute boy whose name was Tolo” (137). (This account later became the story Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story, published in 1994).

In recounting his years at Jemez Pueblo, Momaday describes several incidents that appeared in one guise or another in House Made of Dawn. In addition to the coming of the Navajo, for example, he describes the rooster pull, the Pecos bull run, and the carrying of the statue of Porcingula. About such tribal ceremonies, Momaday comments that “some of these were secret dances, and on these holiest days guards were posted on the roads and no one was permitted to enter the village. My parents and I kept then to ourselves, to our reservation of the day school, and in this way, through the tender of our respect and our belief, we earned the trust of the Jemez people, and we were at home there” (147). Despite the fact that the family voluntarily excluded itself from some Pueblo ceremonies, the young Momaday felt at home in Jemez and writes that “among the people of the valley I was content” (154).

When Momaday was thirteen, his parents gave him a horse. He describes a ride he took into the surrounding settlements, but in the telling about it, the ride becomes symbolic of his growing up: “I went on, farther and farther into the wide world. Many things happened. And in all this I knew one thing: I knew where the journey was begun” (159). Momaday concludes the last part of his memoir with a section that begins, “At Jemez I came to the end of my childhood” (160).

In the brief epilogue Momaday describes a journey on horseback in which he enters a great canyon, visits with the “old people in the arbor,” and rides north into the Black Hills, where he beholds Tsoai, Devils Tower. From there he rides westward to a place near the headwaters of the Yellowstone River, the place of the hollow log where the Kiowa first emerged. With the epilogue Momaday thus recalls his own migration and the migration of the Kiowa people; as he does so, he completes the circle of his memoir.

In an early review of The Names, “Memories of an Indian Childhood” (1977), Edward Abbey writes that although Momaday uses English, his mother’s language, he “tells his story in the manner of his father’s people,” the Kiowa. Abbey recognizes an elegiac tone in the book, a tone that acknowledges without nostalgia that the Kiowa past is gone and that perhaps “through some new alliance of the best in the Indians’ culture and the best of the white man’s civilization,” contemporary America might find a way to survive what Abbey calls “the malaise of the rapacious modern Western culture.” Whereas Abbey contends that Momaday’s autobiographical narrator—who “has chosen to imagine himself all Indian"—achieves “an inner view, not merely an insider’s view” of Kiowa culture,⁶¹ Kenneth Lincoln writes that the narrator is an “Indian child in a non-Indian and mixed-blood setting, [who] grows confused about his composite identity.” According to Lincoln, “Momaday’s self-portrait reveals a child inside looking out at Indians, questioning how he can define himself as a bicultural American.” Further disagreeing with Abbey’s assessment, Lincoln describes what he calls Momaday’s “nostalgia for a mythic Indian world that he never felt fully or singly integrated with."⁶² Schubnell agrees with Lincoln’s assessment, stating that Moma-day was “an outsider to the culture he describes.” In this context Schub-nell emphasizes influences of the Western autobiographical tradition on Momaday’s memoir. Especially important, argues Schubnell, are Dinesen’s two book-length accounts of her experiences in Africa, Out of Africa (1937) and its sequel, Shadows on the Grass (1960). Momaday and Dinesen “are akin in the way they impose their imagination on the landscape."⁶³ Other important influences or “literary echoes” cited by Schubnell include Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, and James Joyce.

Despite his assertion that Momaday remains an outsider, Schubnell delineates the non-Western elements of The Names and argues that the author’s identification with “a racial tradition that has all but vanished from the modern world he lives in requires introspection and an imaginative recreation of his tribal past.” Momaday’s Indian name itself, argues Schubnell, establishes his connection to this world. In summing up the book, Schubnell further acknowledges that Momaday is, to some extent, an insider as well as an outsider: “The Names is an imaginative reconstruction of childhood and youth, an account of a search for identity, and a portrayal of how past and present, myth and reality, dreams, and visions come together in the mind of a contemporary American Indian.” Both the cyclical structure of the memoir and Momaday’s “symbolic and imaginative” representations of his past help to link him with his Indian heritage. Momaday’s mythmaking, in Schubnell’s view, tends to place him “in the racial matrix which produced Kiowa culture."⁶⁴

If Schubnell’s account of Momaday’s memoir sets up a dichotomy between Western and Indian worlds, Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez—in comparing Momaday with Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldua—argues that although autobiography itself is a Western form, Momaday draws “on ethnic heritages . . . in which the individual identity is subordinate to the collective identity,” a trait that fuses “theautobiographical ‘I’ with the ethnic ‘we.’” Momaday thus enacts “a dialogue between [his] particular ethnic group and dominant American culture, between the collective, typically ethnic use of memory and the individual, typically Western use of memory.” Momaday, de Hernandez argues, “wholeheartedly embraces his Kiowa heritage."⁶⁵

Demonstrating Momaday’s sense of the indigenous self, de Hernandez cites as an example the scene in which, as a boy, he draws his own reflection but names it for his grandfather Mammedaty: “Tellingly, this first act of self-portraiture leads straight back to Momaday’s ancestry.” Momaday thus privileges his Indian identity, especially his Kiowa heritage. By telling his story in print, he borrows from a Western literary tradition that enables him to make available a tale from an oral tradition that would otherwise be unknown outside the circle of its immediate audience. According to de Hernandez, Momaday’s modernist tendency to mix “traces of the oral tradition with Western literary styles” enabled him to write an autobiography that is itself an example of how he has constructed his own identity through a combination of Kiowa and Western traditions.⁶⁶

In the essay “Pan-Indianism and Tribal Sovereignties in House Made of Dawn and The Names” (1999), Jane P. Hafen joins the debate about Momaday’s “insider-outsider” status with the comment that the autobiographer “describes the Pueblo with the voice of an inside observer.” Hafen argues that Momaday establishes his Indian identity in several ways. He exposes the absurdity of blood-quantum stipulations while contrasting such stipulations with the “communal construction of the tribal self.” He also privileges the power of the imagination, asserts Hafen, citing the description of his mother’s “act of self-invention” in emphasizing her Cherokee heritage. Momaday establishes “his Kiowa origins through events, place, narrative, familial and tribal relationships. His Kiowaness is unassailable.”⁶⁷

Complementing Hafen’s essay about Momaday’s satire of blood quantum as indicator of Indianness is Chadwick Alien’s essay on blood memory. Alien takes as his starting point the scholarly debate over what familial and collective memory might mean for indigenous peoples. In his opinion, Momaday’s “signature trope” of memory in the blood is at the center of the debate: in Momaday’s works “blood memory achieves tropic power by blurring distinctions between racial identity and narrative.”⁶⁸

As with the debate over whether or not the narrator in The Names is an insider or an outsider, the controversy concerning the issue of blood memory is hotly contested. As Alien points out, in Arnold Krupat’s study of Native American literature and the canon, The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon, Krupat calls Momaday’s insistence on racial memory racist.⁶⁹ According to Alien, a prime example of Momaday’s use of blood memory is found in his account of the giveaway in which Mammedaty is given the black horse. Through a reading of this narrative, Alien concludes that “Blood memory thus tropes the conflating of storytelling, imagination, memory, and genealogy into the representation of a single, multifaceted moment in the particular landscape.” Through strategies of rhetoric, then, Momaday “makes available to readers both that indigenous past and his contemporary identity as indigenous” (Allen’s emphasis). In The Names, as in The Way to Rainy Mountain and in his published conversations with Charles L. Woodard, Momaday “continues and expands his project of constructing a viable contemporary indigenous identity.”⁷⁰

The Ancient Child. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

In his second novel, The Ancient Child, Momaday again explores the ground between different cultures, incorporating Kiowa legend and nineteenth-century Western American lore. Part of this exploration includes his setting of the story in the contemporary American Southwest, San Francisco, and Paris. One of the two main characters is a successful Kiowa painter, Locke Setman (called Set), who moves through these landscapes and through the four books of the novel, which take their titles from elements of painting: “Planes,” “Lines,” “Shapes,” and “Shadows.”⁷¹ In a brief prologue Momaday retells the Kiowa story, presented earlier in the introduction to The Way to Rainy Mountain, of how Tsoai (Rock Tree, or Devils Tower) came to be. Set identifies with both the bear in the legend and the boy who becomes the bear, and he can thus be viewed as the “ancient child” of the title.

The other main character, Grey, is a young woman of Kiowa and Navajo descent who quests after visions and learns to become a medicine woman. Like Set, she moves between two worlds, the Western and the Kiowa: she is a Kiowa medicine woman who ultimately leads Set to his bear identity, but she also imagines being Billy the Kid’s partner and lover. Through her imagination Grey creates his legend. In the opening scene of the novel, for example, she imagines the death of Billy the Kid. Through this and other visions of Grey’s, the reader obtains a history of the infamous Western outlaw. As Grey tells it, she rides with him, loves him, helps him escape from the jail in the Lincoln County, New Mexico, court-house, and finally completes a circle by imagining (and thus witnessing) his death. Both Grey and Set, then, are torn between two cultures: the Kiowa (and Navajo) of their pasts (and future) and the Western culture of their ephemeral present moment.

Grey’s visions and her attendance on her Kiowa grandmother are juxtaposed with the story of Set. As a boy he lost his parents and was raised by a man named Bent Sandridge; Set has become a successful painter in San Francisco. When his grandmother is dying, he receives a telegram and travels to Oklahoma, his homeland, but he arrives too late. She has already died, and he has missed both her death and her funeral. But he meets Grey, who gives him a sacred bundle, and this gift constitutes the first step in the man’s introduction to the bear medicine. The gift of this bear medicine, embodied in the sacred bundle, is intended to provide Set with the power inherent in his totem, the bear. Its powers can be both natural and supernatural, and by accepting the gift he acknowledges his Kiowa (and hence non-Western) heritage. As Grey tells Set when she visits him in the middle of the night, “The grandmother, Kope’mah, wants me to give you back your medicine. It belongs to you. You must not go without it.” (72). As in House Made of Dawn, Momaday makes use of flashback and juxtaposition in The Ancient Child. Between Grey’s midnight visit and her actually giving Set the bundle at a dance, for example, the reader is taken through Grey’s imaginary encounter with Billy the Kid as he breaks out of the Lincoln County jail with her help. Momaday juxtaposes this escape episode with one in which Grey imagines she is with Billy when she is actually being raped by Dwight Dicks, a neighboring cattleman.

