# data[].attributes.body
Scott Momaday's writings do not support the usual definition of the American Dream. Rather, his writings support a redefined version of American Dream as one's ability to move forward into the future while remaining grounded and strengthened by their traditional past.

# data[].attributes.body
Momaday believes that a during a persons journey you will find experiences that every man goes through in different ways. The journey is one that is constant, it begins each time someone thinks of it. This is similar to the way that people journey to their dreams. Each time a dream is conceived, the journey toward that dream begins.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
N. Scott Momaday | Biography, Books, & Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
N. Scott Momaday, Native American author of many works centered on his Kiowa heritage. His best-known book is his debut novel, House Made of Dawn (1968), which won a Pulitzer Prize. Learn more about Momaday's life and work, including his other notable works.

# data[].attributes.body
Momaday was born into a family who did have much. He studied at Stanford University. The most difficult thing for Momaday was trying to "fit in" without losing completely getting rid of his roots.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
N. Scott Momaday (born 1934) is recognized as one of the premier writers in the United States. In 1969, his novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer prize for fiction.

One of the most distinguished Native-American authors writing today, N. Scott Momaday is chiefly known for novels and poetry collections that communicate the fabulous oral legends of his Kiowa heritage. In 1969 he became the first American Indian to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his novel House Made of Dawn, which had a tremendous impact on the development of Native-American literature in the United States. Published during a time of heightened cultural awareness in the late 1960s and early 70s, House Made of Dawn not only influenced but also brought attention to other gifted Indian writers, including Vine Deloria Jr., Leslie Silko, and James Welch.

Born in a Kiowa Indian hospital in Lawton, Oklahoma, on February 27, 1934, Navarre Scott Momaday was the only child of Kiowa artist Alfred Morris Momaday and teacher Mayme Natachee Scott Momaday. A descendant from early American pioneers, Momaday's mother derived her middle name from a Cherokee great-grandmother, Natachee. His father inherited the Kiowa family name "Mammedaty" from Momaday's grandfather. "At that time," Momaday explains in an essay which appears in Something about the Author, Volume 48, "people had but one name. That was the name that was given to him as a child, and that was the only name he had. But during his lifetime the missionaries came in, and the Indians adopted the Christian tradition of the surname and the Christian name. And so my grandfather was given the name John, and he became known as John Mammedaty, and Mammedaty simply became the surname of his family. It was passed down. Some of my relatives in Oklahoma still use that spelling, but my father abbreviated it to Momaday."

Growing up on Indian reservations in the American Southwest, Momaday attributes many of his childhood and lifetime memories to his parents. "Some of my mother's memories have become my own. This is the real burden of the blood; this is immortality," he relates in The Names: A Memoir. Born of mixed blood, Natachee began to identify with her Indian heritage around the age of sixteen. A beautiful girl, she called herself "Little Moon" while her cousins referred to her as "Queen of Sheba"-both of which pleased her mightily. To pursue a degree and to learn more about her Indian heritage, Natachee attended the Haskell Institute, the Indian school at Lawrence, Kansas, in 1929. Her intense love of books and English literature was a great pleasure that she passed on to her son. Through their shared experiences, Momaday learned to develop a mental repository for his vast collection of memories. As Momaday recalls, "Memories ... qualify the imagination, to give it another formation, one that is peculiar to the self. I remember isolated, yet fragmented and confused, images-and images, shifting, enlarging, is the word, rather than moments or events-which are mine alone and which are especially vivid to me."

Cultivates Vivid Early Memories

Momaday remembers that the first notable event in his life occurred when he was just six months old and he accompanied his parents on a journey to the Black Hills in Wyoming to see Devil's Tower. Referred to in Kiowa as Tsoai ["Rock Tree"], Devil's Tower became the source of Momaday's Kiowa name, Tsoai-talee, given to him by Pohd-lohk ["Old Wolf"], a Kiowa elder. Pohd-lohk had in his possession a ledger which he had secured from the Supply Office at Fort Sill and which depicted the calendar history of the Kiowa people from 1833. Momaday would later derive much of his knowledge about the origin of his people from that book.

