N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer prize-winner and Native American literary nice, dies Pulitzer prize successful creator and scholar N. Scott Momaday has died. He is credited with beginning the modern Native American literary motion.
N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer prize-winner and Native American literary nice, dies
Pulitzer prize successful creator and scholar N. Scott Momaday has died. He is credited with beginning the modern Native American literary motion.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
We discovered this week of the loss of life of N. Scott Momaday at his dwelling in Santa Fe. The novelist, poet, essayist and painter was the primary Native American to win a Pulitzer Prize, and he ushered in a renaissance in Native American literature. Megan Kamerick at member station KUNM has this remembrance.
MEGAN KAMERICK, BYLINE: Former poet laureate Pleasure Harjo of the Muskogee Nation says Momaday’s 1969 novel “Home Made Of Daybreak” would set up him as a father for modern Native literature.
JOY HARJO: Not only for me, however for many people developing, like Leslie Marmon Silko and others, developing as younger, Native folks beginning to write and inform tales and to consider what it meant to be a Native author and significantly Native writers of our personal tribal nations.
KAMERICK: Momaday obtained his bachelor’s diploma and taught on the College of New Mexico. Finnie Coleman, an affiliate professor there, says he wasn’t only a nice Native author.
FINNIE COLEMAN: “Home Made Of Daybreak” is among the world’s nice items of literature.
KAMERICK: At a writers’ gathering in New Mexico in 2002, Momaday talked concerning the work of writers.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
N SCOTT MOMADAY: I feel that we’re always redefining the human situation. And that’s, so far as I can see, the author’s topic. What’s it to be human? What’s it to be human right here and now?
KAMERICK: Navarre Scott Momaday was born in 1934 in Lawton, Okla., into the Kiowa tribe. His youth had been spent in different Native communities, together with the Navajo Nation and Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico. He additionally taught faculty on the Jicarilla Apache Nation. Steeped in Indigenous oral traditions, Momaday then obtained a proper poetry schooling at Stanford, the place he obtained a grasp’s diploma and a doctorate. Pleasure Harjo says he skillfully blended these concepts.
HARJO: He took a kind like a novel and made it very significantly Kiowa – you already know, like Kiowa American. You already know, that was a present.
KAMERICK: Momaday instructed New Mexico PBS in 2014, oral custom is commonly extra very important than writing.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MOMADAY: It exists on the stage of the human voice, and it is rapid. Individuals who do not need writing take storytelling very severely as a result of they need to. The story is all the time one era from extinction. So you need to hear, and you need to keep in mind what you hear.
KAMERICK: Momaday printed some 19 books of fiction, poetry and essays. In 2022, he was inducted into the Academy of American Arts and Letters. He additionally turned an completed painter. For NPR Information, I am Megan Kamerick in Albuquerque.
(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN TWO-HAWKS’ “OF SHADOW AND LIGHT”)
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