`Words from a Bear'
Documentary about Kiowa writer and Oklahoma native N. Scott Momaday to debut on PBS
Jeffrey Palmer was 7 years old when he first met literary giant N. Scott Momaday.
He could never have imagined back then that he would one day make an award-winning film about the fellow Oklahoma native and Kiowa Tribe member.
"Sometimes there are things in your life that are kind of fate. And this felt like that.
In the process of making it and now that we've released it, it feels like that. It's gonna change my life,” Palmer said.
Following its world premiere at January's Sundance Film Festival and a successful run on the festival circuit, Palmer's documentary “Words From A Bear” will debut on TV Monday night on PBS' “American Masters” series. The debut coincides with the 50th anniversary of Momaday's landmark 1969 Pulitzer Prize win for his novel “House Made of Dawn.”
“It really was serendipity that this happened,” Palmer said during an interview at the dead Center Film Festival, where his film was named Best Oklahoma Feature. “It just was perfect timing that all of these things came together and we could celebrate not only N. Scott Momaday but also the fact that this novel really changed American literature.”
Homegrown icon
A Kiowa novelist, essayist and poet, Momaday was born in 1934 in Lawton. Awarded the American Medal of Arts in 2007 by President George W. Bush, he has been honored by his home state as the Oklahoma Centennial Poet Laureate and an Oklahoma Cultural Treasure.
2019 has been a significant year for Momaday, who has received the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize and the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award and penned a preface for the new 50th anniversary edition of his classic “The Way to Rainy Mountain.”
Michael Kantor, executive producer of “American Masters,” and Shirley Sneve, director of Vision Maker Media, a nonprofit that empowers Native Americans to share stories representing their cultures, contacted Palmer about making a Momaday documentary after seeing his short film “Isabelle's Garden” at Sundance 2015.
Then an assistant professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, Palmer looked for help on his first feature film across the hall from his colleague Desiree Hill.
“I needed a producer; I didn't know what I was doing,” Palmer admitted with a laugh. “So, I said, `Would you like to help me on this film?' And she said, `Yeah, absolutely.'”
“We had actually kind of worked on some other stuff together ... and you have to be able to work together. It doesn't matter how great somebody is or what their resume is if you don't get along together, if you don't complement each other,” said Hill, an associate producer on “Words from a Bear.”
Their teamwork came in handy when it came to wrangling the film's starry roster of interviewees, including Oscar-nominated actor James Earl Jones, acclaimed author Rilla Askew and now-U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. Palmer ended up interviewing Robert Redford on the same day Hill filmed Beau and Jeff Bridges.
“We were like, `Would these people really be in our film?' Because Scott knew them and said, `This is who I think you should ask,'” recalled Palmer, now an assistant professor at Cornell University. “All of them said yes. They loved Scott so much they wanted nothing more than to be in the film. And there could have been more.”
Kiowa traditions
Palmer also found help on the project even closer to home: His father, Gus, a Kiowa linguist, poet and scholar, was a consultant and interviewee. He's an old friend of Momaday who first introduced his son to the icon years ago.
“We go back to the start of the Indian Renaissance ... when he won the Pulitzer Prize. I was an English major back then, and we didn't have role models. We were looking at William Faulkner and (Ernest) Hemingway and all these other writers, trying to emulate, trying to be writers ourselves. And then all of the sudden, Scott was there,” Gus Palmer said.
“I was glad my son was the filmmaker on this. I thought, `Wow, this is gonna be a really Kiowa undertaking,' which it turned out to be.”
The director/producer said he was aware of that significance of the project. The younger Palmer often deferred to his father when it came time to interview Momaday.
“We wanted culturally to do this the right way, because we knew that it being with a Kiowa elder, there were certain cultural norms. ... So, Dad was the perfect person to have that relationship with him on camera. ... I think it really loosened up the dialogue and created more stories and took us down different directions in the narrative,” Jeffrey Palmer said.
“It really couldn't have been scripted better. It was perfect. You have this dream film that you want to make, and there it was in front of me as a documentary filmmaker. It really landed in my lap. And it has been the most meaningful thing in my life as a work of art but also just personally.”