What Say Momaday? Editor’s note: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and storyteller N. Scott Momaday spoke at Oklahoma City University Nov. 2 as part of the university’s Distinguished Speaker Series. Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969 for his novel, “House Made of Dawn.” His work spans many genres including plays, folk tales, memoirs and essays. OCU Trustee Jeanne Hoffman Smith visited with Momaday just before he spoke to an overflow crowd in OCU’s Kerr McGee Auditorium. Following is a transcript of their conversation.
JHS: I am so glad to see you Scott; it’s been a couple of years since our paths have crossed and I was pleased that Robert (Henry) asked me to have this conversation with you. NSM: It’s good to see you too, Jeanne, and to have this conversation. How do you want to begin? JHS: Well, I think with the list of your enormous creative talents: first a poet, always a storyteller, a Pulitzer prize winning novelist, a powerful playwrite, a metaphoric teacher, a seed-planting scholar, a painter of deep emotions and an author of children’s books… NSM: My goodness! What an impressive list! (Laughing) JHS: Yes, and when we look for the sources of all this, we must look to your own history, your mother and father and your grandparents. Please tell me something of them. NSM: Well you know, Jeanne, I was very blessed to have as my parents two very talented and creative people. My father was a painter as you know, and my mother was a writer. So I grew up in a creative household, and very early on I decided I wanted to create things. My mother was the first influence. I wanted to be a writer, from the time I was seven or eight years old. I came to painting much later, but I had the benefit of watching my father paint in the time I was growing up. So I came by these activities honestly, and I was fortunate to have some good instruction along the way, particularly in graduate school. I met a man at Stanford who became my advisor and then a dear friend, Ida Winters. He knew a lot about poetry, and so his classes were invaluable to me. I learned a lot there, and just have been at it for many years, writing both poetry and fiction and other kinds of writing, travel literature and essays and so on. So it’s been a natural kind of course for me to follow, and I have done it to the best of my ability. I find now since I am retired,
I have lots more time than I realized I would have, and I have been very productive over the past couple of years since retirement. Writing, writing, writing. JHS: Wonderful, and we’ll be the beneficiaries as you put words to what you are thinking, feeling and wanting to say to the world. NSM: Yes, it’s a great satisfaction to me to work with words, and images. My mother wrote poetry which she didn’t publish, but she wrote children’s books as well. She has a book called “Owl in the Cedar Tree” which is a classic, a juvenile book about a Navajo boy. It’s a wonderful piece of work. My father, of course, knew all the—well, I say all—he knew a great deal of the oral tradition of the Kiowa People. I got wonderful stories when I was young from him, and most of the things that appear in “The Way to Rainy Mountain” he told me when I was a boy. That was fascinating to me. I made him tell the same stories again and again and again, and that was beneficial in a way. JHS: And that repetition of hearing the stories over and over is so important. NSM: Especially in the oral tradition, yeah. JHS: You once said that the American Indian oral tradition is not merely to entertain, and not merely to instruct, but to be believed. Can you say a bit more about that? NSM: I think that’s a crucial part of the oral tradition. I tell my students that all stories are true in the sense that they are told to be believed. The trick is to, on the part of a storyteller, to tell the story in such a way that it is creditable, and on the part of the listener as a contract, the listener has to suspend disbelief—goes into the storytelling situation willing to believe the authority of the storyteller. JHS: When you read your stories aloud, your voice has such authority to it that you believe it from the authority of your voice as well as from the words themselves. NSM: Absolutely, yes! JHS: This all reminds me of your story, “In the Bear’s House,” which is one of my favorites. Did Robert tell you that he read “Yahweh’s Prayer” from that book when he gave the commencement address last spring? NSM: Yes he did, and I’m so pleased about that. JHS: Would you tell us again from the story how the bear came to be the bear? NSM: There are several stories about bears. The one that I like and that means most to me is the story of the boy who turned into a bear,
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and storyteller N. Scott Momaday
and that happened at Devils Tower, Wyoming, which the Kiowas call So-Eye, meaning “rock tree.” Devils Tower, as you may know, resembles the trunk of a tree, but it’s a thousand feet high. It’s a wonderful feature in the landscape. And the Kiowas say, when we lived there, on our way down from the Yellowstone to the southern Plains, there were some children playing in the woods, in the Black Hills. And there were eight children, seven sisters and their brother. And the boy, he was pretending to be a bear, and he was chasing his sisters, who were pretending to be afraid, they were running. And in the course of the game, a terrible thing happened. The boy actually turned into a bear. And when the girls saw this, they were truly frightened, and they ran for their lives. And as they were running through the woods, they passed the stump of a tree, a huge tree stump. And the tree spoke to them and said, “If you will climb upon me, I will save you.” And so the girls climbed on top of the stump, and as they did so, it began to rise into the air. The bear came to kill them, but they were beyond its reach. And it reared up and scored the bark all around with its claws. And that’s why Devils Tower has these deep grooves in it, you know, like they were scored by a bear. And the story ends, the girls were born into the sky, and they became the stars of the Big Dipper. And that’s the story. So when I was less than a year old, something like six months old, my parents took me from Oklahoma where I was living with my grandmother and my Kiowa family to Devils Tower, Wyoming. I don’t remember that because I was too young, though I’ve been back a number of times. But when I was brought back home to Oklahoma, an old man in the tribe came to visit, and he took me up in arms, and he began to tell stories. And all the other voices in the arbor fell away, and his was the only one left. And he talked and talked. At the end of his talk, he looked down at me and he said, focus s p r i n g 2 0 1 1
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