Living Shield by Sarah Junek

The Mayborn: Where Real Stories Come Alive

Navarre Scott Momaday is a Native American writer and one of the most famous living writers of the Southwest. Referred to as “the dean of American Indian writers” by The New York Times, Scott Momaday holds an important place in the American literary arts. A poet, playwright, artist, essayist, memoirist and novelist, Momaday crafts — in language and imagery — majestic landscapes of a sacred culture. Momaday was the first Native American to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, House Made of Dawn. The novel led to the breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream. His brilliant use of language has garnered him countless awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Autry Museum of Western Heritage Humanities Prize, a prize from the Academy of American Poets and the “Mondello,” Italy’s highest literary honor.

It is through the spoken word that his dedication to his people’s heritage is most profoundly felt. Born a Kiowa in the Oklahoma Dustbowl, Momaday was raised on reservations in the Southwest, steeped in the oral tradition. “If I do not speak with care,” he has said, “my words are wasted. If I do not listen with care, words are lost.” Momaday is the founder and Chair of The Buffalo Trust, a non-profit foundation for the preservation and restoration of Native American culture and heritage. The Trust promotes the sharing of story, song, art and history in Native communities all across the United States. Above all, it provides young Native Americans with opportunities to experience and lay claim to their inheritance, to define themselves in terms of their collective and individual cultural identity. A senior scholar at The School of American Research in Santa Fe, Momaday has held tenured teaching posts at University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University and the University of Arizona. He presently teaches a class on Oral Tradition at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts. He has also been an NPR commentator and was a founding Trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian. In 2004 Momaday was named a UNESCO Artist for Peace, in recognition of his outstanding achievements as a writer and painter and his efforts to safeguard Native American heritage. Momaday is the present Poet Laureate of Oklahoma, an honor recognizing his renown among contemporary poets.

Momaday was featured in the Ken Burns and Stephen Ives’ documentary, The West, for his masterful retelling of Kiowa history and legend. He is featured in another PBS documentary concerning the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He's also prominently featured in Steve Ives’ forthcoming documentary on Hampton Sides’ literary nonfiction book, Blood and Thunder, about Kit Carson and the conquest of the West. It aired on Feb. 18 on PBS' The American Experience.

Momaday is currently working on a new novel. Behind it all beats the heart of the oral storyteller, keeping alive — in myths and memories — the people persecuted and the land lost. “In the oral tradition,” says Momaday, “stories are not told merely to entertain or instruct. They are told to be believed. Stories are realities lived and believed. They are true.”

A place where the known and the not yet know can gather side by side, sharing nonfiction stories and how they got them.

hunkered down in the wilderness, betrothed to a monstrous novel

N. Scott Momaday learned storytelling as a child. Kiowa families would gather around the table after dinner, expecting a tale. The old man would get up, and without making an announcement, go into his room. He would ease into his rocking chair and close his eyes. The children would slip away from the dinner table too, one by one, forming a circle below his chair. The old man’s face would be tranquil. Silently, the children would wait. No one dared move. Even the tiniest member of the tribe sat still, waiting for the magic. They knew what was coming. And after a while the old man would open his eyes and say in a deep, slow voice, Ah-KEAH-de, They were camping. A row of tiny smiles would light up, and the old man’s eyes would open to take them in, as he spoke the traditional beginning of a Kiowa story.

Today Momaday is the storyteller. But he speaks not just to the children of the Kiowa tribe. As a poet, published author, playwright, painter and professor of English and American literature, he has put the Native American story on the world map. His work illuminates the spirit of the West as it truly was and as it was imagined in the dime-novel legends of the Wild West. A Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969 for his book, House Made of Dawn, not only launched his literary career, it also unleashed a new generation of Native American writers and thinkers on the public.

