February 27, 1934 – January 24, 2024
Crack Open the World
by Rilla Askew
Photo: Steven St. John
I met Scott Momaday in Norman, Oklahoma, in 2007, when he’d just been named Oklahoma’s Centennial Poet Laureate. We were at the home of RC Davis-Undiano, Executive Director of World Literature Today, the international literary journal headquartered at the University of Oklahoma. I didn’t think then, as I do now, of the irony that an indigenous poet was thus celebrated in the year marking the 100th anniversary of the dissolution of Indian Territory.
For context: in the 1800s, the federal government removed Native tribes from their homelands across the continent to Indian Territory. This was to be their land in perpetuity, but by the turn of the century, through chicanery and legislation, the tribes had lost most of their land. In 1907, Indian Territory became the state of Oklahoma. With the stroke of a pen, tribal governments were dissolved, and all indigenous people here, including the Kiowas, having lost so much already, also lost tribal sovereignty. In 2007, Oklahoma was set to celebrate its own statehood and this powerful Kiowa poet in the same year, without a hint of irony.
The state’s never been quick to recognize its own hypocrisies, but as an Oklahoma writer, I’ve tried to be. That evening, though, I missed it. That evening, I thought only of what a privilege it was to be in the presence of this master.
I remember him sitting in a great chair near the living room fireplace, while we—students and faculty and WLT personnel—roiled around him. I remember the rich baritone of his voice when he spoke, which he did very little, and the humorous glint in his eyes that made me think at times he was joking, but then his face would be so serious that I thought, well, perhaps not. Above all, I remember his tremendous presence—how it felt as if the sheer gravitational weight of him could have pulled in all the spirits in the room.
I don’t recall if I tried to tell him how much his work had meant to me. I imagine I was too awestruck and tongue-tied to try. Even now, years later, it’s hard to find words. N. Scott Momaday has loomed large over all my writing days, especially the early years when I was trying to find who I was as a writer. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, House Made of Dawn, was the first of his works I read. I recognized the displacement and alienation, the wounds of a returning World War II soldier—I’d seen these in Oklahoma, had seen the aftermath of Vietnam—but there was so much I didn’t understand: why the novel was set in New Mexico and California instead of Oklahoma, why Abel ran, why running was a mark of healing.
I knew Momaday was Kiowa, a nomadic Plains tribe, a magnificent horse people corralled finally in the Wichita Mountains of Southwestern Oklahoma. It wasn’t until years later, reading his 1976 memoir The Names,that I came to understand how much of Momaday’s own life is captured in that first novel, especially his young years on reservations in New Mexico and Arizona, where his parents were teachers.
I didn’t find my way to The Way to Rainy Mountain until much later, though this interwoven work of Kiowa stories, tribal history, and personal memoir appeared the same year House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer. This is the book that brought home to me the power of Momaday’s poetic storytelling. It also showed me the sacredness of place: how immutable that is, how irrevocable. Rendered in pieces and shards, connected by mythic drawings by his artist father, the book itself is a poem. It broke open my notions of storytelling.
But it is Momaday’s 1990 novel The Ancient Child that has had the most enduring effect for me. I taught it in a Native Lit course at Syracuse University in 1993, and so I studied it more deeply. I’d also read many other Native writers by then, so I was more capable of surrendering my Western notions of novel and narrative. One passage especially stays with me, makes me ache still to read it. Here, the writer describes the end of the Sun Dance, when the Kiowa people were forbidden to practice their religion.
At the last Sun Dance in 1889, soldiers rode out from Fort Sill with orders to disperse the tribe, and the Kiowas were forced to back away from the Medicine Tree. “My grandmother was there,” Momaday writes. “Without bitterness, and for as long as she lived, she bore a vision of deicide.”
Of all the losses—people, land, language, ceremony, story, sovereignty, freedom—this theft cuts hardest for me: the annihilation of a people’s god, their religion, their very foundation of the world.
Momaday taught me a thousand things I didn’t know. The way to Rainy Mountain, the sacredness of place, the visual and auditory power of fusing poem and song, drawing and myth, character and memory.
As with other giants whose work has moved and shaped me, and whom I’ve known in person, even if only through a glancing introduction, the passing of N. Scott Momaday in January of this year caused an acute sense of loss—a kind of chasm. I think of what it means to never have more words from the man, never to see a new painting, hear a new speech or reading, a new humbly offered “Thank you for listening.”
What lives is the power of his words; his books and drawing and paintings; how his work cracked open the world for hundreds of indigenous writers who’ve been shaking our literary world ever since. How his work changed me.
For this, I am grateful.
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