On April 12, The Paris Review announced N. Scott Momaday as the recipient of the 2021 Hadada Award, presented each year to a “distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” Over the past few months, the Daily has published a series of short essays devoted to his work. Today, in the final piece of the series, Terry Tempest Williams writes about her decades-long friendship with Momaday, the power of his work, and what can be done to atone for ecological destruction.

N. Scott Momaday, Dance Group, 2015. Courtesy of Momaday.

The events of one’s life take place, take place. How often have I used this expression, and how often have I stopped to think about what it means? Events do indeed take place, they have meaning in relation to things around them.

—N. Scott Momaday, The Names

We were gathered at the Teton Theater in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a historic cinema built in 1942, a testament to taxidermy where faux ledges of local mammals appeared on the north and south walls. A grizzly bear, black bear, coyote, pronghorn antelope, mule deer, and mountain lion perched above rows of red velvet seats and, on a typical evening, watched the audience as the audience watched the movies. But on this night in 1977, several hundred of us were waiting in our seats not to see a film but to hear the great N. Scott Momaday read from his book The Way to Rainy Mountain, which had just been published in paperback.

The writer, whose Kiowa name is Tsoai-talee, or “Rock Tree Boy,” walked confidently onto the humble stage in a three-piece suit. He was large in stature and reputation: eight years earlier, his debut novel, House Made of Dawn, had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. “Good evening,” he said, in a strong, booming voice, deep with resonance.

The audience gasped.

“You were expecting feathers?” he replied. Read More

On April 12, The Paris Review announced N. Scott Momaday as the recipient of the 2021 Hadada Award, presented each year to a “distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” To honor the multifariousness of Momaday’s achievements, the Daily is publishing a series of short essays devoted to his work. Today, Chelsea T. Hicks considers Momaday’s revolutionary novels, House Made of Dawn and The Ancient Child, which blend the conventions of American literary realism with the oral tradition of Kiowa storytelling.

N. Scott Momaday, 1968. From the Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Courtesy of Momaday.

The first work I ever read by a Native author was N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, in an undergraduate English literature seminar. Although I am a Native person and a voracious reader, I’d grown up under the influence of Southern Christian teachers who warned their students against paganism. Perhaps that is why they never assigned us anything by Momaday, whose novels, set in Jemez Pueblo and the Navajo Nation as well as Los Angeles and San Francisco, tell of witches and traditional medicine women, sacrilegious preachers and alcoholics. Reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha in high school made me wary of literary depictions of Native people. My discomfort became avoidance, until my second year of college, when the syllabus of “Literature of the West” included The Way to Rainy Mountain.

I remember feeling confused, excited, and curious, and then as I began to read, delight overtook me. The sense of place in Momaday’s work is so immediate and gripping that upon finishing the book, I wrote an essay arguing that people are formed by their relationship to the landscape. When I later read Momaday’s first novel, House Made of Dawn, I was shocked to find that the author had made nearly the same argument in a postscript:

Both consciously and subconsciously, my writing has been deeply informed by the land with a sense of place. In some important way, place determines who and what we are. The land-person equation is essential to writing, to all of literature. Abel, in House Made of Dawn, must exist in the cultural and physical context of Walatowa, just as Stephen Dedalus, say, must be fashioned in the mold of Dublin.

House Made of Dawn, with its lyric passages evoking the land, recalls John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The Navajo narrator Ben Benally’s conversational descriptions of Abel’s cultural dislocation and struggle against assimilationist attitudes in Los Angeles seem to echo Nick Carraway’s narration in The Great Gatsby. Yet Ben and Abel are Native characters, and this virtuosic novel is also a container for the high oral tradition of Kiowa and Navajo songs. As Momaday once put it, “I grew up in two worlds and straddle both those worlds even now. It has made for confusion and a richness in my life. I’ve been able to deal with it reasonably well, I think, and I value it.” After House Made of Dawn won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, the Native American Renaissance began, in part because Momaday’s syncretistic method—using English-language literary conventions to represent distinct and sovereign peoples—showed readers the vastness and complexity of the Native world. Read More