N. Scott Momaday

A truism of canon formation: unrecognized literatures need breakthrough events to gain attention and legitimacy. For American Indian literatures, the key event occurred in 1969 when a young, unknown Kiowa painter, poet, and scholar won a Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, The House Made of Dawn (1968). This event is filled with ironies, two of which offer revealing insights about the way Native American literatures have gained acceptance, about the nature of N. Scott Momaday's writing, and about the significance of contemporary Native American literature.

The most obvious irony is the great delay in recognition of literatures in several hundred languages that include centuries, even millennia-old oral narratives, ceremonial liturgies, and autobiographical accounts, as well as histories, essays, autobiographies, poetry, and fiction written in English. The delay reflects not only the power of cultural blinders, but also a 19th- and 20th-century disciplinary territorialism that placed Indians within the anthropologist's and, occasionally, the historian's camp. Of course, the breakthrough suggests the importance of the 1960's commitment to civil rights and ethnic studies. It also reflects another truism: literary critics and teachers of literature tend to recognize examples of "new" literatures that are different enough to seem Authentically Other but familiar enough to be incorporated into current interpretive discourses. House Made of Dawn fulfilled these two requirements wonderfully. The authentically different quotient was provided by the focus on a Jemez Pueblo protagonist and two significant types of Indian settings (Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico and an urban relocation center, Los Angeles); by the use of English recreations of oral literatures, both specific (Kiowa narrative, Jemez ritual, Navajo song) and general (the circular structure of the novel); and by the authority of an Indian author who "looked Indian," was a "certified" tribal member (Kiowa), and had a marvelous performance style and voice. Accessibility came from the use of a familiar and popular genre (the novel) and from beautifully crafted sentences that could echo Hemingway's compactness, Faulkner's stream of consciousness, and the Bible (the protagonist's name is Abel).

House Made of Dawn's rich integrations of oral and written literatures suggest another irony of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize, one that offers specific insights into Momaday's fiction and poetry and into the significance of contemporary Native American fiction and poetry in general. House Made of Dawn is routinely associated with "Indian" or "Native American" literatures. These labels, though useful and appropriate, tend to obscure two dimensions of the multiculturalism (multitribalism, multiethnicity) expressed in Momaday's major works and in the best contemporary literature by Native American writers.

Momaday's background certainly fostered multicultural perspectives. Navarro Scott Mammedaty was born in 1934 in Lawton, Oklahoma, Kiowa country in southwestern Oklahoma. His autobiographical books, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) and The Names (1976) emphasize the importance of the Kiowa landscape and his father's tribal heritage. But his mother was one-eighth Cherokee and seven-eighths Euroamerican blends, and young Scott spent his childhood in several different Southwestern communities (Gallup, Shiprock, Tuba City, Chinle, San Carlos, Hobbes) where he was in close contact with Navajo and San Carlos Apache, as well as Hispanic and Anglo children. When Momaday was 12, his parents took teaching jobs at Jemez Pueblo. In his collection of prose poems and poetry In the Presence of the Sun (1992), Momaday recalls that his childhood experiences made him fall in love with Kiowa, Navajo, Jemez Pueblo, Spanish, and English words. After studying at a Virginia military academy, Momaday attended the University of New Mexico (B. A. in political science), the University of Virginia (briefly to study law), and Stanford (M.A. and Ph. D. in English), where he was strongly influenced by the poet and critic Ivor Winters, who supervised his dissertation, a critical edition of the poetry of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman that was published by Oxford University Press in 1965. Momaday has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Academy of American Poets Prize and has taught at Berkeley, Stanford, and, most recently, the University of Arizona. Emblematic of his varied achievements and background are the two honors he received in 1969: a Pulitzer and election into the Kiowa Gourd Clan.

Momaday's fiction and poetry make abundant use of his multicultural background. House Made of Dawn focuses on a returning Jemez Pueblo World War II veteran sent to prison and then relocated after he kills an albino he perceives as a witch. Indian viewpoints are not, however, limited to Jemez perspectives. In their own (sometimes self-serving, sometimes altruistic) ways, an L.A. Kiowa preacher and Pan-Indian peyote man, a relocated Navajo, a white rural farmer's daughter, and an urban doctor's wife all try to heal Abel from their perspectives. In Momaday's second novel, Ancient Child (1989), the protagonist is Set (Kiowa for bear), an adopted Kiowa-Anglo. He is a successful San Francisco artist going through a painful mid-life crisis. Set's primary healer Grey nurtures him toward an understanding of his Kiowa identity and the exhilarating and terrifying encounter with bear power that comes with that recognition. (Momaday expands on his concepts of bear power in his collection of poems, prose, and painting, In the Bear's House, 1999). Grey is one of Momaday's finest multicultural creations. She is mostly Navajo and Kiowa but also Mexican, French Canadian, Scotch, Irish, and English.

Even The Way to Rainy Mountain -- Momaday's intricate collection of Kiowa tribal and family stories, Kiowa history, and personal memories of Kiowa landscapes and people -- is a multicultural reading experience. It is his favorite book in part because it grew out of stories Momaday had heard since childhood. The first published version was a privately printed collection of Momaday's English versions of tribal and family narratives (The Journey of Tai-me, 1967). With the encouragement of Yvor Winters, Journey developed into a brilliant modernist experiment in juxtapositions of private memories and public oral and written literatures, including two of Momaday's best-known poems "Headwaters" and "Rainy Mountain Cemetery."

Momaday's important collections of poetry include The Gourd Dancer (1976, which includes Angle of Geese, 1974), In the Presence of the Sun (1992) and the poetry section of In the Bear's House (1999). They all demonstrate