It all began, he says, with a storyteller who came before him, Pohd-lohk. He gave the young boy the name Tsoai-talee, after the Rock Tree, a gray rock stump that rises nearly 1,000 feet in the black hills of northern Wyoming. It is a towering monolith filled with wonder and sacred meaning for the Kiowa. As Pohd-lohk took up the young boy in his arms, he knew the boy’s life would proceed from his name, one of the most sacred elements in Kiowa storytelling tradition. Like the buffalo, a sacred symbol to the Kiowa, a “living shield” for their way of life, Momaday has become a living shield for the culture of Native Americans. To stem the loss of their cultural identity—the “theft of the sacred,” as Momaday puts it—he founded The Buffalo Trust, a nonprofit foundation, to record and share story, song, art and history, especially with children of all tribes.

Momaday will be the keynote speaker for the 4th Annual Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers of the Southwest Conference this July. He spoke about his commitment to poetry at his home in Oklahoma City.

Q1: Tell us about your earliest memories of writing.

I guess I wanted to be a writer from the time I was 6 or 8 years old. My mother was a poet so I was familiar with certain forms at a very early age. I made my own definitions of poetry as I went along. While I was at Stanford, I didn’t know an iamb from a trochee, but I started learning the grammar of poetry and all the forms and terms. Yvor Winters taught a course called, “The Writing of Poetry,” and I took that a number of times. He would always limit the class to about five people, all poets. We’d submit poems to each other, and we’d talk about them. Sometimes the criticism made you mad, but it turned out to be helpful. I must have taken “The Writing of Poetry” about five times. I learned every time I took it.

Q2: What does poetry offer to nonfiction writers in terms of the precision of language?

Poets generally train themselves to make the greatest possible use out of every word. If you have a poem that is a great poem, it will have nothing extraneous in it. Every syllable will count.

Q3: Could you talk about the rhythm of Native American life on the reservation and how it affects your writing?

I’ve lived on several reservations and the sense of time is different on the Navajo reservation, for example. It’s changing, unfortunately. They’re coming closer to the outer world. They are being subjected to the conveniences and the busyness of the outer world. I first went on the Navajo reservation as a very young child and that Navajo reservation really no longer exists except in pockets here and there. The same thing at Jemez Pueblo. I lived there when I was in my most impressionable age. There were, I think, three telephones in the whole thousand-population village. There were two or three pickup trucks and everyone went around in wagons or on horseback or on foot. There was no plumbing, no electricity. All of that changed pretty rapidly even while I was there. But vestiges of the old world are still there and I think those things are extremely important to the Jemez people. It enables them to know who they are in terms of their experience, their racial, cultural, and genetic experience.

Q4: What would you say is the most sacred place for you?

I suppose I would have to think about Devils Tower, Wyoming, first of all because it’s so striking in the landscape and I’m connected to it through my name. But there are many such places. Bear Butte and Baboquivari and all kinds of sacred places in the Native American tradition. When I was writing Way to Rainy Mountain, I retraced my racial roots as a Kiowa. I went to Devils Tower. I was driving through the Black Hills and then I topped a ridge; there it was looming in front of me completely unexpected. It knocked the breath out of me. Knowing the story of my name, it all coalesced into an element of wonder. Sometime later, I made a vision quest there. I camped and fasted and that was an important time. There are lots of such places in the country and not only Indian. Gettysburg, for example, is a very inspiring place. If you know what happened there and you walk the grounds, that becomes a very sacred place.

A sense of place is very important. I spent some time studying the Navajo language. I was driving out on the reservation a lot, picking up hitchhikers and trying to talk to them. I got very quickly out of my depth, but it was fun. One of the things I learned was that the Navajos have a tremendous sense of place. They know the name of every rock beside the road. One day I picked up this young Navajo hitchhiker and started talking to him and very quickly exhausted my Navajo, but I did have the question, “What is that called?” He would tell me a story about it, how the place got its name. That is a trait common to most Native Americans. And other peoples, like the Irish and the French and the Russians as well.

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