Natachee scott momaday biography channel

NSM: Yes, I moved around quite a bit, even as a child my parents and I were moving about the country. JE: Was that job related? JE: This became a school issue for you no doubt? I lived in several places on the Navajo. I was in different schools of course along the way and it seems that I was always going to another school when I was growing up.

JE: How did that affect you? NSM: I have no idea what effect that might have had. I do know that very frequently I was the only student in my class who spoke unbroken English, so I had an advantage of a kind and probably not much of a challenge. I was not challenged a great deal when I was in the early grades. JE: Because the students were speaking mostly what?

NSM: Well, their first language was Native. JE: So you were the star of the class? NSM: I had little difficulty in those days. JE: You were able to get along with all of these natachee scotts momaday biography channel You were learning to be very social at an early age. NSM: Yes, I got along quite well with my peers. I still have friends who I remember from those days.

JE: on December 7th, you would have been about 7 years old, do you have any recollection of that announcement? JE: Did the war affect your family? Do you remember the rationing? NSM: Oh yes. In fact, my family took a break as it were at that time from the Indian Service and they went to work, I like to say, for the war effort. JE: And in this time period your father was a great storyteller?

NSM: Yes he knew a lot of oral traditions from the Kiowa. He was a good storyteller. JE: As a young child, were you taken with that? Were you interested in it or did you just think these are old stories my father is telling me? NSM: I was greatly interested. They were wonderful stories. I took them for granted of course, until much later in my life when I realized that they were very fragile and on the verge of extinction.

But yes, I remember him telling me stories at bedtime and I would frequently ask him to tell a certain story. I would ask him to tell some stories again and again and again. So yes, that was a rich part of my boyhood. My mother also told stories. Not from the Indian tradition so much, but stories she just made up to tell. She was a good storyteller as well.

JE: And that led to you being a good storyteller? NSM: Yes, I had that in my background fortunately. I am very fortunate. JE: This was a Kiowa home you were growing up in, through all of this moving you had to maintain a certain identity or was that confusing to you? I knew that I was Indian and that identity was the principal one. JE: In you made a move to the Pueblos?

She agreed to take the job if my father could join her. So she went first to Jemez and then my father and I, a little bit later, joined her there. My parents became the two teachers at the two-teacher day school at Jemez. He was the principal and my mother was the teacher. She taught the first three grades and he taught the second three grades. JE: So would Jemez be the best home of your childhood?

NSM: It was certainly a place that was influential in my boyhood. I think I lived there during my most impressionable years and I loved the place. I still do. I think it was an ideal kind of childhood I had there. JE: Because your experience there in Jemez is seen in your work? JE: Jemez in New Mexico, just exactly where is that? Scott Momaday: I think anybody that goes to a Pueblo is going to be an outsider in the sense that there is so much secret activity in the tribe.

So my parents were excluded from secret ceremonies of course, but they were welcomed as Indian. I think I had a much closer relationship with the Pueblo in a way because of my age. I was going to school with my peers and they were Pueblo and I was not. NSM: No, no, they considered them Indian and they still had very close relationships with Indians from outside.

JE: When do you remember consciously writing anything of substance? NSM: I guess during my high school years. When I got into college, I was very much determined to be a poet and I was writing what I thought was poetry. JE: And then the chicken pull, what was that? NSM: That was a game and it had religious significance. It is a Spanish tradition and it happened at Jemez of course once or twice a year.

It was very, very thrilling to watch. You had to be an excellent horseman to take part in the game. So I saw that a number of times while I was living there. It was very exciting to see. Then I think through the years it deteriorated and it became something for the children rather than for the men in their prime. JE: Also something you drew on was the killing of the goose that also provides the subject for Angle of Geese?

I based that on an incident in which I went with my father and one of his friends hunting and we found geese on the river in Jemez. It made a great impression upon me and I wrote about it. JE: Do you think to yourself how this was all meant to be? How you ended up in New Mexico and all this and then you used all of those experiences forever and ever?

NSM: Yes, yes it is and I do feel that very keenly. JE: You spent your final year of high school in a military school in Virginia, why a military school? NSM: Well, I had gone to so many schools. I went to four different high schools as a matter of fact. I had gone to all of those schools on the reservations when I was little. So I talked to my parents about this and we decided I would spend my senior year in prep school.

