{"id":29473,"date":"2024-01-30T17:24:04","date_gmt":"2024-01-31T00:24:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/n-scott-momaday-pulitzer-prize-winner-and-giant-of-native-american-literature-dies-at-89\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T00:57:42","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T06:57:42","slug":"n-scott-momaday-pulitzer-prize-winner-and-giant-of-native-american-literature-dies-at-89","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/n-scott-momaday-pulitzer-prize-winner-and-giant-of-native-american-literature-dies-at-89\/","title":{"rendered":"N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize winner and giant of Native American literature, dies at 89"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Kiowa
Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his groundbreaking novel \u201cHouse Made of Dawn,\u201d died Jan. 24 at his home in Santa Fe, publisher HarperCollins announced. He had been in failing health. (Russell Contreras\/Associated Press file)<\/span>Russell Contreras<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

NEW YORK \u2013 N. Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer Prize-winning storyteller, poet, educator and folklorist whose debut novel, \u201cHouse Made of Dawn,\u201d is widely credited as the starting point for contemporary Native American literature, has died. He was 89.<\/p>\n

Momaday<\/a> died Jan. 24 at his home in Santa Fe, publisher HarperCollins announced. He had been in failing health.<\/p>\n

\u201cScott was an extraordinary person and an extraordinary poet and writer. He was a singular voice in American literature, and it was an honor and a privilege to work with him,\u201d Momaday\u2019s editor, Jennifer Civiletto, said in a statement. \u201cHis Kiowa heritage was deeply meaningful to him and he devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially the oral tradition.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHouse Made of Dawn,\u201d published in 1968, tells of a World War II soldier who returns home and struggles to fit back in, a story as old as war itself: In this case, home is a Native community in rural New Mexico. Much of the book was based on Momaday\u2019s childhood in Jemez Pueblo and on his conflicts between the ways of his ancestors and the risks and possibilities of the outside world.<\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up in both worlds and straddle those worlds even now,\u201d he said in a 2019 PBS documentary. \u201cIt has made for confusion and a richness in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite such works as John Joseph Mathews\u2019 1934 release \u201cSundown,\u201d novels by Native Americans weren\u2019t widely recognized at the time of \u201cHouse Made of Dawn.\u201d A New York Times<\/em> reviewer, Marshall Sprague, even contended in an otherwise favorable review that \u201cAmerican Indians do not write novels and poetry as a rule, or teach English in top-ranking universities, either. But we cannot be patronizing. N. Scott Momaday\u2019s book is superb in its own right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Joseph Heller\u2019s \u201cCatch-22,\u201d Momaday\u2019s novel was a World War II story that resonated with a generation protesting the Vietnam War. In 1969, Momaday became the first Native American to win the fiction Pulitzer, and his novel helped launch a generation of authors, including Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch and Louise Erdrich. His other admirers would range from the poet Joy Harjo, the country\u2019s first Native to be named poet laureate, to the film stars Robert Redford and Jeff Bridges.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was a kind of literary father for a lot of us,\u201d Harjo told The Associated Press during a telephone interview Monday. \u201cHe showed how potent and powerful language and words were in shaping our very existence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the next decades, he taught at Stanford, Princeton and Columbia universities, among other top-ranking schools, was a commentator for NPR, and lectured worldwide. He published more than a dozen books, from \u201cAngle of Geese and Other Poems\u201d to the novels \u201cThe Way to Rainy Mountain\u201d and \u201cThe Ancient Child,\u201d and became a leading advocate for the beauty and vitality of traditional Native life.<\/p>\n

Addressing a gathering of Native American scholars in 1970, Momaday said, \u201cOur very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves.\u201d He championed Natives\u2019 reverence for nature, writing that \u201cthe American Indian has a unique investment in the American landscape.\u201d He shared stories told to him by his parents and grandparents. He regarded oral culture as the wellspring of language and storytelling, and dated American culture back not to the early English settlers, but to ancient times, noting the procession of gods depicted in the rock art at Utah\u2019s Barrier Canyon.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do not know what they mean, but we know we are involved in their meaning,\u201d he wrote in the essay \u201cThe Native Voice in American Literature.\u201d \u201cThey persist through time in the imagination, and we cannot doubt that they are invested with the very essence of language, the language of story and myth and primal song. They are 2,000 years old, more or less, and they remark as closely as anything can the origin of American literature.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2007, President George W. Bush presented Momaday with a National Medal of Arts \u201cfor his writings and his work that celebrate and preserve Native American art and oral tradition.\u201d Besides his Pulitzer, his honors included an Academy of American Poets prize and, in 2019, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.<\/a><\/p>\n

Momaday was married three times, most recently to Barbara Glenn, who died in 2008. He had four daughters, one of whom, Cael, died in 2017.<\/p>\n

He was born Navarre Scott Mammedaty, in Lawton, Oklahoma, and was a member of the Kiowa Tribe. His mother was a writer, and his father an artist who once told his son, \u201cI have never known an Indian child who couldn\u2019t draw,\u201d a talent Momaday demonstrably shared. His artwork, from charcoal sketches to oil paintings, were included in his books and exhibited in museums in Arizona, New Mexico and North Dakota. Audio guides to tours of the Smithsonian Institution\u2019s Museum of the American Indian featured Momaday\u2019s avuncular baritone.<\/p>\n

After spending his teens in New Mexico, he studied political science at the University of Mexico and received a master\u2019s and Ph. D. in English from Stanford. Momaday began as a poet, his favorite art form, and the publication of \u201cHouse Made of Dawn\u201d was an unintentional result of his early reputation. Editor Fran McCullough, of what is now HarperCollins, had met Momaday at Stanford and several years later contacted him and asked whether he would like to submit a book of poems.<\/p>\n

Momaday did not have enough for a book, and instead gave her the first chapter of \u201cHouse Made of Dawn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of his writing was set in the American West and Southwest, whether tributes to bears \u2013 the animals he most identified with \u2013 or a cycle of poems about the life of Billy the Kid, a childhood obsession. He saw writing as a way of bridging the present with the ancient past and summed up his quest in the poem \u201cIf I Could Ascend\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething like a leaf lies here within me; \/ it wavers almost not at all, \/ and there is no light to see it by \/ that it withers upon a black field. \/ If it could ascend the thousand years into my mouth, \/ I would make a word of it at last, \/ and I would speak it into the silence of the sun.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2019, he was the subject of a PBS \u201cAmerican Masters\u201d documentary in which he discussed his belief he was a reincarnation of a bear connected to the Native American origin story around Devils Tower in Wyoming. He told the AP in a rare interview that the documentary allowed him to reflect on his life, saying he was humbled that writers continued to say his work has influenced them.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m greatly appreciative of that, but it comes a little bit of a surprise every time I hear it,\u201d Momaday said. \u201cI think I have been an influence. It\u2019s not something I take a lot of credit for.\u201d<\/p>\n

Former Associated Press writer Russell Contreras contributed to this report from Santa Fe.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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