In the second book, “Lines,” Set has received the medicine bundle and returned to San Francisco. In the third chapter the narrative switches to a first-person account by Set of his life in the city; the next chapter is a third-person account of Grey’s life in Oklahoma. In a self-referential gesture Momaday depicts Grey reading a passage from his own memoir, The Names. She is also shown writing her own poems and stories about Billy the Kid. Meanwhile, Set travels to Paris for the opening of his art show; he has an affair with Alais Sancerre, the gallery owner, and then hears of Bent’s death. He returns immediately to San Francisco and shortly afterward suffers a nervous breakdown. Though there is no apparent reason for his malady other than Bent’s death, the reader presumes it is because of the bear medicine, which has been too strong for Set. It is as if he has not prepared himself and thus cannot control or use the powerful medicine appropriately. Set refuses to paint; stops seeing his girlfriend, Lola Bourne; and begins drinking heavily. Eventually, he becomes so sick he must be hospitalized. Meanwhile, Grey continues perfecting her powers, imagines her life with Billy the Kid, and prepares for Set’s arrival. She knows he will return when the time is right.

In the third book, “Shapes,” Set has returned to Oklahoma, where Grey is to take care of him. They travel through northern New Mexico on their way to Lukachukai, in northeastern Arizona, where Grey’s Navajo mother lives. Here, Set completes his healing and his preparations for a journey to Devils Tower. In the short fourth book, “Shadows,” Set has arrived at Devils Tower, where he becomes the bear.

Reviewers of The Ancient Child emphasize Momaday’s use of disparate fragments to create a whole. One reviewer writes, for example, that the “entire work is a clever mosaic of ... tiny facets of meaning that inexorably draw the reader in."⁷² Another comments on how the episodes concerning Billy the Kid contrast with those concerning Set, and how that contrast points toward an American identity that “will be intimately involved with its Indianness."⁷³ Writing for The New York Times Book Review, Ed Marston finds fault with the mosaic pattern in The Ancient Child, not because the different plotlines do not work together, but because the novel ignores the history of the American West: it may be that Momaday’s “romantic treatment of the murderous Billy, the wild throwback Grey, and the blocked and suffering Set is meant as a healing novel. . . . If that was the intent, it has not worked. This novel cannot heal because nothing is shown as wounded. It is as if 150 years of human bloodshed and destruction of the land never happened."⁷⁴

In the essay “Ancient Children at Play: Lyric, Petroglyphic, and Ceremonial” (1993) Kenneth M. Roemer focuses on three types of play in The Ancient Child: lyric, petroglyphic, and ceremonial. By lyric play he refers to the beauty of the prose and Momaday’s emphasis on imagination, emotion, and beauty. Roemer uses the petroglyphic as an analogy for structural play, suggesting that the overlapping and superimposing of stories results in an accretion of images in a way similar to the art of petroglyphs. In other words, the stories of Set, Grey, Billy the Kid, and the bear all overlap and intertwine, each adding meaning to the others. The ceremonial play refers to rituals of marriage, healing, and daily life. These types of play not only enable Set’s regeneration and transformation and make manifest the complexity and sophistication of contemporary American Indian literature, but they can also “have powerful heuristic and therapeutic effects on modern readers."⁷⁵

As with some of the criticism of House Made of Dawn, Roemer investigates how The Ancient Child affects both its readers and the characters therapeutically. That is, the healing effects of the novel reach beyond the characters to the readers themselves. In comparing The Ancient Child with House Made of Dawn, Roemer suggests that whereas Abel clearly earns and deserves readers’ sympathy, they are unlikely to sympathize with Set because he is young, successful, artistic, and mobile. It is harder to take his “illness” seriously. Roemer also notes that there seems to be a devaluation of women in the novel in that they exist only to help Set. In a sense, claims Roemer, the book is almost a parody of other healing novels, especially of Momaday’s own House Made of Dawn and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). Given the autobiographical links, Momaday runs the risk of making “the text vulnerable to interpretation as a narrow and idiosyncratic ceremonial play.” Roemer argues that, insofar as Momaday himself identifies with the bear and, like Set, is an artist, the self-satire redeems the book, making it a “healing game of personal therapy."⁷⁶

In a feminist reading of the novel Kathleen Donovan argues more forcefully than Roemer that through his characterization of Lola and Grey, Momaday objectifies and ultimately devalues women. Although they are superficially independent, she argues, Lola, Alais, and Grey finally exist only to assist Set in his healing. Donovan concludes that, despite the ultimate healing of Set (as of Abel in House Made of Dawn), the “characterization of women in Momaday’s novels demonstrates a lack of harmony and balance, and underlying misogyny."⁷⁷

In the essay “Planes, Lines, Shapes, and Shadows: N. Scott Momaday’s Iconological Imagination” (1995) Catherine Rainwater explores the similarities between Momaday the artist and his character Set. According to Rainwater, Momaday “exploits an elaborate, self-reflexive iconography. The result is an iconological metalanguage revealing basic interconnections between the aesthetic structure of his works and the thought, emotion, belief, morality, and even personal identity represented therein.” In his fiction, Rainwater suggests, Momaday creates his own artistic images or symbols that function as both part of the plot and structure of The Ancient Child and also as tools for interpreting the novel itself. Rainwater’s point is that Momaday himself is in certain senses not only the author and narrator but also the protagonist. By an iconological reading of Momaday, Rainwater suggests that he creates not only works of art such as novels and paintings but that he also creates a self that is a kind of “imaginative construction comparable to a work of art."⁷⁸ Such a reading runs the risk of obscuring any clear lines between author, narrator, and character, of course, but Momaday himself has said that he is what he has imagined himself to be, and in this sense he is as much a conscious creation as are his characters.

Rainwater maintains that Momaday’s own paintings are “much like Set’s as described in this partially autobiographical novel,” and that Momaday, like his paintings, “resists ‘precise outline’ and reductive ‘definition’ by developing a rich language of images, complete with an implied set of instructions for their decoding.” She refers to Momaday’s use of the image of pointing. (Billy the Kid tells Grey she must point the gun, for example, and she draws an arrow on the ground, pointing out where she and Set must go.) These images of pointing, Rainwater argues, also “provide excellent general instruction for the reader.” That is, Momaday points out “that we read with certain habits and preconceptions that may, nevertheless, lead us to see beyond our preconceptions.” Finally, Rainwater suggests that by “writing, drawing, and painting, Momaday has invented himself as the bear in response to an inner vision, an ‘idea’ that he has about himself as an Indian.”⁷⁹ By inventing himself, he becomes an aesthetic object.

Philip Heldrich argues that a major component of The Ancient Child is the argument that “subjectivity created through the voices of myth, legend, dream, historical account, and poetry, gives rise to identity.” Grey discovers her identity primarily through imagining and re-creating the legend of Billy the Kid; she “comes to an understanding of how language and vision structure identity.” Set discovers his identity through imagining and creating him-self in his painting. He leams from his painting and from Grey that “story shapes identity and the world.”⁸⁰ For Susan Roberson, identity is more associated with place than with story. She traces “the theme of return and the connection between place and self” in the novel. According to Roberson, The Ancient Child suggests “the impact of specific geographies on the inner cognitive landscapes of the self.”⁸¹

In the Presence of the Sun: A Gathering of Shields. Santa Fe, N. Mex.: Rydal, 1991.

In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961–1991 is a collection of works, most of them previously published, presented in four sections: “Selected Poems,” “The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid,” “In the Presence of the Sun: A Gathering of Shields,” and “New Poems.” All but one of the poems in the first section originally appeared in The Gourd Dancer. Momaday’s imaginings of the notorious outlaw Billy the Kid in the second section are essentially the same as the collection published in American West in 1985 and then reinvented as passages by Grey in The Ancient Child. (Many of the pieces were, in fact, first published in various journals or books during the 1970s.⁸²) The third section, a collection of shield poems and drawings, was published in 1991 in a limited edition of 140 copies as In the Presence of the Sun: A Gathering of Shields. The final section, “New Poems,” introduces twenty-seven previously uncollected poems. In addition to the shield drawings in the third section, there are forty-one drawings and illustrations throughout the rest of the book.

“The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid” is a mix of poems and short accounts of the narrator’s own imagined life with the notorious outlaw. As Momaday has indicated several times, he is fascinated with the life of this renegade and believes that “few if any men have lived more deeply in legend."⁸³ As he does in The Names, Momaday describes the Navajos’ coming to the Feast of San Diego at Jemez, New Mexico, and a man in black who shares distinct similarities with the albino from House Made of Dawn but turns out to be Billy the Kid. There is a tobacco-gift episode in which Billy, the man “in whose eyes there was no expression” (63), buys tobacco to share with an old man. After the sharing he spills the remainder on the ground. Billy asserts that it is more important to share his own than to give outright: “this the old man understands and appreciates more even than the tobacco itself,” he argues (60).

The character of Billy the Kid is neither all good nor all bad as Momaday presents him. He is a murderer and whoremonger, but he shows kindness to his friend the old man. He also makes an interesting gesture to a nun who visits him in the Santa Fe jail. In the poem “He Would Place a Chair for Sister Blandina,” Momaday describes how the prisoner is “shackled, hand and foot,” when she comes to see him in the jail:

Still, he regards her. “I wish
I could place a chair for you,
Sister.” And she regards him.
Later she will weep for him. (62)

“In the Presence of the Sun: A Gathering of Shields” includes sixteen stories of the shields and the drawings that accompany them. Of the stories, Momaday writes, “Here are sixteen shields, a quantity that is deeply meaningful, for it is predicated upon the sacred number four. The shields make four fours” (75). The shields are masks, and each has a story; in this way they create their own power and embody a sort of medicine. The stories themselves often tell the history of the making of a shield or its medicine. In “The Shield That Came Back,” for instance, Momaday describes a beautiful and carefully built fan that has been lost on a raiding expedition. But the shield itself is redemptive: “You see, the shield was more powerful than the fan . . .” (79). In another shield story, Many Dogs is willing to trade his grandfather’s shield for a special hunting horse, but Dragonfly is amazed at this willingness because of the value of the shield. “The end of the story is that Dragonfly gave Many Dogs eight horses for the shield that was brought down from Tsoai” (105).