My mother had a rich tradition of southern life coming from Kentucky, so I had a romantic idea of Virginia and its very rich history. JE: So overall that was a good experience for you? NSM: Yeah, it was a natachee scott momaday biography channel experience. JE: The rigidness of a military academy, was that something you had to deal with? I thought I might, but I fell right into the groove and it turned out to be a fine year for me, an interesting year.

A lot was compressed into that year. JE: You were able to work on your writing skills? NSM: No, not particularly my writing skills. I remember that I entered a speaking contest in Baltimore and represented the school there and I think took third place or something. JE: Was this a surprise to you that all of a sudden you realize, hey, I can get up in front and I can speak or was it difficult for you or you had to gain confidence to do that?

NSM: Yes, I had had some experience I think in one summer before my senior year I took part in a forensic, not a contest so much as a kind of seminar at the University of New Mexico. I got interested in speaking and I found that I could do it pretty well. I had a little experience before. Scott Momaday: Yes. He was of pretty good stature. Laughter He was quite widely recognized at that time.

JE: He obviously had an influence on you. NSM: Yeah, I think he must have. I know that one of my most successful poems was based upon his short story The Bear.

Natachee scott momaday biography channel

JE: Some osmosis going on here? NSM: I think so, yes. But he came to speak at the University of Virginia while I was there. I think he had a daughter in school there and she prevailed upon him to visit and he did. NSM: No. JE: But you were obviously taken with him? NSM: Yeah, I admired him very much. JE: One of the defining moments in your life would be when you won a scholarship in creative writing to attend Stanford.

NSM: Yes, that was a very important event in my life. I spent a very happy year there, single and independent. During the course of that year I applied for a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and I won it so I began my graduate career that way. I went to Stanford. I had the notion that I would go there for a year, the term of my fellowship and then come back to my job in Dulce.

JE: As I understand it, you were selected for that award by someone whom you came to admire? He was a poet and a critic and a wonderful man who chose me out of a group of applicants. I was the only poet that year at Stanford in the Stegner Fellowship. JE: He had a very long interest in Indian poetry. NSM: He had an interest in all kinds of poetry.

He was wonderfully erudite and he knew a great deal about English traditional forms for example, so I learned a lot from him in the four years I was there. JE: What kind of a person was he? NSM: He was a sweet man, but he had a terrible reputation as a critic because he suffered no fools. He was very straightforward about his opinions of literature.

So he came down hard on certain people like Emerson and Whitman. This of course put him in some area of laughter scrutiny. But he was right I think. He stuck by his guts. He had the strength of his convictions. He became an important man in my life. JE: Was he quite critical at times of your work? NSM: Well, he could be. He was at the beginning especially.

Then as we got to know each other he became less critical and more supportive. JE: He influenced your work, especially your early work, a period of time referred to as Post-Symbolist. He was very much interested in that, more interested than I was, but that was one of the things that he was known for. NSM: Yes, exactly. Well, I had a close friend in high school.

I spent my sophomore year at St. There, I became good friends with a boy who later committed suicide. But he had a child, an only child, who died in a terrible accident, so that informs the first part of that poem. And then the second, in obvious ways, related the story of the goose that I carried in my arms. Chapter 6 — The Journey of Tai-me John Erling: It occurs to me that I suppose all of us have very interesting things that happen in our life.

However, it takes a certain mind to take those experiences and to write about them. Is that true because it sounds like you have this interesting life—well there are a lot of people that have interesting lives. JE: All the material that is wasted then, huh? NSM: Yeah, Laughter who knows what stories there may be out there. There you designed a course in American Indian Studies that I would like for you to talk about.

So yes, I developed a course in that subject. I taught it for a great many years and I took it with me to Berkeley, then again I went back to Stanford to be on the faculty after a time. JE: When you say you taught it, what were you teaching? NSM: We were looking at examples of oral tradition stories and songs in American Indian tradition talking about how they were formed and composed.

Emotionally how they compare to what we call poetry in English. Some of it of course had been transcribed. She married Kiowa artist Al Momaday inand in journeyed to the Navaho Reservation to teach Indian children for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, remaining with the Navaho for eight years, learning their language and culture. They were the school's entire staff.

