N. Scott Momaday

Scott Momaday is recorded at birth as Navarre Scott Momaday.

Scott Momaday studied at University of New Mexico, Stanford University and Augusta Military Academy. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is English-language literature. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are fiction. Residence is recorded at Lawton and Tucson. Employment is recorded with University of California, Santa Barbara, University of California, Berkeley and University of Arizona. Works named in the authority record are House Made of Dawn. Work by N. Scott Momaday is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution and National Museum of the American Indian. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, National Medal of Arts, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and St.

• Name — N. Scott Momaday • Native Name — Ts’òâitàlyì: • Occupation — Writer • Birth Name — Novarro Scotte Mammedaty • Born — 27 February 1934 • Birthplace — Lawton, Oklahoma, U.S. • Died — 24 January 2024 • Place of death — Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S. • Education — University of New Mexico (BA) Stanford University (MA, PhD) • Movement — Native American Renaissance • Genre — Fiction • Notable Works — House Made of Dawn (1968) Navarre Scott Momaday (February 27, 1934 – January 24, 2024) was a Kiowa and American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance. In a tribute published upon his death, Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States, noted that in House Made of Dawn, "Momaday found a way to move eloquently between oral storytelling forms and the written English novel form. The trajectory of the book moves from sunrise to sunrise, making a circle - a story structure recognizable in Indigenous oral history, yet following traditional American literary shape and expectations of a novel. The title is drawn directly from the traditional literature of the Diné people." Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 for his work's celebration and preservation of Indigenous oral and art tradition. He held 20 honorary degrees from colleges and universities, the last of which was from the California Institute of the Arts in 2023, and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Navarre Scotte Momaday, also written Novarro Scotte Mammedaty. was born on February 27, 1934, in Lawton, Oklahoma. He was delivered in the Kiowa and Comanche Indian Hospital, registered as having seven-eighths Indian blood. N. Scott Momaday's mother was Mayme 'Natachee' Scott Momaday (1913–1996), who Momaday stated was to be of English, Irish, French, and "some degree of Cherokee" descent, born in Fairview, Kentucky, while his father was Alfred Morris Momaday, who was a full-blooded Kiowa. His mother was a writer and his father a painter. His grandfather John spelled the name Mammeday. In addition, the etymology of Momaday appears in John Peabody Harringon's Vocabulary of the Kiowa language, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1928, as an unambiguous entry on page 121: mῌm-dei ‘up, upper; roof’. Harrington used a small-capital Greek eta H to represent the sound of “ǎ” in land /lænd/ and iotacized it (subscript iota, as a right-turning curl) to represent that nasalized vowel: [æ˜], thus [mæ˜m-dei], corresponding to “original” Mammeday and then Momaday. As an infant, Momaday was taken to Devils Tower and given the Kiowa name Tsoai-talee (Rock-Tree Boy). In 1935, when N. Scott Momaday was one year old, his family moved to Arizona, where both his father and mother became teachers on In 1946, a 12-year-old Momaday moved to Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, living there with his parents until his senior year of high school. Growing up in Arizona and New Mexico allowed Momaday to experience not only his father's Kiowa traditions but also those of other Southwest Native Americans including the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo traditions. To challenge himself, Momaday spent his final year of high school at the Augusta Military Academy in Virginia. He then enrolled at the University of Virginia, where he met William Faulkner and John Dos Passos. Momaday subsequently transferred to the University of New Mexico, graduating in 1958 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. He continued his education at Stanford University where, in 1963, he earned a Ph.D. in English Literature. In a 2022 interview for the PBS show American Masters, the 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 Oklahoma, which 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. "I have achieved a kind of reputation and I think the legacy has to do with what is possible. 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. And it was terribly hard for them to come out of that, to survive that kind of poverty of the morale, let’s say. But they have done it to a large extent. There’s still a ways to go. 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.D. in 1963 from Stanford University, Momaday's first book publication was The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, which he edited and prefaced with an introduction. Momaday's doctoral dissertation was on Tuckerman. 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 1969. House Made of Dawn was the first novel of the Native American Renaissance, a term coined by literary critic Kenneth Lincoln in the Native American Renaissance. The novel is a seminal work of contemporary Native American literature. His follow-up work The Way to Rainy Mountain blended folklore with memoir. 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 Review, John Finlay described it as Momaday's best work, and that it should "earn him a permanent place in our literature." The Gourd Dancer, which was finished while Momaday taught in the USSR, was released in 1976. 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."

Momaday was tenured at Stanford University, the University of Arizona, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of California-Santa Barbara. Momaday was a visiting professor at places such as Columbia and Princeton, while also being the first professor to teach American Literature in Moscow, Russia at Moscow State University. In 1963, Momaday began teaching at the University of California–Santa Barbara as an assistant professor of English. From 1966 to 1967, he focused primarily on literary research, leading him to pursue the Guggenheim Fellowship at Harvard University. Two years later, in 1969, Momaday was named professor of English at the University of California-Berkeley. Momaday taught creative writing, and produced a new curriculum based on American Indian literature and mythology. In 1981, he settled at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he retired in 2005. During the 35-plus years of Momaday's academic career, he built up a reputation 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 Yale, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Wisconsin, Dartmouth and Oklahoma City University. Momaday was a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico during the 2014–15 academic year to teach in the Creative Writing and American Literary Studies Programs in the Department of English. Specializing in poetry and the Native oral tradition, he taught The Native American Oral Tradition.

In 2007, Momaday 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 Laureate, succeeding Nimrod International Journal editor Francine Leffler Ringold. Momaday held the position for two years. Momaday was the founder of the Rainy Mountain Foundation and Buffalo Trust, a nonprofit organization working to preserve Native American cultures. Momaday, a known watercolor painter, designed and illustrated the book, In the Bear's House.

He died on January 24, 2024, at the age of 89 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Source: • The Journey of Tai-me (1967), folklore & memoir, revised and published as The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) (illustrated by his father, Alfred Momaday), folklore & memoir; • The Names: A Memoir (1976), memoir

Source: • House Made of Dawn (1968), novel • The Ancient Child (1989), novel

Source: • Angle of Geese (1974), poetry chapbook • The Gourd Dancer (1976), poetry • Again the Far Morning: New and Selected Poems (2011), poetry • The Death of Sitting Bear (2020), poetry • Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land (2020), poetry • Dream Drawings: Configurations of a Timeless Kind (2022), poetry,

Source: • The Indolent Boys (Play) Premiered on the Syracuse Stage during the 1993–94 season. • Three Plays: The Indolent Boys, Children of the Sun, and The Moon in Two Windows (2007), plays

Source: • In the Presence of the Sun (1992), stories and poetry • The Native Americans: Indian County (1993) • The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (1997), stories and essays • In the Bear's House (1999), mixed media

The authorities additionally record the headings Navarre Scott Momaday, Navarre Scott Mammedaty, Tsoai-talee and Rock Tree Boy. His recorded language was English.

Scott Momaday worked in English-language literature. His work is associated with Native American Renaissance. He was employed by University of California, Santa Barbara, University of California, Berkeley and University of Arizona. He belonged to American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He worked at Lawton and Tucson.