Creative Nonfiction (Course Guide / Lisa Heise)

Navarre Scott Momaday was born on February 27, 1934, in Lawton, Oklahoma. His father, Alfred Momaday, was Kiowa, and his mother, Mayme Natchee Scott Momaday, was part Cherokee. While still a baby, Momaday was given the name Tsoai-talee (Rock Tree Boy) by a Kiowa elder after Devil's Tower (Rock Tree, or Tsoai in Kiowa), the prominent Wyoming landmark that lay on the Kiowa's ancestral migration route. Momaday's parents would take him to Devil's Tower as a child so that he could make contact with his ancient traditions, and that experience would be among the most important of his formative influences. | from Encyclopedia of the American Indian in the Twentieth Century | Credo Reference (Library Database)

Navarre Scott Momaday not only secured his reputation as an important writer but also helped spark a renaissance of American Indian literature that has continued into the 21st century. Momaday's two autobiographies. The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) and The Names: A Memoir (1976), are major artistic accomplishments that have profoundly influenced contemporary American autobiographers. In his autobiographical essay “The Man Made of Words” (1970). Momaday describes what he sees as the function of life writing: “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.” | from Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms | Credo Reference (Library Database)

"My friend, the late Vine Deloria Jr., once chided me for remarking too often a time when dogs could talk. I had to admit that he was probably right. I had discovered that Kiowa elders used this formula to indicate something that had happened far back in time. This or that happened a long time ago when dogs could talk. It seems to me a charming and appropriate expression. It is the kind of thing that reveals more and more of itself in the fullness of time. That, by the way, is a mystery which distinguishes the oral tradition, and it is a foundation of language itself." | From: World Literature Today(Vol. 81, Issue 5) Sept-Oct 2007 | Gale Literature Resource Center (Library Database)

PDF Link. The article presents a reprint of the "In the Presence of the Sun: A Gathering of Shields," by N. Scott Momaday. It focuses on the Plains shield, a round and made of durable materials, which reflects the character of the Plains culture. A Plains warrior believe that the shield is what a person sees and reflects one's own reality. The shield of two dreams, walking bear's shield and bote-talee's shield, are among the shields described in this paper. | Native Peoples Magazine. Fall97/Winter98, Vol. 11 Issue 1, p56-61 | MasterFILE Complete (EBSCO) (Library Database)

PDF Link. The author explains why he has associated Christmas and oranges. When the author's father, a full-blood Kiowa, was taken as a small child in a wagon to see his first Christmas program at Rainy Mountain Church in Oklahoma, he had never seen a Christmas tree, and he had never seen an orange. When an orange was given to him, and he held it in his hands, he must have been filled with wonder, according to the author. His father became a teacher, and he and his wife taught at Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, for a quarter of century. Every year, before the Christmas program, the author's father went to the produce markets in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and he always brought back oranges. No child at Jemez Day School ever went without a Christmas orange. | Native Peoples Magazine. Nov/Dec2003, Vol. 17 Issue 1, p43-44. 2p. | MasterFILE Complete (EBSCO) (Library Database)