Being an only child, Momaday learned at an early age to give free reign to his imagination, or as he states, "to create my society in my mind. And for a child this kind of creation is accomplished easily enough." Momaday's mother encouraged him to learn English as his native language, and this circumstance sometimes led the boy to experience brief periods of cultural dislocation. In describing these strange incidents, Momaday relates that he was able to see "Grendel's shadow on the walls of Canyon de Chelly, and once, having led the sun around Hoskinini Mesa, saw Copperfield at Oljeto Trading Post." When he was twelve, his family moved to the Pueblo village of Jemez. Momaday remembers "not being able to imagine a more beautiful or exotic place," and Jemez offered the boy a child's natural delight full of canyons and mountains. In Momaday's interpretive mind, Jemez became a landscape full of mystery and life, and many of his descriptive details of those childhood days can be found in his later writings. Once referring to Jemez as having "horses in the plain and angles of geese in the sky," Momaday later reflected on this image when writing Angle of Geese and Other Poems (1974).

Embarks on a Writing Career

Uncertain about his future after graduating from high school, Momaday contemplated attending West Point before deciding to enroll in the University of New Mexico in 1952. He earned a bachelor's degree in Political Science in 1958, while distinguishing himself as a public speaker and creative writer. Taking a one year break from his studies, Momaday taught school on the Jicarilla Apache reservation before pursuing a graduate studies program in literature. By this time, he had received his first academic recognition as a talented writer when he was awarded the John Hay Whitney Fellowship in creative poetry writing and the Stanford Wilson Dissertation Fellowship at Stanford University. While at Stanford, Momaday met Yvor Winters, who later became a close friend and adviser. Momaday obtained his Master's degree in 1960 and his Ph.D. three years later. In 1965 he published his first book, The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, which was based on his doctoral dissertation. Momaday credits Winters for his decision to analyze the writings of Tuckerman, a reclusive New England naturalist. According to the 1971 edition of the Penguin Companion to World Literature, Momaday's thesis led to an increased awareness of Tuckerman's poems on the part of poets and critics alike.

Following his graduate studies, Momaday joined the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1963 as assistant professor of English. Further literary research led him to pursue a Guggenheim Fellow at Harvard University during the 1966-67 academic year, after which he returned to Santa Barbara to resume teaching. Two years later, he was named professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught creative writing and introduced a new curriculum centered around American Indian literature and mythology. Also during this period, Momaday published his influential novel House Made of Dawn (1968). The story follows the adventures of Abel, a disenchanted Native-American World War II veteran who attempts to balance his identity between culturally disparate native and non-native worlds. Unable to exist peacefully in either world, Abel gradually reaches the conclusion that he is lost, and he returns to the reservation to heal his shattered psyche. In an analysis of House Made of Dawn published in the June 9, 1968, New York Times Book Review, Marshall Sprague observes that "while mysteries of culture different from our own cannot be explained in a short novel," nevertheless Momaday's book is "as subtly wrought as a piece of Navajo silverware." The next year, Momaday was accorded one of literature's highest honors when he was named the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for House Made of Dawn.

In his next novel, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), Momaday incorporated several Kiowa myths and legends into a quasi-fictional account of the 300-year-old migration of the Kiowa tribe from their place of origin in the Yellowstone region to the plains, where they learned to domesticate horses and developed into a sophisticated society. Relating the legend of how the Kiowas came into the world through a hollow log, Momaday explains that the Kiowas are a small tribe because when they entered the log "there was a woman whose body was swollen up with child, and she got stuck in the log. After that, no one could get through, and that is why the Kiowas are a small tribe in numbers." The Way to Rainy Mountain features illustrations by Momaday's father, Alfred, and it has been characterized by a reviewer for Choice (September 1969) as "a beautiful book-honest, unique, dignified, and told with a simplicity that approaches the purest poetry.... It is a book for all seasons, for all readers."

In subsequent years, Momaday's reputation has ascended to the international level. In 1979 he was awarded Italy's highest literary award, the Premio Letterario Internationale "Mondello." Moreover, in 1990 Momaday was selected to be a keynote speaker in Moscow before the Conference on Environment and Human Survival, the Global Forum and the Supreme Soviet. That same year, he was asked to be a member of the Pulitzer Prize Jury in Fiction. The father of four daughters, Momaday continues to write and teaches classes on oral tradition at the University of Arizona.

In 1993, Momaday published In the Presence of the Sun. This book includes 70 poems and 16 new stories about the "great tribal shields of the Kiowas and a strange, arresting section on Billy the Kid," according to The New York Times Book Review's Barbara Bode. Bode further says that "the reader will not find here the 'political' Indian, the Indian as 'victim' or the romanticized Indian. Rather, we hear the voices of people like Otters Going On and the woman Roan Calf, of people raided and killed, worshipped and wept. Yet the images, the voices, the people are shadowy, elusive, burning with invention, like flames against a dark sky."

