Santa Fe resident was giant of Native American and world literature

Jan. 29—Pulitzer Prize-winning author, poet and storyteller N. Scott Momaday, whose groundbreaking 1968 novel House Made of Dawn inspired generations of Native artists and helped make him a revered presence on the nation's literary scene, died in Santa Fe last week.

Momaday was 89. His death on Wednesday was announced Monday by publisher HarperCollins. The Associated Press reported he had been in failing health.

Born Navarre Scott Mammedaty in Lawton, Okla., Momaday was Kiowa but grew up in New Mexico's Jemez Pueblo. He spent much of his life writing about the Indigenous cultures of the American Southwest and the Bear Clan from which he descended.

The Pulitzer-winning House Made of Dawn — the story of a young Native man who returns to Jemez Pueblo seeking healing after serving in World War II amid a struggle to reconcile his identity with life in the modern world — has been credited with ushering in a period referred to as the Native American Renaissance. The movement was marked, observers said, by a rise in literary works by Native writers eager to tell their stories to an audience that often knew nothing of the Indigenous experience in the U.S.

"He laid the groundwork for us," Institute of American Indian Arts President Robert Martin said of Momaday in a phone interview Monday. "He was a legend. We are certainly going to miss him and his voice. Not only in literature but in support of Native American culture and traditions.

"He paved the way for all the Native writers of today," Martin continued. "He was the first. Before that, there had been Native American writers and storytellers, but they had never been acknowledged for their importance or contributions until Scott Momaday came along."

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, where he earned a doctorate in English literature in 1963, according to the National Endowment for the Arts.

Momaday lectured, taught and wrote throughout the country and the world, including the University of New Mexico; the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford; the University of Arizona; and the University of Puget Sound.

In 1974, he became the first professor to teach American literature at the Moscow State University in Russia, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, and during this time began drawing and painting. He later exhibited his works across the U.S., including at the Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe.

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 produced three children's books.

In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for House Made of Dawn in 1969, he received innumerable awards and honorary degrees over the years. He was named a UNESCO Artist for Peace in 2003 and received the National Medal of Arts in 2007.

In a 2014 interview with Santa Fe journalist Lorene Mills, Momaday acknowledged the notoriety of House Made of Dawn was a double-edged sword for a time.

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

People who knew him remembered Momaday as warm and witty, a captivating storyteller whose deep voice — both literally and metaphorically — compelled anyone within earshot to listen.

"He was important on so many levels there almost aren't enough words to say," author and Santa Fe International Literary Festival co-founder Carmella Padilla said in a phone interview Monday.

"He was a giant, of course, of Indigenous literature but a giant of any literature — not just regionally, not just nationally, [but] internationally," she added. "His voice was so powerful and prescient and meaningful and timeless. He spoke of thousands and thousands of years of life and nature and traditions ... which was so relevant for anybody living today."

Padilla said Momaday wanted to be "remembered as a poet, first and foremost, because he felt that was the essential language ... Even when he was writing prose, poetry was a part of it."

Momaday was married several times and had four daughters, one of whom proceeded him in death, said his granddaughter Natachee Momaday Gray. Several of his relatives — including his daughter, writer and filmmaker Jill Scott Momaday, two granddaughters and a great-granddaughter born in July — live in Santa Fe.

Gray — who released her own book of poetry last year — wrote in an email that while growing up, Momaday had always been just her "granddad," but after taking one of his courses on storytelling at UNM during her sophomore year, she finally saw the man others revered as a living legend.

"To everyone else, he was The Man Made of Words. The voice of God. The Bear. He was larger than life," she wrote. "My grandfather always told the creation story of the 7 sisters and the boy who turned into a bear at Devil's Tower in Wyoming, a sacred site to the Kiowas. I like to think that he went back to the earth and he emerged a big brown bear, like he always said he would."

Gray provided this passage from his book Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land published in 2020, as a tribute to her grandfather.

"May my heart hold the earth all the days of my life," Momaday wrote. "And when I am gone to the farther camps, may my name sound on the green hills, and may the cedar smoke that I have breathed drift on the canyon walls and among the branches of living trees. May birds of many colors encircle the soil where my steps have been placed, and may the deer, the lion, and the bear of the mountains be touched by the blessings that have touched me. May I chant the praises of the wild land, and may my spirit range on the wind forever."

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