N. Scott Momaday
N. Scott Momaday
Navarre Scott Momaday— known as N. Scott Momaday — is a Native American author of Kiowa descent. His work House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969. Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 for his work that celebrated and preserved Native American oral and art tradition. He holds 20 honorary degrees from colleges and universities, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth27 February 1934
CountryUnited States of America
Writing is not a matter of choice. Writers have to write. It is somehow in their temperament, in the blood, in tradition.
I have deep roots in this Oklahoma soil. It makes me proud.
As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.
The spiritual reality of the Indian world is very evident, very highly developed. I think it affects the life of every Indian person in one way or another.
Sometimes, I think the best kind of poem is one in which there is an acute balance between what is humorous and that which is very serious. That balance is very hard to strike. But it can be done.
We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.
I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.
Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it.
To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.
Coyotes have the gift of seldom being seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to.
The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred.
For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.
Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.
Words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold.