N. Scott Momaday

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. As an infant, Momaday was taken to Devils Tower and given the Kiowa name Tsoai-talee (Rock-Tree Boy). Momaday subsequently transferred to the University of New Mexico, graduating in 1958 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. ==Literary career==

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 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." ==Academic career==

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. 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. 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. ==Awards and recognition==

In 1969, Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn. In 1992, Momaday received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. In 1993, Momaday received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. Momaday was featured in the Ken Burns and Stephen Ives documentary, The West (1996). He was also featured in PBS documentaries concerning boarding schools, Billy the Kid, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In 2000, Momaday received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In July 2007, Momaday was honored as the Oklahoma Centennial Poet Laureate Later that year, in November, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President George W. Bush. Momaday received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Illinois at Chicago on May 9, 2010. In 2018, Momaday won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, 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 2019, Momaday was awarded the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize. In 2019 Momaday received the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Momaday appeared in the 2023 Ken Burns documentary The American Buffalo. ==Later activities==

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.'' ==Death==

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

Nonfiction 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 Long Fiction Source: • Three Plays: The Indolent Boys, Children of the Sun, and The Moon in Two Windows (2007), plays Children's literature Source: • Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story (1994), children's book • Four Arrows & Magpie: A Kiowa Story (2006), children's book Miscellaneous 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 ==See also==