"N. Scott Momaday has made himself readily available for interviews throughout his career. Among the recurrent issues raised in these conversations are Momadays multi-ethnic experience, his view of the Indians place in American society, his synthesis of native oral traditions and the Western literary canon, his concern for ecology and conservation, his theories of language and the imagination, the influences on his academic and artistic development, his work as a teacher and painter, and, of course, his own comments on specific works. Momadays responses to queries on these topics are remarkably consistent."
Navarre Scott Momaday 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.
"Now when I hear spoken—mostly by the older people who are passing away—it is to me very good. ...the sound is like a warm wind that arises from my childhood. It is the music of memory. ...much of the power and magic and music of words consist not in the meaning but in sound. Storytellers, actors, and children know this too."
N. Scott Momaday"If an arrow is well made it will have tooth marks on it. ...The Kiowas ...straightened them with their teeth. Then they drew them to the bow to see that they were straight."
N. Scott Momaday"She was ten when the Kiowas came together for the last time as a living Culture. They could find no buffalo... a company of soldiers rode out from ... to disperse the tribe. Forbidden without cause the essential act of their faith, having seen the wild herds slaughtered and left to rot upon the ground, the Kiowas backed away forever from the medicine tree. ...My grandmother was there. Without bitterness, and for as long as she lived, she bore a vision of deicide."
N. Scott Momaday"[T]he s came out one by one into the world through a hollow log. ...They looked all around and saw the world. It made them glad to see so many things. They called themselves Kwuda, "coming out.""
N. Scott Momaday"Sampte drew the string back until he felt the bow wobble... and he let it go. It shot across the long light of the morning and struck the black face of a stone... glanced then away... limping... then it settled down in the grass and lay still. ...he believed that the arrow might take flight again, so much of his life did he give into it."
N. Scott Momaday"Just before Mammedatys time the s had been brought to their knees in the infamous winter campaigns of the Seventh Cavalry, and their Plains culture... virtually destroyed."
N. Scott Momaday