Navarre Scott Momaday
Activity Sheet

Biography from Academy of Achievement
On February 27, 1934, Navarre Scott Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma and spent the first year of his life at his grandparents' home on the Kiowa Indian reservation, where his father was born and raised. When he was one year old, Scott's parents moved to Arizona. His father was a painter. His mother, who is of English and Cherokee descent, became an author of children's books. Both worked as teachers on Indian reservations when Scott was growing up, and the boy was exposed not only to the Kiowa traditions of his father's family but to the Navajo, Apache and Pueblo Indian cultures of the Southwest. Momaday early developed an interest in literature, especially poetry.
After graduation from the University of New Mexico, and a year of teaching on the Apache reservation at Jicarilla, Momaday won a poetry fellowship to the creative writing program at Stanford University. Under the guidance of poet and critic Yvor Winters, Momaday earned a doctorate in English literature in 1963, and accepted a teaching post at the University of California at Santa Barbara. As his doctoral dissertation, he edited and annotated the Complete works of the 19th century American poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. It was published by Oxford University Press in 1965.
In 1969, his first novel, House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Momaday moved to the University of California at Berkeley as Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He designed a graduate program of Indian Studies and taught a popular course in American Indian literature and mythology. His long study of the Kiowa oral tradition bore fruit that year in The Way to Rainy Mountain , a collection of Kiowa tales illustrated by his father Al Momaday. That same year, he was initiated into the Gourd Dance Society, the ancient fraternal organization of the Kiowas.
His 1971 essay "The American Land Ethic" drew public attention to the tradition of respect for nature practiced by the native peoples and its significance to modern American society in an era of environmental degradation. Angle of Geese and Other Poems was published in 1974, a memoir, The Names , in 1976. A second volume of poems, The Gourd Dancer (1976) was partly written while he was lecturing in Moscow in 1974. At the same time, he took up drawing and painting seriously for the first time in his life. Since then his work has been exhibited throughout the United States. His newer books are frequently illustrated with his own paintings and etchings.
Momaday left Berkeley for Stanford in 1973. Since 1982, he has lived in Tucson and taught at the University of Arizona, giving occasional lectures at other schools including Princeton and Columbia. His more recent books include: The Ancient Child (1989), In the Presence of the Sun (1991), Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story (1993), and The Native Americans: Indian Country (1993). He is also the author of a play, The Indolent Boys.
He holds honorary doctorates from eleven universities, including Yale. He is professor of English at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Momaday received the Oklahoma Center for the Book Lifetime Achievement Award Winner in 1994.

House Made of Dawn
Book Description from amazon.com
In June 1945, a young Tano Indian named Abel returns from World War II army service to his home village, Walatowa, in New Mexico's Canon de San Diego, only to discover that he has entered a hell between two cultures. The world of his grandfather, Francisco--and of Francisco's fathers before him--is a world of seasonal rhythms, a harsh and beautiful place defined by unremitting poverty; a land with creatures, traditions and ceremonies reaching back thousands of years. It is the urban world of post-war white America, with its material abundance and promises of plenty that draws Abel away from his people. It is a choice fraught with pain, however, for Abel winds up in prison, then drifts to Los Angeles and a life of dissipation, disgust, and despair. Torn between pueblo and city, between ancient ritual and modern materialism, between starlight and streetlight, Abel descends further and further into his own private hell; a fate not unknown to thousands of Native Americans.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, N. Scott Momaday explores the plight of young twentieth-century Native Americans against the panoramic background of a majestic--and majestically described--landscape. Abel must find a way to reaffirm the ancient ways and truths of his people while finding a place for himself in a world seemingly at dramatic odds with those truths. May it be beautiful all around me, prays the Night Chanter. And Abel persists in seeking a path to that beauty. Read an exerpt.

PinkMonkey Notes
http://www.freebooknotes.com/guides/housemadeofdawn.htm

Reading Group Guide for House Made of Dawn
http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides/house_made_of_dawn.html

The Way to Rainy Mountain
From the new preface
The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself.

Study Guide for The Way to Rainy Mountain
http://www.plainsfolk.com/seminar/guide3.htm

In the Bear's House
Book Description from amazon.com
N. Scott Momaday's unique connection to the beauty and spirituality of the natural world surfaces in all of his works, from his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn to his more recent collection In the Presence of the Sun. Yet In the Bear's House is Momaday's intensely personal quest to understand the spirit of the wilderness embodied in the animal image of Bear.

You are the dark shape I find
On nights of the spilling moon,
Pale in the pool of heaven.
You are spirit, you are that
Which summons me and confirms
My passage. You know my name...
--from "Revenant"

Intimately linked to Bear since his childhood, Momaday searches for this elusive yet omnipresent spirit who is both the keeper and the manifestation of the wild mountains, rivers, and plains. Exploring themes of anguish, forgiveness, and belief, Momaday journeys from the bitter Siberian taiga to the blackening night sky to deep within his own timeless essence, and reveals Bear to be both a radiant presence and spiritual restorative. In the first section, Momaday uses dialogues between the original Bear, Urset, and his creator, Yahweh, to probe the troubling consolation of language, the wonder of prayer, and the grace of storytelling. The bold, finely wrought language of the poems and passages collected here evoke the despair, bewilderment, and valor of the hunted Bear as well as the ultimate redemption and fulfillment to be found in the ritual of death. The provocative original paintings throughout In the Bear's House powerfully enhance our interpretation of Bear by suggesting his many incarnations.
Through both word and image, Momaday brings us deep into his vision of Bear's house and further distinguishes himself as one of the most luminous visionaries of our time.Modern American Poetry Web Page
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/momaday/momaday.htm

Perspectives in American Literature Web Page
http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/momaday.html

Teaching Momaday
http://www.georgetown.edu/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/momaday.html

Academy of Achievement
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/mom0pro-1

PBS The West - Keeper of the Flame
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/program/producers/momaday.htm

Interview Transcript
http://www.coh.arizona.edu/english/poetics/momaday.html