The final section of In the Presence of the Sun consists of twenty-seven new poems that vary immensely in subject and tone. Several are playful lines that serve as epitaphs, while others take the same and other subjects much more seriously. The playfulness is seen in the two-line poem “Ambition”: “He drove himself, and was undone/And left no stone unturned but one” (116).

In “A Fire at Thule,” which juxtaposes play, make-believe, and grieving, Momaday treats the subject of death earnestly. An implied death is central to the poem, in which the poet compares a child’s sense of loss to his own: “My little daughter speaks of you. She says/You are sad, you have done with make-believe.” In the next stanza he expresses his own sadness: “The having done is hard to my ear . . .” (123). “Concession” offers another consideration of death: “Believe that death inhabits the mere shade/Intimacy demands” (127).

Momaday considers other types of loss in several of these new poems. In “The Great Fillmore Street Buffalo Drive” he describes the decline of the buffalo. The poet depicts the animal’s blisters and sore hooves and then has to imagine one bull back into healthy existence:

One bull, animal representation of the sun,
he dreams back from the brink
to the green refuge of his hunter’s heart. (119)

Such dreaming shows that these poems about death remain somewhat hopeful. In “Rings of Bone” the speaker states that “the leaves are dead” but concludes that

Again the leaves have more or less to do
with time. Music pervades the death of leaves.
The leaves clatter like the rings of bone
on the bandoliers of old men dancing. (132)

In “Scaffold Bear” a “good man killed himself,” and his death is linked to the apparent butchering of a bear, but nevertheless the speaker retains a glimmer of hope:

The bear spoke to someone there, perhaps to me.
For in this cave of sleep,
I am at home to bears. (133)

The illustrations in In the Presence of the Sun are reproductions of Momaday’s artwork in several different media: acrylic, graphite and wash, monoprint, etching, ink, watercolor, and colored pencil. They range widely in subject matter as well. There is, for example, a realistic graphite-and-wash self-portrait (xvi) and also “Self Portrait with Leaves” (also graphite and wash), an abstract drawing that appears to be a bear rather than a human (1). There are also several other portraits and many drawings of horses. In “In the Presence of the Sun: A Gathering of Shields” Momaday includes nineteen drawings of the shields. All but two of them are straightforward ink representations of shields. Some are quite simple, such as Bote-talee’s shield (82), which is made up of a spider web. Several are more elaborate: the Floating Feathers shield, for example, has five feathers and a background and depicts an action. Unlike some of the other art in the book, these shields stand starkly against the page and are unambiguous.

In The Ancient Child Momaday suggests the importance of the plane, which seems apt in the context of these shields: “You have to be always aware of the boundaries of the plane, and you have to make use of them; they define your limits, and they enable you to determine scale, proportion, juxtaposition, depth, design, symmetry correctly. You see, you can make something, a line, a form, an image. But you have to proceed from what is already there—defined space, a plane” (55). In this sense the shields, with their sharpness and clarity, constitute an exception in Momaday’s artwork. In her essay on The Ancient Child Rainwater makes an important connection between Momaday’s writing and his pictorial art, arguing that he seems to apply the same theory of composition to both pursuits. As she describes it, both language and picture for

Momaday have the following characteristics: “Simple, slightly blurred images emerge out of vague backgrounds, as though the artist has coaxed them from a world of incipient form. . . . [P]atches of shadows suggest that the spirit of coal bears a humanlike face [or] the shaman appears in a foggy liminal space, as though suspended between material and spiritual worlds.”⁸⁴ Momaday seems to agree; in the preface to In the Presence of the Sun he compares writing and painting: “The poet says, ‘Here, let me show you something.’ That is, let me help you to see something as you have not seen it before. And so says the painter” (xix).

According to Rainwater, Momaday’s art reminds the viewer of what Westerners are taught to reject: “the tendency to see faces in clouds and on the surfaces of rocks and tree trunks."⁸⁵ Again, Momaday might agree. In an essay for Viva: Northern New Mexico’s Sunday Magazine, for instance, he writes that “An Indian child . . . sees with both his physical eye and the eye of his mind; he sees what is really there to be seen, including the aesthetic effect of his own observation upon the scene, the shadow of his own observation upon the scene, the shadow of his own imagination. It is the kind of vision that is cultivated in poets and painters and photographers."⁸⁶

As he recalls in the preface to In the Presence of the Sun, Momaday watched his father at his artwork as a child, but not until he was an adult did he begin to “see” as an artist, at least as the term applies to painting and drawing: “When I came out of the Soviet Union I brought with me a new way of seeing and a commitment to record it. I moved from charcoal to paint, from black and white to color, from paper to canvas, and back again” (xx). His statements about his art retain a childlike openness and Romanticism that can be seen in his emphasis on the spontaneity of the artist’s creative impulse. Momaday describes impulses that cannot be forced by stipulations or deadlines: “I believe that poems and paintings are made as they are made. . . . When I had found my way with charcoal and graphite, I went to watercolor and acrylics, to oils, to printmaking. . . . [W]ith every attempt to write a line or draw an image I have learned something” (xvii). As to the importance of his art , he writes in the same Romantic vein: “If you look closely into these pages, it is possible to catch a glimpse of me in my original being” (xx). Yet, Momaday would not want to be too precise in delineating his art. As he said in an interview with Woodard, “I don’t want to enclose the thing I’m drawing in a precise outline. Giving a thing such definition sometimes reduces it."⁸⁷ This attitude suggests the method behind the abstract quality of much of his artwork.

Barbara Bode writes that Momaday’s drawings evoke “traditional Plains Indian art” but that it is primarily words that Momaday “is in love with.” Concerning the “Gathering of Shields” section, for instance, she insists that “the prose poems that go with the drawings of war shields illustrate his romance with symbol.” His words, she contends, contain “the essence of the ancestral voices that speak through him."⁸⁸ Certainly, the verbal and pictorial art in In the Presence of the Sun complement each other.

Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story. Santa Fe, N. Mex.: Clear Light, 1994.

In 1994 a children’s story by Momaday, Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story, was published. (It was reprinted by University of New Mexico Press in 1999.) The story first appeared in the 24 December 1972 issue of Viva: Northern New Mexico’s Sunday Magazine as “The Circle: A Fable of Christmas.” It also appears as a part of The Names.⁸⁹ By publishing the account of Tolo as a children’s book, Momaday gave the story its own standing; he also included his own illustrations to complete the imagery and meaning. The story thus becomes a retelling in a new context, and it thereby gains a meaning it would not otherwise have. In this instance the story becomes not just one a child might hear at Jemez Pueblo but one with a much more universal value, suitable for a wide audience, including nonIndian children and their parents, who might read the children’s book but might not read The Names.

The story tells of a mute Indian child named Tolo. Although the boy’s grandfather has died, the boy recalls his experiences with the old man: “Tolo wanted to tell his parents of what he had seen and heard, but because he had no voice he lived alone with his memories, dreaming.”⁹⁰ Then, one Christmas, he has an extraordinary experience. After Mass he leaves the church and wanders to a great meadow where he and his grandfather used to go. Here Tolo enters the circle of wonder, where he shares the real meaning of fire with an elk, a wolf, and an eagle. The story is especially interesting in that although it takes place on Christmas Eve, the focus of the story is on the boy’s encounter with the wild animals in the wilderness rather than on the birth of Jesus. This encounter gives Tolo his voice by the end of the story.

Although Circle of Wonder has not received much critical attention, a few reviewers have noted that Momaday skillfully fuses Native American and Christian traditions in the story. Of the illustrations, Alan Tack writes that they “are evocative both in their richness of color and in their simplicity of image.”⁹¹ Another reviewer notes that the book “features Momaday’s singular, impressionistic artwork.”⁹²

The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages is a collection of essays and other short prose pieces written over a thirty-five-year span of Momaday’s career. Chronologically, the earliest essay is “The Morality of Indian Hating,” first published in 1964, which Momaday recalls that he wrote as “a student at Stanford in 1962 or 1963.”⁹³ A few pieces were originally published in Momaday’s column in Viva: Northern New Mexico’s Sunday Magazine in the early 1970s. Other essays are more recent. “Granada,” for example, is a travel account that first appeared in The New York Times in 1996. The collection is divided into three parts, with the essays grouped loosely by topic. The first part, “The Man Made of Words,” comprises essays about language and identity. The second part, “Essays in Place,” features pieces in which Momaday develops his ideas concerning the sacredness of place: “We Native Americans in particular, but all of us, need to restore the sacred to our children” (76). The third part, “The Storyteller and His Art,” consists of nineteen “passages” on various topics.

After a brief introduction in which Momaday discusses the importance of language and the stories his father told him, the collection begins appropriately with the essay “The Arrowmaker,” delivered as part of a talk at the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars in 1970. The essay recounts the legend, presented earlier in The Way to Rainy Mountain, of an arrow maker who identifies a man outside of his tepee as an enemy because he does not understand the Kiowa language. It is absolutely fitting that the collection begin with this essay because, in Momaday’s view, the “arrowmaker is preeminently the man made of words” (11). Like Momaday, this man “has consummate being in language” (11). Since the arrow maker protects himself and his wife by speaking, the story highlights the importance of language. The legend came to Momaday through his father; thus, it embodies the importance of storytelling. Presented in written form in the essay, it becomes an embodiment and extension of an oral tradition. The story deals with a life-and-death situation and thus suggests the importance of and risk involved in storytelling and language. In Momaday’s words, “Language determines the arrow-maker, and his story determines our literary experience” (12).

