Native writer makes case for respecting the land
N. Scott Momaday captures not only how a landscape looks but how it lives. How dawn paints a canyon wall. How dusk shifts a valley’s mood. In decades of prose and poetry, he describes the spirit of a place.
That place, most often, is the Southwestern wilderness Momaday first explored as a boy on horseback. It’s the setting for his novel “House Made of Dawn,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 and led a renaissance of Native American writing, as well as many poems since. In his newest work, “Earth Keeper,” the place is the Earth itself.
The book, a slim collection of short meditations, is an homage and a handbook.
“It’s a call to action to wake up to the importance of the Earth and to save it — because we are losing it,” said Momaday. “We stand in danger of losing so much of it that it becomes for us maybe the end of our civilization.”
Native American tradition, much more than the broader culture, appreciates the great gift of nature, he said, to which we are indebted. “We are obligated to respect it — to revere it, even.”
These days, Momaday, 83, is writing as a grandfather, concerned about the animals his eight grandchildren will never glimpse. As a poet and a painter, intent on capturing those creatures on paper. As an elder in the Native American tradition, a keeper of stories.
“By this time in my life, I’m well beyond elderhood,” he said with a sly chuckle. “I’ve become a member of the geezer society.”
Momaday spoke by phone from his Santa Fe home studio, where he spends his mornings writing or painting, pursuits he picked up from his mother, a writer, and his father, a painter. Rose bushes frame his window and, across some distance, lilac bushes are bare but considering their own bloom.
“There are so many moods to the Earth,” he said, of writing about the land. “I want to be attuned to as many of them as I can be.”
When Momaday was 6 months old, his family took him to Devils Tower, a sacred place the Kiowa call Tsoai, or Rock Tree, and gave him a sacred name, Tsoai-talee, or Rock Tree Boy. It comes from the Kiowa story of how that massive tower came to rise from the Wyoming grasslands, a story that involves a boy who turns into a bear.
“I am somehow bound to that to story and to that place,” he said, a tie that has only grown stronger as he’s grown older. “I believe I am the incarnation of that boy. “And indeed, I turn into a bear on occasion.” Momaday was an only child who, living in remote places — Native communities in the canyon country of Arizona and New Mexico — had to rely on his imagination.
He delighted in stories. His mother read to him from the good books that were always around. His father, a member of the Kiowa tribe, told him stories from that tradition.
“I fell in love with them,” he said. “I memorized some of them.”
While on a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University, Momaday wrote a poem called “The Bear,” which concludes:
“More scarred than others
These years since the trap maimed him,
Pain slants his withers, drawing up the crooked limb.
Then he is gone, whole,
Without urgency, from sight,
As buzzards control,
Imperceptibly, their flight.”
The poem earned attention and, in 1962, the Academy of American Poets prize. But it was his first novel, which he typed each morning before teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara, that made him famous.
“House Made of Dawn” tells the story of Abel, who represents a generation of Native American men who served in World War II and struggled to find their way back to their traditional way of life.
It’s a tale steeped both in old Kiowa stories and modern societal stresses. It’s also a story of the land.
“And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land,” he writes, “low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed.”
A few months later, “House Made of Dawn” won the Pulitzer Prize.
In one of the book’s essays, he too gets angry, decrying those who “poison the earth and inflict wounds upon it,” enlisting a Navajo saying that begins: “I am ashamed before the earth.” But he ends the piece in prayer: “Dawkee, Let me not be ashamed before the earth.”
Mostly, he focuses on tribal stories and scenes of wonder. Winter on the northern prairie, sunlit rain in a canyon. In the middle of the night, on a remote airfield, he witnessed the northern lights: “Great ribbons of dancing light unraveled on the snowy sky, and a great shiver of color enveloped the dome of the earth.” Most mornings, Momaday writes.
“It satisfies some great need in me,” he said. “It’s like nourishment. …”
Sitting at his computer, the text enlarged, he’s inspired by the news, by beloved books, even though his eyesight is “not what it once was.”
He’s begun work on a book that, in its first section, captures the Kiowa people’s migration from the north, following the sun down to the southern plains. ”