N. Scott Momaday, giant of Native American literature, dead at 89

Jan. 29—N. Scott Momaday, whose groundbreaking debut novel "House Made of Dawn" inspired Native artists for decades, died last week in Santa Fe, his publisher announced Monday.

Momaday was 89.

A Kiowa man born in Lawton, Okla., Momaday grew up in Jemez Pueblo and spent much of his life writing about the Indigenous cultures of the American Southwest.

"He was important on so many levels, there almost aren't enough words to say," said Santa Fe author Carmella Padilla.

"He was a giant of course of indigenous literature but a giant of any literature not just regionally, not just nationally, internationally. His voice was so powerful and prescient and meaningful and timeless," Padilla said.

Momaday, who for a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s wrote for The New Mexican in a publication called Vida, wrote "House Made of Dawn" in the late 1960s and became widely known as one of the leading Native voices for many decades. He was a storyteller, poet, educator and folklorist in addition to a novelist.

"House Made of Dawn," published in 1968, tells of a World War II soldier who returns home and struggles to fit back in: Much of the book was based on Momaday's childhood in Jemez Pueblo and on his conflicts between the ways of his ancestors and the risks and possibilities of the outside world.

In a 2014 interview with Santa Fe journalist Lorene Mills, Momaday recalled the day he won the Pulitzer Prize for "House Made of Dawn." Asked by his publisher if he was sitting down, he said he wasn't, "but I should have been."

"It made a considerable difference in my life," he told Mills. "because I didn't know what to do after that."

He called the honor "a welcome thing, but it had its burdens."

After earning a bachelor's degree in English at the University of New Mexico in 1958, Momaday won a poetry fellowship to the creative writing program at Stanford University and earned a doctorate in English literature there in 1963, according to the National Endowment for the Arts.

Momaday lectured, taught and wrote all over the country and the world, including at UNM, the University of California, Stanford University, the University of Arizona, the University of Puget Sound and Moscow State University of Russia, to name but a few.

In 1974, he became the first professor to teach American literature at the Moscow State, and during this time there he began drawing and painting. He would later exhibit his works across the U.S., including at the Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe and the Jacobson House at the University of Oklahoma in 2006.

He wrote more than a dozen books, essays and collections of poems — including "The Way to Rainy Mountain" in 1969, and "The Names" in 1976. His poetry included "In the Presence of the Sun" in 1992 and "In the Bear's House" in 1999. He also wrote three children's books.

"His poetry bridged the gap between worlds, and the words that he wrote were unwaveringly human, tender and honest," granddaughter Natachee Momaday Gray wrote in an email Monday. "I will always remember his booming baritone voice and his enormous presence."

In 2007, President George W. Bush presented Momaday with a National Medal of Arts "for his writings and his work that celebrate and preserve Native American art and oral tradition." Besides his Pulitzer, his honors included an Academy of American Poets prize and, in 2019, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Momaday began as a poet, his favorite art form, and the publication of "House Made of Dawn" was an unintentional result of his early reputation. Editor Fran McCullough, of what is now HarperCollins, had met Momaday at Stanford and several years later contacted him and asked whether he would like to submit a book of poems.

Momaday did not have enough for a book, and instead gave her the first chapter of "House Made of Dawn."

Much of his writing was set in the American West and Southwest, whether tributes to bears — the animals he most identified with — or a cycle of poems about the life of Billy the Kid, a childhood obsession. He saw writing as a way of bridging the present with the ancient past and summed up his quest in the poem "If I Could Ascend":

Something like a leaf lies here within me; / it wavers almost not at all, / and there is no light to see it by / that it withers upon a black field. / If it could ascend the thousand years into my mouth, / I would make a word of it at last, / and I would speak it into the silence of the sun.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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