If the story of the arrow maker is taken to demonstrate the general thesis that “reality consists in language” (11), as Momaday suggests, one can appreciate the importance that Momaday attributes to language, words, and stories in several of the essays throughout the collection. In “The Native Voice in American Literature” he describes someone who, millennia ago, “fixes the wonderful image in his mind’s eye” by brushing pigment onto a wall: “All the stories of all the world proceed from the moment in which he makes his mark. All literatures issue from his hand” (13). But American literature predates even this first cave painting: “oral tradition is the foundation of all literature” (14). In support of this contention Momaday presents and discusses several native songs or chants from the oral tradition. At their best these chants “transcend their merely symbolic value and become one with the idea they express” (18).

One of the fundamental ideas the essays express concerns the connection between the oral tradition and the landscape. Momaday articulates this idea in “A First American Views His Land,” in which he suggests that the voice of the old woman Ko-sahn “proceeded from the land itself” (38). Indeed, he writes, the “oral tradition is rich with songs that celebrate natural beauty” (38). Even in the essays devoted primarily to an explanation of his land ethic, Momaday expresses his belief in the indivisibility of word and landscape. The essay “On Indian-White Relations” articulates what he calls an American Indian attitude toward the land: “not an idea but a perception on the far side of ideas, an act of under-standing as original and originative as the Word. The dichotomy that most closely informs the history of Indian-white relations is realized in language” (52). In “A Divine Blindness: The Place of Words in a State of Grace” Momaday writes of the centrality of language, especially written language, to human experience. After briefly tracing the history of the written word, he concludes by stating that “Paradise is a library. It is also a prairie and a plain, and it is a place of the imagination, the place of words in a state of grace” (88).

In “The American West and the Burden of Belief” Momaday again writes of the importance of language. In briefly recounting the experiences of three notable men of the West—George Armstrong Custer, William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and Plenty Horses—he argues that they were finally blind to the ambiguities of the landscape that could be understood only through language. Custer and Cody, of course, were part of Western or European-American literate culture and therefore could not perceive the landscape as sacred. The departure from the oral tradition, Mbmaday maintains, “was also the dilution of the sacred, and the loss of a crucial connection with the real” (105). Emblematic of Custer’s inability to see the sacred was his failure to hear the warning given him after he led a massacre of the members of the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle’s band on the Washita River in western Oklahoma. Custer was warned that if he made war on the Indians again he would be killed, but he did just this on the banks of the Little Bighorn River in Montana, where he and his men were slaughtered. Plenty Horses was a young Lakota who spent five years at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. When he returned to his home, he was rejected by the other members of the tribe; in an attempt to regain their acceptance, he killed a cavalry officer. Momaday argues that Plenty Horses was robbed of his Native American voice at the school and thus failed to see the sacred in the landscape: “He could not realize his vision, for his old way of seeing was stolen from him in the white man’s school” (106).

The selections in the second part of The Man Made of Words, “Essays in Place,” also stress the importance of recognizing the sacred in the landscape: “Where words and place come together, there is the sacred” (111). This section consists primarily of travel essays. Momaday records his thoughts about travel from New Mexico and the American West to France, Russia, Bavaria, Granada, and back to New Mexico and Rainy Mountain Creek in Oklahoma. One of the unifying themes of these journeys is the traveler’s recognition of the sacred. In “Sacred Places” Momaday writes about the mystery of the holy, its final unknowability, and the desperate need of humans to preserve sacred places, “to preserve the spiritual centers of our earth, those places that are invested with the dreams of our ancestors and the well-being of our children” (116-117). In “Revisiting Sacred Ground” and “Navajo Place Names” Momaday describes several places sacred to Native Americans (such as Medicine Wheel, Devils Tower, and the Black Hills) and insists that they be recognized and preserved. He begins the essay “Navajo Place Names” with a statement that might be said to sum up much of the idea he invests in the sacredness of place: “Where language touches the earth, there is the holy, there is the sacred” (124). He writes that “the essential things of the world and the universe are in place, in place” (126, Momaday’s emphasis).

From the western United States, Momaday travels to the caves at Altamira, Spain, to show his reader the cave paintings there. As in “The Native Voice in American Literature,” he argues in “Sacred Images” that there is a fundamental similarity or connection between cave painting (or any painting or drawing, for that matter) and writing. Thus, he argues the rock paintings of the Southwest in the United States are a beginning of American literature. Similarly, the cave paintings in Spain and at Lascaux and Grotte Chauvet in France tell stories. Although modern viewers may not know what the stories are, they certainly feel that the paintings tell stories: “To behold them is to see into the spiritual caverns of our evolution, which is to see into eternity. We can ask no more, and we must not ask less, of art” (131).

The next stop is the Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius of Radonezh, Russia, a place Momaday first saw when he taught in Moscow in 1974. Here the traveler is inspired by the devotion of the Russian pilgrims he sees and meets. He compares their ability to survive and persevere with the similar abilities of American Indians: “I had seen and heard in the faces and voices of the pilgrims the kind of faith and resolve that has survived generations of persecution and privation. . . . Here was a point on the planet where survival and renewal are one” (137-138).

In “Bavarian Byways” Momaday takes his reader into southern Germany, where he is especially interested in the medieval city of Regensburg on the Danube River. He recalls the Bavarian city as one of the “extraordinary places” of his experience, primarily because of its Dom, St. Peter’s Cathedral, which dominates the skyline. Momaday calls it the darkest cathedral he has ever seen, “inside and out, and its darkness is a thing to be pondered, for such darkness expresses the medieval intelligence more impressively than many architectural monuments” (140, 141). The Roman-built Steinerne Brucke (Stone Bridge) across the Danube and the city’s narrow cobbled streets also fascinate the traveler. From Bavaria, Momaday returns to Spain, where he mixes history and geography, commenting that “a kind of sadness underlies the beauty of Granada” (149). He sees the natural setting as complementary to the buildings as he tours the Alhambra. Because of its beauty, profundity, and mystery, he writes, it is a place “to seek out and behold with wonder” (153).

In “New Mexico: Passage into Legend” Momaday completes the circle, as it were, by returning to his home state, “La Tierra del Encanto,” the land of enchantment, which for him “comprehends the richness and variety of the continent itself” (154). As the subtitle of the essay suggests, this is a journey into the legendary, in which the author recounts some of the life of his idol, Billy the Kid. The essay gracefully meanders through history as the present-day Momaday walks the streets of Lincoln, New Mexico, where Billy the Kid made his storied escape from the courthouse jail.

As Momaday begins the second part of The Man Made of Words with a description of Carnegie, Oklahoma, where his father and grandfather danced, he completes the section with a homecoming: “The Homestead on Rainy Mountain Creek.” In this essay Momaday recalls his own past and to some extent that of the Kiowa people, much as he did in The Way to Rainy Mountain and The Names. He recalls his boyhood excitement at visiting with old people who “imaged” for him “the bygone . . . and infinitely exciting time of the centaurs, the warriors, and the buffalo hunters” (165). Especially important is his recollection of Koi-khan-hodle (Dragonfly), his father’s friend who painted his face and prayed every morning before dawn. The conclusion of the essay perhaps sums up how Momaday regards and fuses the landscape, the imagination, and storytelling: “Home. Homestead. Ancestral home. If I close my eyes, I can see Dragonfly there beyond the hedge. I can see my young parents walking toward the creek in the late afternoon, a coppery light on the path. I can hear my grandmother’s voice in the rooms of the house and in the cool corners of the arbor. And these are sacred recollections of the mind and heart” (166). This passage suggests how Momaday values landscape, but it also speaks to his notion of blood memory. Through his imagination he hears the voices of his ancestors, both in his mind and in his heart.

The third section of The Man Made of Words, “The Storyteller and His Art,” consists of nineteen short passages covering a wide range of topics and eras. In “Chopetl” Momaday recalls how, when he was a boy of ten, the son of the explorer Viktor Firpo gave him an ancient slingshot (called a dullimer or chopetl). Using the language of the explorers, Momaday describes how Firpo’s expedition “was attacked by savages and decimated” (196). Momaday concludes that the slingshot has “grown weary of war” (197). In “I Wonder What Will Happen to the Land” Momaday laments the current mistreatment of the environment in contemporary America: “What we have developed all too frequently is not the land, but a crisis in our relationship to the land, a state of emergency” (187).

Momaday also draws on and adds details to some of the episodes from The Names. In Pohd-lohk’s diary he reads of the Kiowa people’s confused response to the night in 1833 when there was a meteor shower. He retells a story about buying a dog from a Navajo man, and he tells about how a Navajo woman, anxious to see the photograph his father had taken of her, finally did not seem to like the picture. Momaday speculates on what might have motivated her response. Perhaps she saw herself differently, or perhaps the photograph “in its dim, mechanical eye . . . had failed to see into her real being” (175).

In several of these short essays Momaday recalls people who have been important to him—whether or not he ever actually met them. He describes his father’s friend Quincy Tahoma, who let the young Momaday “into the inner circle” by including him in excursions to the mountains and letting him listen to them talk “in the manner of old Indian men” (182). He honors Jay Silverheels, the Mohawk who played Tonto in the television series, by suggesting that he is the stuff of legend: “isn’t it possible that the Lone Ranger is a figment of Tonto’s vivid imagination?” (184) Momaday recalls that Edmund Wilson, a scholarly friend and mentor, remembers after thirty years that he had known “a beautiful Indian girl named Tersita” (199). In “A Turning Point” Momaday tells the story about his friend Nelson, who, while traveling through Spain, met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen: “Oh, my friend, how I loved her! Completely, do you see? And a more perfect love there never was” (178). Momaday asks his friend why he didn’t “steal the woman and run away with her.” Nelson answers, “Because I was twenty-five . . . and full of understanding.... If only I had been twenty and known nothing” (179).

