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.