"I think
quite a lot about the origins," says Kiowa writer and
painter N. Scott Momaday. "I think about those people who
first came onto this continent. We know virtually nothing
about them, but they fascinate me. I like to imagine them."
Momaday
is one of this country's most accomplished Native American
writers and when he speaks about oral and written literary
arts of the Americas you sense in his voice a depth of knowledge
that has developed over years of contemplating and practicing
those arts. Certainly, his influence has been deeply pervasive.
In conversations with Native American writers, his 1968 Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn comes up time
and again.
"So many
people have told me that it influenced them in one way or
another," Momaday says when asked about the impact of that
book. "I suspect that it was in a certain context a very timely
publication. House Made of Dawn and Bury My Heart
at Wounded Knee were published at about the same time,
and I think the two of them together have made a significant
difference in the publication of books by and about Native
Americans."
But Momaday
never set out with the idea of writing in any particular cultural
style. "When I started writing;" he says, "I didn't think
about Native American literature as such at all. Some of my
earliest work had to do with the Indian world, because it's
the world I knew best. I grew up on Indian reservations. So
that was right at hand and very fresh in my mind. But I wasn't
thinking about Native American literature. I wasn't labeling
it in those days."
Today,
he is the Regents Professor of English at the University of
Arizona and has published numerous books of poetry and fiction,
including The Way to Rainy Mountain, The Names
and The Ancient Child. He has also written a play,
based on a historical incident involving three young Kiowa
boys who ran away from a boarding school in 1891.
While
Kiowa storytelling is an integral part of Momaday's work,
he acknowledges that he didn't always fully recognize the
value of the tradition he was born into. "I wasn't aware of
it when I was really immersed in Kiowa tradition," he says.
"The stories were wonderful and I took
them for granted. But I didn't understand that they were anything
special until much later. After I had become an adult, I started
asking myself what it was that made them special. And then
I got terribly interested in oral tradition as such. I love
to think about it."
Still,
he finds it difficult to pinpoint the specific influence of
the oral tradition on his own work. "It keeps my writing alive
in ways that I don't understand entirely," he says, although
he takes an evident pleasure
in pondering the relationship between the oral tradition and
the written word.
"You pick
up a novel," he says, "and you understand that here is page
one and here is page 220 and that's the end. With storytelling
it's different, because there is no page 220. There's a closure,
perhaps. But it's almost arbitrary. And what does that mean?
Does it mean that storytelling is intrinsically a superior
kind of expression? Or does it mean that writing is, because
it has more perceptible shape? Probably it makes no sense
to argue either way, because both things are valuable"
For Momaday,
both writing and speech are vital tools to be used in the
search for that difficult trail back to the origins. "This
is how it is for a great many of us," he says. "We have been
uprooted from the native ground in a way. And one of the great
problems is how to get back to it. That's a significant story
in itself. Man's search for his identity may be the oldest
story of all."