As might be expected, Momaday again shows his enthusiasm for the history and landscape of the Southwest in several of the passages in the final section of The Man Made of Words. He writes about places of special importance, such as Monument Valley, Canyon de Chelly, and a beach in Santa Barbara where he rescued an octopus and placed it back in the water. He speculates about whether the octopus might have been “struggling to take my presence into account” (208). Momaday asks that readers remember Antonio Jose Martinez, “The Dark Priest of Taos,” immortalized as the antagonist of Father Jean Latour in Willa Cather’s novel Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), as the educator and advocate of literacy that he truly was. Momaday also re-creates an historical moment in the life of Billy the Kid: he describes Sister Rosa Maria Segale’s meeting the outlaw and asking him to spare the lives of the physicians of Trinidad. When she meets him again, he is chained hand and foot; his leg irons are spiked to the jail floor. Billy says, “I wish I could place a chair for you, Sister” (203).

In the last of these passages Momaday recalls having a drink with his friend Drum Hadley. Drum, a cowboy himself, sees “a vaquero, a real one” and acknowledges that because he and the stranger are both cowboys they intuitively have a sense of each other. Momaday ponders this and writes: “It was a strange moment for me, the moment of truth and exile, as it were. I was an Indian among cowboys” (211). Coming as it does at the end of the essay that concludes the collection, this remark carries special significance. At the same time, however, the comment seems out of place and disjointed. Why, one must ask, would the narrator of such a volume, a Western writer who moves so easily and freely among Indian and non-Indian friends throughout the text, suddenly feel a “loneliness, a sense of exclusion and disaffection” (211)? Underlying all these essays is Momaday’s feeling that, like his father’s friend Tahorria, he “had been severed for many years in his mind from the world in which his roots were planted. This is not a rare affliction among Indians, especially those who have the old ways fixed forever in their blood” (180). Perhaps like Tahoma, Momaday feels to some degree this alienation from the landscape and from the self.

John Motyka calls The Man Made of Words “a fine collection of essays and occasional pieces with a seeming contradiction."⁹⁴ For Motyka the contradiction is not a result of Momaday’s feelings of alienation; rather, he feels that Momaday contradicts himself when he says that he privileges sound over meaning but then concludes that meaning is after all more important than sound, insofar as language formulates meaning. Motyka seems to imply that Momaday overcomes this apparent contradiction through his integrity and skill as a writer. In another review Neil Schmitz calls the collection “problematic” but does little to explain what he means or what is particularly problematic about the collection. He does, however, write that the book is “Momaday in a nutshell, essential Momaday."⁹⁵ Since the essays collected in The Man Made of Words span the author’s entire career to the date of its publication, this seems a fair assessment.

In the Bear’s House. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Like The Way to Rainy Mountain, In the Bear’s House is a collection of works in several different genres and makes liberal use of previously published material. The book includes a collection of Momaday’s bear paintings, eight bear-God dialogues, several poems about bears, and two prose passages, also about bears. Despite the heavy presence of the bear, Momaday proclaims in the introduction that “this is not a book about Bear... . I am less interested in defining the being of Bear than in trying to understand something about the spirit of wilderness, of which Bear is a very particular expression.”⁹⁶

“The Bear-God Dialogues” introduce the reader to Urset (the bear) and Yahweh (the creator) through a series of conversations, analogous to Platonic dialogues. Urset comes to Yahweh because he is troubled, but he has no words to describe his troubles; or, perhaps more accurately, he is troubled because, as he says, “all words confound me” (18). In contrast, Yahweh “was the word”: “We are indivisible, the word and I. I Am is my name” (17). Urset says to Yahweh, “Berries. I am a bear, and it is in my nature, as I understand it, to relish berries, but is it in your nature to do so?” (23). Urset asks Yahweh to make a prayer for him, which he does, remarking that he prays unceasingly: “It is what I do; it is what I am” (26). Yahweh also offers wisdom about dreaming and storytelling: “Dreaming is the soul’s perception of the world” (29), he says. About storytelling, he says, “A story must have a shape, a design, and it must have some consequential meaning” replete with “wonder, delight, belief, and grace” (34-35). He adds, “All stories are true” (37).

The topics of discussion between Urset and Yahweh include several other issues. On the subject of evolution, for example, Yahweh declares that the fact that humans have language shows that they are more highly evolved than nonhumans, and poetry is “the highest of all languages” (39). Urset considers the concept of everlasting life (without a physical body) and questions the value of having a soul: “A while ago my children were warm and full of motion. They danced and they sang and they climbed trees. . . . What happened to them? ... I want to feel the solid resistance of their flesh. I don’t want to touch the shadows of their having been” (44-45). In the final dialogue Yahweh considers the concepts of time and timelessness: “Artificial tenses, the past and future of which you speak, mere extensions of the present. I am. You are. Time is” (48), he says.

In the Bear’s House includes nineteen poems whose tone ranges—like the bear pictures themselves—from the serious and philosophical to the light and playful. The playful tone is seen in “The Corporeal Bear”:

You are too large for a quatrain.
You must be fitted in such verse
As will your prominence contain,
Lines neither narrow, neither terse,
Et cetera, et cetera. (55)

Momaday comments with similar playfulness on the constellations in “The Blind Astrologers”:

They ascend the ancient bridge
and lay fishes in our way,
so to feed us and our dogs. (58).

In “Prayer for Words” the speaker seems to be a bear who, ironically, uses words to lament the lack of words: “I could tell of the splintered sun. I could / Articulate the night sky, had I words” (60). More serious yet is “Summons,” in which the speaker seems to be a bear in search of “the bear doctor”:

I have come from the mountains to die.
I have come from my home to go forth.
Where is the bear doctor? Where is he?
Who will outfit me for my journey? (72).

The death of a bear is also the subject of “Notes on a Hunting Scene.” In this prose poem the emotional impact of the bear’s death and a woman’s unaccountable laughter—“like ice rattling in a tin cup”—seem to work against the rhetoric of the poem, which argues for consolation through ritual: “The bear lay lifeless on the sledge. Sooner or later the singer would come, and everything would have its place in the relief of ritual” (71). With these lines the poem ends; no singer has come. In the delightful prose poem “Moscow Circus” the speaker describes his company on a Moscow subway: “At Park Kultury the bear got on, and I lost my place in the book.” The speaker stares and tries to memorize the appearance of his fellow passenger. After getting off the train, the speaker looks back: “In his window the bear had turned to look at me. Did he smile? Was he trying to memorize me? His was the last face I saw as the carriage vanished ...” (69).

Momaday’s fascination with and love of bears is evident throughout this collection. In “Revenant” the speaker acknowledges his indebtedness to the bear, the “spirit” which “summons me and confirms/My passage” (74). In “The Print of the Paw,” another prose poem, the speaker discovers a paw print in fallen leaves, a print from which he imagines the whole bear: “Were I to construct a model of this bear, based upon this single print, it would turn out to be a mythic and wondrous thing. . . . And I would be an artist of the first rank. . . . And all who should lay eyes upon my work would know . . . how much I love the bear whose print this is” (61).

“Passages,” the final section of In the Bear’s House, includes the two longest prose pieces. “The Bear Hunt” is a verbatim retelling of a story Francisco tells near the end of House Made of Dawn. Once again, Momaday reuses old material in a new context, thereby continuing a larger, longer story, reminiscent of the oral tradition, in which stories are told and retold in various contexts that inevitably give them new meaning. “The Bear Hunt” as Francisco tells it suggests a young man’s close relationship with both the literal earth and with the traditions of his ancestors, who lived in direct daily contact with the earth and animals. Though Francisco does indeed kill the bear, it is a necessary and appropriate killing as described in the novel. The night before the killing, the hunter senses the nearness of the bear: “he did not want to break the stillness of the night, for it was holy and profound; it was rest and restoration, the hunter’s offering of death and the sad watch of the hunted, waiting somewhere away in the cold darkness and breathing easily of its life, brooding around at last to forgiveness and consent. . .” (210).⁹⁷

Critics of House Made of Dawn tend to agree that this passage suggests Francisco’s affinity with the natural world. In the context of In the Bear’s House, the passage takes on an added and perhaps contradictory dimension. It is helpful to recall Momaday’s comment in the introduction that the book represents an attempt “to understand something about the spirit of wilderness, of which Bear is a very particular expression” (9). In In the Bear’s House, then, the hunt seems somewhat out of place, told as it is from a human perspective. Indeed, the reader sees the bear only at the moment of his being shot; and even then, the bear is described through the eyes of the hunter. This is an appropriate point of view in Francisco’s coming-of-age narrative, but it jars the reader in this new context, recalling as it does Urset’s lament from the dialogues: “In the caves are the bones of my children, Great Mystery. I go there and look upon them, and I shudder and weep. What are these lifeless, brittle remains?” (45).

The second piece in this last section, “The Transformation,” describes the transformation of boy into bear—told in Tosamah’s sermon in House Made of Dawn and retold in both the introduction to The Way to Rainy Mountain and The Ancient Child. Indeed, the text of “The Transformation” is identical to that in The Ancient Child, beginning with the prologue that describes the eight children at play, the disappearance of the sisters, the subsequent sighting of the boy, and the transformation itself. Again, one can see that Momaday retells the story of Tsoai (Devils Tower). He simply tells an age-old tale in another context, again recalling the oral tradition. In its new context, the transformation tale suggests that the wilderness Momaday is interested in exploring in this collection is indeed at the very heart of man, much as is the bear itself. “You are not a man,” Yahweh tells Urset, “But you are manlike” (23).

In addition to selections of writing, In the Bear’s House includes fourteen of Momaday’s illustrations. Six of them are in color and eight are not. Of the eight that do not use color, all but one consist of agitated contours that are not uniform. The combination of thick, thin, heavy, light, and disconnected lines suggests spontaneity, movement, and even the pulse of the artist’s hand or of the bear’s heart. Such gestures in the sketches are especially appropriate, for example, in the illustration opposite “The Transformation” (91), in which the drawing itself seems to be in a state of becoming. Indeed, the composition becomes a bear only after one studies the sketch or considers it in relation to the narrative that follows it. Perhaps Momaday expresses this sense himself in the poem “Cave Painting.” Addressing a cave painting, the speaker speculates,

Stillborn in pigment, you keep
the posture of becoming
and are informed by that dread
of the darkness that is art. (79)

Since the bear sketches are without other figures, shapes, or background, they also create meaningful empty space. That is, the empty space on the one hand suggests the centrality of the bear—especially given that the figure usually takes up most of the page—but on the other hand, the drawings provide space in which viewers can imaginatively complete the picture for themselves.

In addition to having various hues, the six paintings in color tend to have sharper, more-distinct contours than do the other sketches. There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part these bears stand out distinctly against backgrounds that fill with color what in the other drawings remains empty space. Thus, although the colored bear portraits are also without accessories, the empty space has value other than what the viewer attributes to it. Brush strokes tend to be obvious even though the colors in general (and especially in the background) tend toward a low saturation, leaving the suggestion of empty space for the viewer’s mind to wander around in. The exception to this low-saturation rule might be found in the standing pink bear. The painting is unrealistic but distinctly outlined and brightly painted with a brownish-yellow background. This illustration accompanies the poem “The Bear.” It is an interesting choice on Momaday’s part, because the poem itself describes an old, maimed bear who suddenly “is gone, whole, / without urgency, from sight” (53). The pink bear, in contrast, stands powerfully on the page and remains vividly in the reader’s eye.

ART IMITATING LIFE

As is clear from the interviews in which Momaday has talked openly about his life and work and from his two autobiographical books, The Names and The Way to Rainy Mountain, a biographical approach to his work is not only appropriate but is also perhaps somewhat necessary. Momaday insists that one is who one imagines oneself to be. In this sense his art imitates life, certainly, but his life also imitates his art. In addition to the two clearly autobiographical works, his other writings also reveal interesting parallels between his works and his life.

As many critics have suggested, and as Momaday himself has admitted, there are many biographical elements in House Made of Dawn. Perhaps the most obvious example is his use of the story of the Kiowa migration (as he imagines it) as one of Tosamah’s sermons. There are parallels between the author and the protagonist. Abel is a young Pueblo Indian (not much older than Momaday himself at the time he wrote the novel) who, as Momaday had done, leaves his home at Jemez Pueblo to enter the larger world. Perhaps a more apt parallel is that between the author and Tosamah, the Kiowa trickster and storyteller of the novel.

Readers may find similarities between the novel and Momaday’s life by comparing episodes that reappear as (or turn out to be) biographical or historical elements as recounted in The Names. Momaday describes boyhood incidents in the memoir that also appear in the novel. The coming of the Navajos to Jemez at the time of the Feast of Santiago is one good example. In The Names their arrival is described: “From the yard of the day school I looked southward, along the road to San Ysidro, and there was a train of covered wagons, extending as far as I could see” (129). A similar description appears in the novel: “On the old road to San Ysidro, the first covered wagons had come into view” (69).

The basis for the structure of the novel, the dawn run, also has its roots in Jemez tradition and Momaday’s experience. In the early spring, coinciding with the clearing of the irrigation ditches, the men participated in a dawn run, described in The Names: “at dawn there was a footrace.... I saw the runners pass in front of the day school in the cold gray morning, running evenly, their breath visible on the dark air, stripped to their waists. They ran without effort” (142). This passage may be compared with the opening of the novel: “Abel was running. He was alone and running, hard at first, heavily, but then easily and well... . He was naked to the waist” (1). The chicken pull also appears in both the novel and the memoir. In The Names Momaday remembers that one of the ablest riders of the village “took the rooster up and held it high in the air, its wings beating furiously. He turned then and walked his horse back to the west end, among the other riders, and one of these he began to beat heavily with the rooster about the head and shoulders” (144). In House Made of Dawn the albino is the expert horseman: “The white man looked down the Middle toward the other riders and held the rooster up and away in his left hand while its great wings beat the air” (43). He has successfully pulled the rooster from the ground and now beats Abel with it: “he rode beside Abel, turned suddenly upon him, and began to flail him with the rooster” (44).

A biographical reading of the eagle scene—another crucial early episode—in House Made of Dawn suggests a motive for Abel’s killing the eagle he has caught. In The Names Momaday recalls that in Jemez “there was kept a golden eagle in a cage. Always, in passing, I spoke to it; and then, for a long moment, it held me fast in its regard, which was like doom. There was much shame between us, at the wire” (147). Clearly it troubled the young Momaday to see this caged bird, much as it horrified Abel to think of his bird in a similar situation. Looking at the eagle in the night, “The sight of it filled him with shame and disgust. He took hold of its throat in the darkness and cut off its breath” (22). Momaday relates another episode concerning the power of shame in The Way to Rainy Mountain, where he tells of a fine hunting horse whose rider turned the horse during a charge: “That was a bad thing. The hunting horse died of shame” (70).

Momaday also used biographical elements in his second novel, The Ancient Child. The character Grey’s association with Billy the Kid, for instance, is drawn from Momaday’s own childhood. As he said in a conversation with Charles L. Woodard, “In this novel, one of my characters fantasizes about Billy the Kid in nearly the same way that I did when I was a child. So it’s something that has become a part of the life of my mind.”⁹⁸ In The Names the young Momaday imagines himself avenging Billy’s death: “go for your gun Garrett gun Garrett gun Garrett I’ll give you the chance you never gave poor Billy Garrett go for it what you’re not afraid are you Garrett . . . just say that I’m a friend of the man you shot down in cold blood . . . Billy and me we rode the range together” (111). In The Ancient Child Grey imagines meeting Billy the Kid at Arroyo Seco. She sits across the table from him, describing his face, hands, and speech:

. . . his speech was plain and direct—and

disarmingly polite.

“Thank you for coming,” he said.

“I will go with you,” I replied.

And this is how it began: and this is the

strange and true story of my life with Billy the Kid. (184)

In the Presence of the Sun includes a section comprised of the poems that make up Grey’s chapbook in The Ancient Child; the section has the same title in both works: “The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid.” In In the Presence of the Sun Momaday writes that as he rode his horse named Pecos he imagined himself as the enemy of desperados and hos-tile Indians, as the one who saved a “lovely young girl” who was in need of saving. “After a time Billy the Kid was with me on most of those adventures. . . . We got on well together in the main, and he was a good man to have along in a fight” (47). Thus, Grey’s involvement with Billy the Kid in The Ancient Child clearly reflects the imagination of Momaday himself.

Momaday’s interest in recounting the expert horsemanship of a Navajo mentioned in The Names, that of the albino in House Made of Dawn, and that of Grey in The Ancient Child all perhaps have their genesis in his own expert horsemanship. Speaking of his horse, Pecos, Momaday writes in In the Presence of the Sun that “we two came to a good understanding of each other, I believe. I did a lot of riding in those days, and I got to be very good at it. My Kiowa ancestors, who were centaurs, should have been proud of me” (47). In The Ancient Child the reader sees how Grey becomes an expert rider through hard, diligent practice. Practicing to pull a matchstick from the ground while riding past on her horse, Grey makes several unsuccessful attempts; on the eighth, “she took the match from the ground, and she was elated. She was somewhat battered and bruised, but she was triumphant” (169).

The Ancient Child is also revealing about the inner life of Momaday. Locke Set man identifies with Devils Tower and the bear, and he is an artist. Speaking about the novel (the working title of which was “Set") in a conversation with Woodard, Momaday described his affinity with the Devils Tower and the bear: “It 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. . . . Set, my work in progress, is about the boy who turns into a bear, and in a sense I am writing about myself. I’m not writing autobiography, but I am imagining a story that proceeds out of my own experience of the bear power."⁹⁹ Thus, it is easy to identify Momaday with the character Set, the artist who straddles the two worlds, Western and Kiowa, and who finally becomes the bear. Set’s transformation is not merely literal. Referring to the Kiowa legend of the bear and his sisters, Momaday speaks of the complexity of the bear and his relationship to it: “My notion is that the boy and the bear are divisible. That after the end of the story, the bear remains and the boy remains and they come together now and then. The boy becomes a boy again and becomes a bear again. . . . Probably in every generation there is a reincarnation of the bear—the boy bear. And I feel that I am such a reincarnation, and I am very curious about it."¹⁰⁰

In The Ancient Child, Set is led toward the bear and toward becoming the bear. The prologue retells the story of the Kiowa boy who becomes a bear and chases his sisters. But the potential transformation of Set himself becomes readily apparent only near the end of the novel. When Grey’s mother, Lela, tells him that he has been sick and that the bear stands against him, Set replies:

“Yes. I am sick. I have been sick for a long time, but I hope to be well and strong. I can be well and strong with Grey’s help—she knows how to help me. I have become stronger since I have been here, because of Grey. . . .

“I have been afflicted. The bear stands against me. . . .

“Aoo’. I am the bear.” (295)

In this passage Momaday presents an ambiguity toward the bear that is similar to the ambiguity he expressed in an interview. He told Woodard he had been aware of the bear power’s relation to him since he was about twenty-five years old: “I have struggled with my bear power through those years. I think I have come to terms with it. I feel good about it."¹⁰¹ Momaday’s daughter Jill has corroborated this notion, maintaining that her father “really believes that he does turn into the bear.” Momaday has said that the bear spirit “comes and goes, and he’s a very creative spirit. . . . I think some of my closest, my most ominous, the times I’ve been in greatest danger have also had to do with the bear."¹⁰²

In the Bear’s House takes on special meaning in regard to Moma-day’s affinity with the bear and bear medicine. In “The Bear-God Dialogues” the bear comes to the creator, the Great Mystery, because he is troubled about language: “all words confound me,” he says, “yet silence resonates among all these words, and silence disturbs me most of all” (18). One need read only as far as the introduction to learn of the identification Momaday feels with Bear: “I am acquainted with Bear, indeed more than acquainted. Bear and I are one, in one and the same story” (9). Thus, from his naming at the foot of the rock tree (Devils Tower) when he was a baby through the 1999 publication of In the Bear’s House, Moma-day’s fascination and connection with the bear power has been an important part of his life and writing.

Given the striking similarities between his writing and his life, the question arises as to what Momaday has imagined and what actually took place. But to ask the question at all is to miss an important characteristic of his art. One cannot, or at least Momaday does not, draw a hard and fast line between what took place historically and what takes place in the imagination. With the historical figure of Ko-sahn, for instance, Momaday evokes her physical presence, long after she has died, through his writing. Her reply to his suggestion that he has imagined her and that she is not real demonstrates his sense of the power of the imagination. She replies: “If I am not here in this room, grandson, then surely neither are you."¹⁰³

MOMADAY’S WORKS IN HISTORY

To appreciate the place of Momaday’s works in history, one need only look as far as the many scholarly references to House Made of Dawn as the novel that initiated the American Indian literary renaissance. Momaday himself modestly de-emphasizes the importance of the novel in relation to that renaissance. When asked by Hartwig Isernhagen specifically how he accounted for its importance, the author laughed: “I think, maybe, the answer to that is that it is simply timing, that it appeared at a time when the world was ready for it, in 1968."¹⁰⁴ Scholars of American Indian literature, however, are more assertive about the place and importance of House Made of Dawn. LaVonne Ruoff, for example, writes simply that “Momaday has been a major influence on contemporary literature."¹⁰⁵

Gerald Vizenor, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and prolific Anishinaabe author and scholar, has praised Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, calling it “a great act of imagination. Momaday has certainly given us the contemporary voice that has a kind of courage to speak with complexity and diversity.” That “contemporary voice,” coupled with the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Momaday for the novel, Vizenor says, “brought attention to what was thought to have been a nonexistent literature."¹⁰⁶ He claims that shortly after the publication of House Made of Dawn Charles R. Larson published the first critical study of Native American fiction, American Indian Fiction. Although Larson’s study did not actually come out until 1978, a full decade after the publication of Momaday’s novel, Vizenor’s point is well taken. The publication of the novel initiated a renaissance, agrees Vizenor, but he also praises the book in its own right. In an essay on Momaday in Updating the Literary West, Robert Gish states emphatically that Momaday’s novel “was a momentous book, both in itself and in what it signified and what it sparked: a renaissance of American Indian writing."¹⁰⁷ Of Momaday’s place in history, Arnold Krupat writes that “Momaday is not only the best known and most celebrated contemporary Native American writer, recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for fiction,” but he is also “the presumptive groundbreaker or forefather” for other American Indian writers.¹⁰⁸

ADAPTATIONS OF MOMADAY’S WORKS

In the 1970s Firebird Productions made a motion-picture version of House Made of Dawn; it was produced and directed by Richardson Morse and starred Larry Littlebird as Abel, Judith Doty as Milly, Jay Val-era as Ben Benally and John Saxon as Tosamah. Momaday said in a 1975 interview that the movie was made but never distributed.¹⁰⁹ In 1987 New Line Home Video released a video version of Morse’s production. Although Momaday, along with Morse, is given credit for writing the screenplay, the author himself claims that he “had very little to do with the film."¹¹⁰ It seems to have been Morse’s project: “The producer once said to me that he could make eight different films of the book."¹¹¹ Moma-day has commented, “I was happy with the film that was made. The external photography was good; the way the race and the man running worked as a thread throughout was well done. There were things that disappointed me. The acting was not particularly distinguished, but I’m not sure that distinguished acting was called for in the parts."¹¹²

As Momaday himself notes, perhaps the strongest features of the movie are the photography of the landscape and the way the dawn runner ties the whole together. Although, unlike the book, it begins with the scene of Francisco’s death, it then turns immediately to Abel’s dawn run. Since it ends with the run as well, the movie thus preserves the circular structure of the novel. From the dawn run the story is told as a series of flashbacks from the runner’s point of view, a technique that fairly represents the use of flashback in the novel. According to Momaday, “there are time confusions in the novel—distortions of time, which belong there because they reflect Abel’s mind in certain ways, valid ways."¹¹³ The movie attempts to depict these confusions through flashback.

In addition to the use of Abel’s running and flashbacks to retain the structural feel of the novel, the movie includes scenes not found in the novel that associate and link the forces of evil represented by the snake, the albino, and Martinez. Early in the movie Francisco pulls the boy Abel away from a coiled rattlesnake that immediately afterward seems to have been the albino himself. When Abel kills the albino, the scene cuts back and forth between the stabbing and scenes of an eagle fighting a rattlesnake. Later, two telling scenes are juxtaposed. In the first, Martinez, the corrupt cop in Los Angeles, walks into a bar, silencing the patrons, and in the next scene the albino walks into a bar on the reservation. This sequence artfully links Martinez and the albino.

As is obviously necessary in making a motion-picture adaptation, Morse cut several major elements of House Made of Dawn. Momaday comments that the movie “isn’t a representation of the whole novel, but it deals fairly with a part of the novel."¹¹⁴ One major element of the plot that was cut is that involving Angela Grace St. John. She makes no appearance in the movie; nor does Father Olguin have a role, except in the opening scene, where he is told Francisco is dead. Morse also altered the time setting of the novel. Rather than a post-World War II setting, the movie takes place in the late 1960s or early 1970s, making Abel a Vietnam War veteran. One drawback of this change is that it misses the point (in terms of historical accuracy, at any rate) of the Indian relocation policies of the 1950s. When asked about the change, Momaday comments that he was not really disturbed by the time period: “In order to reflect the time span and the convolutions of time in the film one would have had to make a very long and complicated film.”¹¹⁵

The movie gives perhaps undue attention to a scene involving a peyote ceremony. Though the ceremony is only a small part of the novel, it occupies a proportionally much greater and therefore more central place in the movie. (The scene lasts just over ten minutes in the seventy-seven-minute production, but it takes up only 5 pages in the 212-page book.) This difference can perhaps be attributed to the period when the movie was made (the early 1970s), when there was a popular interest in peyote culture and court cases involving Native Americans’ right to use the drug in religious ceremonies, finally granted in the Religious Freedom Act of 1978.

When asked about the emphasis in the movie on the peyote ceremony, Momaday responded that it was important for the scene to be done imaginatively “because the peyote ceremony itself is highly imaginative and very dramatic. It is an artistic consideration more than anything else.” As to whether or not depicting the tribal peyote ceremony was appropriate in the first place, Momaday seemed to beg the question: “There are ineffable qualities of Indian religious experience; there are sacred areas that are sacred because they are private, and those are unavailable to us. There are always questions of that kind, whether you are making films or writing books.” In other words, it seems as if he did not feel he had inappropriately revealed what should have remained private. In a broader sense, Momaday claimed that in making movies about American Indians, “We shouldn’t worry about the representation of the cultural realities; that should be secondary to the idea of making an exciting, creative, and inspirational film.”¹¹⁶

PUBLIC RESPONSE

As the books, articles, and dissertations devoted to Momaday indicate, his place among literary scholars is well established. Among the public—that is, among nonacademic readers—his position also seems secure. One indication of the favorable public response to Momaday is the fact that House Made of Dawn, The Way to Rainy Mountain, The Names, The Ancient Child, In the Presence of the Sun, The Man Made of Words, Circle of Wonder, and In the Bear’s House are still in print. Three books featuring interviews with Momaday are available: Woodard’s Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday (1989); Conversations with N. Scott Momaday (1997), a selection of interviews from various sources, edited by Schubnell; and Isernhagen’s Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong: Conversations on American Indian Writing (1999), which features an interview with Momaday. There are also book-length critical studies of Momaday’s works by Schubnell and Susan Scarberry-Garcia. Guides for students, teachers, and scholars are also still in print, including Kenneth M. Roemer’s 1988 study Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain.

That Momaday’s works are often taught to high-school and college students is evident from anthologies of American literature compiled in the 1990s by publishers such as Prentice Hall, Heath, Harper, and Norton. The Literary West: An Anthology of Western American Literature (1999) includes a selection from The Way to Rainy Mountain, as does an introduction to literature, Making Literature Matter: An Anthology for Readers and Writers (2000). Selections from Momaday’s writings are also often anthologized in college readers for writers, such as Common Ground: Reading and Writing about America’s Cultures (1994) and Essays in Context (2001). In such readers and anthologies Momaday often receives acknowledgment for his literary success: “The poetic qualities of Momaday’s prose have elicited almost universal praise; his talent for poetry is prodigious, and his experiments with style show his sensitivity to the way that form creates meaning.”¹¹⁷

Momaday’s writing is almost always featured in anthologies of American Indian literature produced both for the classroom and the general public. Such books include American Indian Literature: An Anthology (1979; revised, 1991), edited by Alan R. Velie; Native American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (1995), edited by Vizenor; Songs from This Earth on Turtle’s Back: Contemporary American Indian Poetry (1983), edited by Joseph Bruchac; Earth Song, Sky Spirit: Short Stories of the Contemporary Native American Experience(1993), edited by Clifford E. Trafzer; and Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1900-1970 (1994), edited by Paula Gunn Allen.

Momaday can be seen and heard in several videos. He is the narrator of A Matter of Promises, part one of the two-part Winds of Change (1990). The video chronicles Indian-white relations among three different tribes: Onondage, Navajo, and Lummi. Momaday is also the narrator of Our Vanishing Forests (1992), a video overview of the management of national forests in the United States. Momaday: Voice of the West (1996) is a video interview that introduces the writer and artist to a nonacademic audience. Momaday also contributed to the popular public-television documentary The West (1996).

NOTES

1. 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. 19.

2. N. Scott Momaday, The Journey of Tai-me (Santa Barbara, Cal.: Privately printed, 1967), n.p.

3. Ibid.

4. Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York: Perennial Library, 1989), p. 1. Subsequent parenthetical references in the text are to this edition.

5. Marion Hylton, “On a Trail of Pollen: Momaday’s House Made of Dawn,” Critique, 14, no. 2 (1972): 63.

6. Martha Scott Trimble, N. Scott Momaday, Boise State College Western Writers Series, no. 9 (Boise, Idaho: Boise State College Press, 1973), p. 24.

7. Floyd C. Watkins, In Time and Place: Some Origins of American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), pp. 158, 134.

8. Charles R. Larson, American Indian Fiction (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), pp. 78, 81.

9. Ibid., pp. 93, 79, 82, 84.

10. Paula Gunn Allen, “All the Good Indians,” in The 60s Without Apology, edited by Sohnya Sayres (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 229.

11. Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), pp. 100, 101, 105, 118.

12. Lawrence Evers, “Words and Place,” in Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction, edited by Richard Fleck (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1977), pp. 114, 116.

13. Linda Hogan, “Who Puts Together,” Denver Quarterly, 14, no. 4 (1980): 141.

14. Susan Scarberry-Garcia, Landmarks of Healing: A Study of House Made of Dawn (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), p. 2.

15. Allen, “Bringing Home the Fact,” in Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 571.

16. James Ruppert, Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), pp. 39, 3, 54.

17. Louis Owens, “Acts of the Imagination,” in his Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1992), pp. 95, 96.

18. Jane P. Hafen, “Pan-Indianism and Tribal Sovereignties in House Made of Dawn and The Names,” Western American Literature, 34 (Spring 1999): 7.

19. Bernard Hirsch, “Self-Hatred and Spiritual Corruption in House Made of Dawn,” Western American Literature, 17 (Winter 1983): 320.

20. Robert M. Nelson, Place and Vision: The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), p. 48.

21. Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez, Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), pp. 52, 55.

22. Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), p. 4. Subsequent parenthetical references in the text are to this edition.

23. Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday, p. 144.

24. Ibid., pp. 148, 157.

25. Kenneth Lincoln, “Tai-Me to Rainy Mountain,” American Indian Quarterly, 10 (Summer 1986): 105.

26. Vine Deloria Jr., quoted in Lincoln, “Tai-Me to Rainy Mountain,” p. 106.

27. Lincoln, “Tai-Me to Rainy Mountain,” p. 115.

28. Kenneth Fields, “More Than Language Means: Review of The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday,” Southern Review, new series 6 (January 1970): 203, 198, 199, 201.

29. Trimble, N. Scott Momaday, pp. 27, 32.

30. Alan R. Velie, Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), p. 28.

31. Arnold Krupat, The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 178, 180, 182, 187.

32. Schubnell, “Tribal Identity and the Imagination,” in Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, edited by Kenneth M. Roemer (New York: Modern Language Association, 1988), pp. 24-25.

33. See Lawana Trout, “The Way to Rainy Mountain: Arrow of History, Spiral of Myth,” in Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, pp. 32-40.

34. H. David Brumble, “The Way to Rainy Mountain and the Traditional Forms of American Indian Autobiography,” in Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, p. 45.

35. Joan Henley, “Exploring the Ways to Rainy Mountain,” in Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, p. 47.

36. Robert Berner, “The Way to Rainy Mountain: Structure and Language,” in Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, pp. 54, 58.

37. William Oandasan, “The Way to Rainy Mountain: Internal and External Structures,” in Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, p. 63.

38. Helen Jaskoski, “Image and Silence,” in Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, p. 69.

39. Gretchen M. Bataille, “Momaday and the Evocation of Identity,” in Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, pp. 79, 83.

40. Norma Wilson, “Discovering Our Natural Resources in Language and Place,” in Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, p. 85.

41. Scarberry-Garcla, “Beneath the Stars: Images of the Sacred,” in Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, p. 89.

42. Kimberly Blaeser, “The Way to Rainy Mountain: Momaday’s Work in Motion,” in Narrative Chance, edited by Gerald Vizenor (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), pp. 39, 42, 43, 50, 52.

43. Elaine A. Jahner, “Metalanguages,” in Narrative Chance, edited by Gerald Vizenor (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), pp. 157, 158, 160, 162, 168, 166.

44. Kristeva, quoted in Jahner, “Metalanguages,” p. 174.

45. Jahner, “Metalanguages,” p. 182.

46. Kurt Spellmeyer, ‘“Too Little Care’: Language, Politics, and Embodiment in the Life-World,” in Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World: Language, Culture, and Pedagogy, edited by Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard R. Glejzer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 258.

47. Chadwick Allen, “Blood (and) Memory,” American Literature, 71, no. 1 (1999): 101.

48. Arlene Elder, ‘“Dancing the Page’: Orature in N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain,” Narrative, 7 (October 1996): 273, 274, 279, 285.

49. Momaday, Colorado: Summer/Fall/Winter/Spring (Chicago: Rand McNally 1973), p. 6. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

50. Joseph Bruchac, “The Magic of Words: An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 99.

51. Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday, p. 206.

52. Momaday, “Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion,” in The Gourd Dancer (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 29. Subsequent references to poems included in both The Gourd Dancer and Angle of Geese and Other Poems are to this collection and appear parenthetically in the text.

53. Roger Dickinson-Brown, “The Art and Importance of N. Scott Momaday,” Southern Review, new series 14 (January 1978): 42, 45.

54. Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday, p. 198.

55. Momaday, quoted in Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday, p. 233.

56. Bruchac, “The Magic of Words: An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” p. 99.

57. Momaday, preface to In the Presence of the Sun (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), p. xx.

58. Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday, p. 189.

59. Ibid., pp. 189, 190.

60. Momaday, The Names: A Memoir (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), n.p. Subsequent parenthetical references in the text are to this edition.

61. Edward Abbey, “Memories of an Indian Childhood,” Harper’s, 254 (February 1977): 95.

62. Lincoln, Native American Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 105, 104.

63. Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday, pp. 168, 169.

64. Ibid., pp. 174, 177, 187.

65. Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, “The Plural Self,” in Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures, edited by Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett Jr., and Robert E. Hogan (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), pp. 42, 45.

66. Ibid., pp. 44, 51.

67. Hafen, “Pan-Indianism and Tribal Sovereignties in House Made of Dawn and The Names,” pp. 21, 15, 18.

68. Alien, “Blood (and) Memory,” pp. 93-94.

69. See Krupat, The Voice in the Margin, pp. 13-14, note 7.

70. Alien, “Blood (and) Memory,” pp. 101, 104.

71. Momaday, The Ancient Child (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990). Subsequent parenthetical references in the text are to this edition.

72. Edward B. St. John, review of The Ancient Child, Library Journal, 114 (August 1989): 165.

73. J. E. Deflyer, review of The Ancient Child, Choice, 27 (June 1990): 1697.

74. Ed Marston, review of The Ancient Child, New York Times Book Review, 31 December 1989, p. 14.

75. Kenneth M. Roemer, “Ancient Children at Play: Lyric, Petroglyphic, and Ceremonial,” Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction, edited by Richard F. Fleck (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1993), p. 111.

76. Ibid., pp. 110, 111.

77. Kathleen Donovan, Feminist Readings of Native American Literature: Coming to Voice (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), p. 98.

78. Catherine Rainwater, “Planes, Lines, Shapes, and Shadows: N. Scott Momaday’s Iconological Imagination,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 37, no. 4 (1995): 376.

79. Ibid., pp. 381, 384, 387.

80. Philip Heldrich, “Constructing the Self through Language and Vision in N. Scott Momaday’s The Ancient Child,” Southwestern American Literature, 22, no. 2 (1997): 11, 13, 16.

81. Susan L. Roberson, “Translocations and Transformations: Identity in N. Scott Momaday’s The Ancient Child,” American Indian Quarterly, 22, nos. 1 and 2 (Winter/Spring 1998): 32.

82. See, for example, “Wide Empty Landscape with a Death in the Foreground” and “Trees and Evening Sky,” in Carriers of the Dream Wheel, edited by Duane Niatum (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 90, 102.

83. Momaday, In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), p. 43. Subsequent quotations are cited parenthetically in the text.

84. Rainwater, “Planes, Lines, Shapes, and Shadows,” p. 381.

85. Ibid.

86. Momaday, quoted in Charles L. Woodard, Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 152.

87. Woodard, Ancestral Voice, p. 173.

88. Barbara Bode, “Imagination Man,” review of In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991, New York Times Book Review, 14 March 1993, p. 15.

89. See Momaday, The Names, pp. 137-142.

90. Momaday, Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), p. 10.

91. Alan Tack, review of Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story, Native Peoples, 8 (Fall 1994): 82.

92. Unsigned review of Circle of Wonder, Publishers Weekly, 241 (19 September 1994): 28.

93. Momaday, The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 76. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

94. John Motyka, review of The Man Made of Words, New York Times Book Review, 15 June 1997, p. 23.

95. Neil Schmitz, review of The Man Made of Words, Buffalo News, 8 June 1997, sec. F, p. 8.

96. Momaday, introduction to In the Bear’s House (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 9. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text.

97. See also Momaday, In the Bear’s House, p. 85.

98. Woodard, Ancestral Voice, p. 22.

99. Ibid., p. 13.

100. Ibid., p. 14.

101. Ibid., p. 13.

102. Momaday: Voice of the West, produced and edited by Jean Walkinshaw (Alexandria, Va.: PBS Video, 1996).

103. Momaday, “The Man Made of Words,” in Indian Voices, edited by Rupert Costo (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1970), p. 51.

104. Hartwig Isernhagen, Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong: Conversations on American Indian Writing (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), p. 35.

105. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990), p. 60.

106. Isernhagen, Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong, p. 96.

107. Robert Gish, “N. Scott Momaday,” in Updating the Literary West, edited by Thomas Lyon and others (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1997), p. 538.

108. Krupat, The Voice in the Margin, p. 177.

109. William T. Morgan Jr., “Landscapes: N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 54.

110. Bataille, “Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, p. 65.

111. Morgan, “Landscapes,” p. 55.

112. Bataille, “Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” p. 64.

113. Morgan, “Landscapes,” p. 55.

114. Ibid.

115. Bataille, “Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” p. 65.

116. Ibid., pp. 65, 66.

117. Sandra Fehl Tropp and Ann Pierson D’Angelo, eds., Essays in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 405.