Together they taught the pueblo children and encouraged them to express themselves through art. They were responsible for making this art available in exhibits nationwide, even internationally, their purpose being to help narrow the breach between Indian and Anglo peoples. As a teacher of Indian children, Mrs. Larson explained, "aided by Grey's loving tutelage and her own renewal with the Navajo world.

In the process of describing this symbolic natachee scott momaday biography channel, Momaday's writing soars to heights of poetic beauty. Several aspects of The Ancient Child are derived from Momaday's own experience and interests. The novel "is about the boy who turns into a bear, and in a sense I am writing about myself," he told Woodard.

It is full of magic. When Woodard asked the author about his interest in Billy the Kid, he replied: "I think it might be because I grew up in New Mexico and heard about Billy the Kid from the time I was very young I'm now probably one of the authorities on Billy the Kid. I've thought so much about him. Billy the Kid is opposed to one part of my experience—to the Indian side of me.

He's diametrically opposed to that, but at the same time he's very much a reflection of the world I love. The Wild West. Billy the Kid, the landscape of the Southwest, and Momaday's Indian heritage all figure prominently in his collection, In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, The book is also illustrated with Momaday's paintings, with subjects ranging from Native American shields to bears and buffalo.

It's a wonderful symbolic representation of the ideal of the self. In the preface to the volume Momaday writes, "The poems and stories, the drawings here, express my spirit fairly, I believe. If you look closely into these pages, it is possible to catch a glimpse of me in my original being. The story revolves around Tolo, a young mute boy grieving for the loss of his beloved grandfather.

On Christmas Eve, his grand-father's spirit unexpectedly leads Tolo to a mountain bonfire, where he meets an elk, a wolf, and an eagle and discovers new meaning to the Christmas tradition. A gathering of Momaday's stories and essays over the past thirty years, the collection includes his accounts of journeys around the world, including visits to the Soviet UnionGranada, and Germany.

Presented here too are his remembrances of tribal elders from his childhood and his views of Indian sacred places. The book's final section contains a series of brief vignettes and short tales. According to Joe Knowles in the Nation, "These fits of narration are sometimes grandfatherly, dodderingly humorous ramblings Elsewhere he is incisive and a touch sorrowful.

Momaday's collection, In the Bear's House, is an assemblage of artwork, poems, and prose focusing on the central character of "Bear," a symbol for wilderness. Ray Olson, writing in Booklist, maintained that the book "radiates metaphysical wisdom, especially in the simply worded, witty dialogues, and an aura of mysterious beauty. Acknowledging the similarities of theme and subject matter in his writings, Momaday told Bruchac, "I think that my work proceeds from the American Indian oral tradition, and I think it sustains that tradition and carries it along.

And vice versa. I've written several books, but to me they are all parts of the same story. And I like to repeat myself, if you will, from book to book, in the way that [American writer William] Faulkner did—in an even more obvious way, perhaps. My purpose is to carry on what was begun a long time ago. In a sense I'm not concerned to change my subject from book to book.

Rather, I'm concerned to keep the story going. I mean to keep the same subject, to carry it further with each telling. Through the years Momaday has become more interested in telling his story with both words and illustrations. As he explained to Woodard, Momaday sees a relationship between writing and visual art. Drawings and paintings, the author noted, "can be very powerful and can draw upon some sort of universal power in the way that language does.

I certainly need to write, and painting seems to come from the same impulse. If I didn't write, I would cease to be. Painting, now that I have discovered it, is becoming a necessary activity for me—a necessary expression of my spirit. Momaday commented further to Woodard that he is slowly becoming as well known for his art as he is for his writings, a phenomenon he considers "progress.

I have a long way to go, and I get some resistance. There are people who don't want to believe that I can paint, because they have already accepted me as a writer, and there is in human nature, I think, a tendency to resist new definitions. As Momaday related to Woodard, his friend remarked: "Scott, I like your paintings. They're very nice.

