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N. Scott Momaday
February 27, 1934- January 24, 2024
Navarre Scotte Momaday was a Kiowa (tribe located in the Great Plains) and American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His work, House Made of Dawn, is considered as the first significant work that would become part of the Native American Renaissance canon. From an early age, the arts had a particular place in Momaday's life, as his father Al Momaday was a painter and mother, Natachee Scott Momaday, was a writer (“N. Scott Momaday”). Momaday's parents were also an deeply involved in their respective native traditions. Al was a member of the Kiowa nation, while Natachee was of English and Cherokee descent- placing Momaday at even-eighths Indian blood (with the remaining one-eighth attributable to pioneer ancestry) per the blood quantum native laws (“N. Scott Momaday Biography”). Both of Momaday's parents taught on Indian reservations in Arizona and New Mexico when he was growing up, exposing him to the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo Indian cultures of the Southwest, thus allowing for a unique blend of cross-cultural traditions and influences.
The Man Made of Words
“The arrowmaker is pre-eminently the man made of words. He has consummate being in language; it is the world of his origin and of his posterity, and there is no other. But it is a world of definite reality and of infinite possibility” (Momaday 416).