The following year saw the publication of Circle of Wonder. The is a poetic story that "skillfully blends Christian and Native American traditions," according to Publishers Weekly. The book also features Momaday's artwork.

Further Reading on N. Scott Momaday

Shubnell, Matthias, N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.

Something about the Author, volume 48, edited by Anne Commire, Detroit, Gale, 1987; 158-162.

Twentieth Century Western Writers, second edition, edited by Geoff Sadler, Chicago, St. James Press, 1991; 470-471.

Woodward, Charles, Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Review of The Way to Rainy Mountain, Choice, September 1969.

Sprague, Marshall, review of House Made of Dawn, June 9, 1968.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
N. Scott Momaday (born 1934) is recognized as one of the premier writers in the United States. In 1969, his novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer prize for fiction. One of the most distinguished Native-American authors writing today, N.

# data[].attributes.headline
N. Scott Momaday’s work asks the universal questions

# data[].attributes.subject
N. Scott Momaday’s work asks the universal questions

# data[].attributes.body
N. Scott Momaday’s short story, “The End of My Childhood” depicts a young man who has experienced a dramatic twist in his life, which he refers to as the metaphoric end of his childhood. He is leaving the world he knew in his youth behind to the new world of the military academy and his newfound adulthood. Momaday shows the man as someone who is chasing the American Dream by leaving his past behind and starting new. This completly contradicts Momadays view on the American Dream and shows a different perspective that people view the American Dream as.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Director Jeffrey Palmer reflects on the process behind "N. Scott Momaday: Words From a Bear" and Momaday's enduring impact on Native American and Indigenous Communities.
From the beginning, we felt overwhelmed by the task of telling someone's life story and what to include and exclude to create a cogent narrative. Our early research identified several clear editorial and production goals that would set the foundation for the structure of the film. The first goal was to understand the richness of N. Scott Momaday's life. At the time, he was an 85 year-old Kiowa man, who was the first and only Native American author to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature. After our preliminary research, we realized that this was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. He in fact had won numerous accolades from literary awards, to peace prizes, to honorary doctorates. He knew a multitude of luminaries, actors and actresses, politicians, artists, musicians, and writers from around the world. Not only is he a great writer, he is also an accomplished painter and master orator. Yet, it is his connection to his Kiowa ancestry, his roots, that made his story unique and untold to the American public. The elders he interacted with as a child and who told stories to him, profoundly transformed his life into the writer he became. We wanted the PBS audience to know who these people were in Momaday's life and tell their stories as well.

"A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things."
―N. Scott Momaday, "The Way to Rainy Mountain"

Another goal we set was bringing a visual strategy to the ancient Kiowa Oral narratives and to N. Scott Momaday's poetry and prose. Kiowa history is fused to these ancient narratives, and we wanted to be able to bring them into the contemporary history of Momaday's life. This was essential for creating a Kiowa perspective that fully captured the essence of who Momaday was and is as a subject in history.

"We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined."
- N. Scott Momaday, "The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages"

The reportorial and creative techniques used in our film visually captured the essence of Momaday's writings, relating each written line to his unique Kiowa-American experience, representing ancestry, place and oral history. Original animation, both digital and stop motion, was the centerpiece for bringing the ancient narratives into the contemporary narrative of Momaday's life. We were able to work directly with the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and met with Kiowa elders utilizing their artwork, Kiowa family photos, and testimonies. We dramatized scenes in Momaday's life with live action reenactments and utilized beautiful aerials of tribal landscapes. All of this information was supported by an illustrious group of interviewees.

"And the simple act of listening is crucial to the concept of language, more crucial even than reading and writing, and language in turn is crucial to human society."
― N. Scott Momaday, "House Made of Dawn"

The importance of the subject matter and the impact of N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear has been felt across Native American and Indigenous communities. There are few biographies directed on Native American subjects and even fewer that are directed and produced by a Native American. The film has provided Indigenous children around the world with a connection to history, language, landscape, and identity. Furthermore, non-Native audiences the film illuminates the struggles Native American peoples have faced over the centuries and has opened new dialogue on the relevance of Native American history and the importance of N. Scott Momaday in American literature.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
N. Scott Momaday's work asks the universal questions | American Masters | PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Director Jeffrey Palmer reflects on the process behind "N. Scott Momaday: Words From a Bear" and Momaday's enduring impact on Native American and Indigenous Communities. From the beginning, we felt overwhelmed by the task of telling someone's life story and what to include and exclude to create a cogent narrative.