N Scott Momaday

Writer

N Scott Momaday, who has died at 89, was a Pulitzer-winning giant of Native American stories whose debut novel, House Made Of Dawn, is widely credited as the starting point for contemporary Native American literature.

The book, published in 1968, tells of a Second World War soldier who returns home and struggles to fit back into the Native community in rural New Mexico. Much of the story was based on Momaday’s childhood in Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, and on his conflicts between the ways of his ancestors and the risks and possibilities of the outside world.

Novels by American Indians were not widely recognised at the time House Made Of Dawn was published. A New York Times reviewer, Marshall Sprague, even contended in an otherwise favourable review that “American Indians do not write novels and poetry as a rule”.

Like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Momaday’s novel was a wartime story that resonated with a generation protesting against 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 admirers would range from the poet Joy Harjo, the country’s first Native to be named poet laureate, to the film stars Robert Redford and Jeff Bridges.

Over the following decades, he taught at Stanford, Princeton and Columbia universities, among other top-ranking colleges, was a commentator for NPR, and lectured worldwide.

He published more than a dozen books, from Angle of Geese And Other Poems to the novels The Way

To Rainy Mountain and The Ancient Child, and became a leading advocate for the beauty of traditional Native life.

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 also to ancient times, noting the procession of gods depicted in the rock art at Utah’s Barrier Canyon.

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. After spending his teens in New Mexico, he studied political science at the University of Mexico and received a master’s and PhD in English from Stanford.

Momaday began as a poet, his favourite art form, and the publication of House Made Of Dawn 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.

Momaday did not have enough for a book, and instead gave her the first chapter of House Made Of

Dawn.

He was married twice, most recently to Regina Heitzer. He had four daughters, one of whom, Cael, died in 2017.