But you are a great writer and you're wasting your time. Louise ErdrichThe Bingo Palace, Whether as a poet, novelist, or painter, Momaday has infused his work with myth, spirituality, and a reverence for nature. His writings, which draw on the Native American natachee scott momaday biography channel tradition in both form and subject matter, have inspired a number of Native American authors.

In the years since House Made of Dawn was published, Momaday has retained his position as an influential literary figure, though it is a designation the author rarely thinks about. The author expressed to Woodard that "it is exciting to be Scott Momaday, alive at this time and presented with stimuli all around me. In fact, it is wonderful. Brumble, H.

Donovan, Kathleen M. Momaday, N. Nelson, Margaret F. Schubnell, Matthias, N. Schubnell, Matthias, editor, Conversations with N. Seekamp, Warren B. Velie, Alan R. Woodard, Charles L. Marken, review of The Names, pp. Bloomsbury Review, July-August,p. Library Journal, May 1,Caroline A. Mitchell, review of The Man Made of Words, p. Los Angeles Times, November 20, Publishers Weekly, September 19,p.

Louis Literary Award," p. In a interview for the PBS show American Mastersthe director Jeff Palmer asked Momaday what knowledge would he want to pass on to younger generations. He responded: "I would want them to be mindful of that fact that at the beginning of the 20th Century say, I was born in a house in Oklahomawhich had no electricity, no plumbing.

We would be considered at the very bottom of the scale in terms of land and poverty. I came from that by the virtue of good luck and perseverance into a kind of existence that has been visible. It is possible to overcome great disadvantage. You know the Indian people, at the turn of the 20th Century, were terribly defeated. They had a sense of defeat.

They had been conquered and put down and held down. But they have done it to a large extent. I want my legacy to be the example of how one can survive against those odds. I think it gets easier all the time After receiving his Ph. His novel House Made of Dawn led to the breakthrough of Native American literature into the American mainstream after the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in The novel is a seminal work of contemporary Native American literature.

As other Indigenous American writers began to gain recognition, Momaday turned to poetry, releasing a small collection called Angle of Geese. Writing for The Southern ReviewJohn Finlay described it as Momaday's best work, and that it should "earn him a permanent place in our literature. According to Matthias Schubnell, Momaday's memoir The Names "is best described as an extension of The Way to Rainy Mountain: while the earlier work conveys the mythic and historical precedents to Momaday's personal experiences in story fragments within an associative structure, The Names is a chronological account of his childhood and adolescence.

From tohe focused primarily on literary research, leading him to pursue the Guggenheim Fellowship at Harvard University. Momaday taught creative writing, and produced a new curriculum based on American Indian literature and mythology. During the plus years of Momaday's academic career, he built up a natachee scott momaday biography channel specializing in American Indian oral history and sacred concepts of the culture itself.

Momaday's contributions to the field resulted in 21 honorary degrees from universities including Yalethe University of Massachusettsthe University of WisconsinDartmouth and Oklahoma City University. InMomaday received the St. InMomaday won a Lifetime Achievement Award [ 39 ] from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, [ 40 ] the only juried prize to honor the best books addressing racism and questions of equity and diversity.

The same year, Momaday became one of the inductees in the first induction ceremony held by the National Native American Hall of Fame. In Momaday received the Richard C. InMomaday returned to live in Oklahoma for the first time since his childhood. Though initially he moved back to Oklahoma for his wife's cancer treatment, Momaday's relocation coincided with the state's centennial, and Governor Brad Henry appointed him as the 16th Oklahoma Poet Laureatesucceeding Nimrod International Journal editor Francine Leffler Ringold.

Momaday held the position for two years. Momaday was the founder of the Rainy Mountain Foundation [ 46 ] and Buffalo Trust, a nonprofit organization working to preserve Native American cultures. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item.

Native American author and academic — Bush Background [ edit ]. Literary career [ edit ]. Academic career [ edit ]. Awards and recognition [ edit ]. Later activities [ edit ]. Death [ edit ]. Selected bibliography [ edit ]. Nonfiction [ 51 ] [ edit ]. Long Fiction [ 51 ] [ edit ]. Poetry [ 51 ] [ edit ]. Drama [ 51 ] [ edit ]. Children's literature [ 51 ] [ edit ].

Miscellaneous [ 51 ] [ edit ]. See also [ edit ].