Poet and author, N. Scott Momaday is from the Kiowa, Cherokee, and English heritage. . His poetry speaks to the heart of his traditions. He is a Pullitzer Prize winning writer, whose first novel, House Made of Dawn, makes him a leading writer of the Native American/First Nations Peoples’ Literary Renaissance.
Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma where he and his parents lived during the first year of his life with his father’s parents, N.Scott’s grandparents, on the Kiowa reservation. N. Scott Momaday and his parents moved to Arizona where his father, a painter, and his mother, an author of children’s books, both taught on reservation schools. As a result, Momaday knew and understood not only his own traditions but also those of the Navajo/Dine, Apache, and Pueblo Indians. Momday also connects us to the natural world which shapes his experiences and understanding of life lived in awareness of the ecosystems and our relationship with those fragile and powerful energies. His poetry is alive and full of the sensations and images of the world around him. Those images keep memory alive, keep experience preserved in memory, and tell the stories of those who struggle and live with such awareness.
From an early age, Momaday loved literature, especially poetry. He graduated from the University of New Mexico, and then taught for a year on the Apache reservation before winning a poetry fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University. He earned a doctorate in English Literature in 1963, and taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara afterwards.
After the publication of his first book, House Made of Dawn, he accepted a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley. He developed a program of Native American studies, and taught courses on American Indian literature and mythology. He wrote a second book, The Way to Rainy Mountain, which is a collection of Kiowa Tales. His father, Al Momaday illustrated this book. He has written a number of other books and articles, including a Angles of Geese and Other Poems and The Gourd Dancer, both books of poetry. Momaday began painting, and his paintings are on exhibit. He also illustrates his own books. President George W. Bush awarded Momaday the National Medal of Arts for “ his writings and his works that celebrate and Native American art and oral tradition.”
For a real treat, watch the video of Navarro Scott Momaday as he reads his work and talks about his life and his writing. He has a beautiful, melodic voice and brings the world he ‘sees’ to life with his words.
The following is one of Momaday's poems:
The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee
BY N. SCOTT MOMADAY
I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am an eagle playing with the wind
I am a cluster of bright beads
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake
I am a flame of four colors
I am a deer standing away in the dusk
I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche
I am an angle of geese in the winter sky
I am the hunger of a young wolf
I am the whole dream of these things
You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to the gods
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte
You see, I am alive, I am alive.
(N. Scott Momaday, “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee” from In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991. Copyright ©1991 by N. Scott Momaday. Reprinted with the permission of the author and St. Martin’s Press, LLC.)
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