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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.”
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Momaday Links
THE BUFFALO TRUST
MODERN AMERICAN POETRY
PBS "NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE WEST"
N. Scott Momaday, Keeper of the Flame
THE INTERNET PUBLIC LIBRARY
Native American Authors Project: N. Scott Momaday
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| Momaday in Print |
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A House Made of Dawn. Pulitzer prize-winning story based on the lives of the author's ancestors. Tells the story of a young American Indian named Abel, home from a foreign war and caught between two worlds: one his father's, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons and the harsh beauty of the land; the other of industrial America, a goading him into a compulsive cycle of dissipation and disgust.
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In the Bear's House. Momaday passionately explores themes of loneliness, sacredness and aggression through his depiction of the bear, the one animal that has both inspired and haunted him throughout his lifetime.
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The Way to Rainy Mountain. Momaday retells the Kiowa myths that he learned from his grandmother, speculates on the actual history they may symbolize and describes, with infectious nostalgia, the Indian life he knew as a child.
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The Ancient Child. A magical saga of one man's tormented search for his identity. Locke Setman (Set), a Native American, is raised far from the reservation by his adopted father. Set feels a strange aching in his soul and, returning to the tribal lands for the funeral of his grandmother, meets a stunning young medicine woman with a gift of astonishing visions--who turns his world upside down.
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In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991. A collection of stories, poems, and drawings reflect the career of one of America's most distinctive storytellers, whose literary oeuvre both celebrates and mourns the lost world of great native American legends and myths.
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Three Plays: The Indolent Boys, Children of the Sun, the Moon in Two Windows (Oklahoma Stories & Storytellers). The Indolent Boys recounts the 1891 tragedy of runaways from the Kiowa Boarding School who froze to death while trying to return to their families. A joyous counterpoint to this tragedy, Children of the Sun is a short children's play that explains the people's relationship to the sun. The Moon in Two Windows, a screenplay set in the early 1900s, centers on the children of defeated Indian tribes, who are forced into assimilation at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where the U.S. government established the first off-reservation boarding school.
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The Man Made of Words : Essays, Stories, Passages. Exploring such themes as land, language, and identity, Momaday recalls the moving stories of his Kiowa grandfather and Kiowa ancestors, recollects a boyhood spent partly at Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, and ponders the circumstances of history and Indian-White relations as we inherit them today.
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The Names: A Memoir. Of all the works of N. Scott Momaday, this may be the most personal. Momaday ecalls the significant events and ventures of his own life, his own land, and his own people.
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