Opinion | Joy Harjo: N. Scott Momaday weaved thought and dreams into words

Joy Harjo of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation is a poet and musician who served as 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States.

The passing of an icon leaves an opening. Around it, we place symbols of our grief: flowers, songs, tributes and tears. There are always words, and his words were what placed N. Scott Momaday of the Kiowa Nation in a place of high esteem in American and world literature, in a place of honor by indigenous communities of this country. I imagine Momaday, who died on Jan. 24 at 89, saying in his oracular and deeply rooted voice how he was spoken into this world, for most of what appears in this earthly story field began and begins in the thoughts that make words.

I first came upon his words when I was an undergraduate student at the University of New Mexico in the early 1970s. My generation of Native students were looking for potent words to assist in righting wrongs done to our peoples since “discovery.” We made attempts for justice as we assisted tribal nations in our community. They came to us for help, for witness, as they spoke to the power and mining companies in often futile attempts to save their lands from exploitation, and to preserve the waters and land for future generations.

This search for words led me to Native poets who were emerging as stalwarts in American literature, such as James Welch of the Blackfeet Nation, Leslie Marmon Silko of the Laguna Pueblo, and Momaday. All were also storytellers in the form of fiction. All were directly connected through their parents to cultures dependent on the spoken word — orality — for their systems of knowledge and communication.

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Momaday, born in 1934, was a kind of crossover point between the primacy of orality and written language as the principal mode of passing on knowledge and making stories. He had an American education, one that culminated at Stanford University — but he was also educated by his grandparents Aho and Mammedaty, whose power to call worlds into being with their spoken words he often referenced in his many essays and talks.

In his brilliant, ground-breaking novel “House Made of Dawn,” awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, Momaday found a way to move eloquently between oral storytelling forms and the written English novel form. The trajectory of the book moves from sunrise to sunrise, making a circle — a story structure recognizable in indigenous oral traditions, yet following traditional American literary shape and expectations of a novel. The title is drawn directly from the traditional literature of the Diné people.

Momaday was also a noted poet, memoirist, essayist and artist. His poem “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee,” a lyrical chant of affirmation, is a classic in contemporary Native literature. With “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” he reinvented memoir, constructing the work with three separate, compelling voices that braid the mythical, the personal, and the storyteller into a sequence of memory. “The Man Made of Words,” a book of essays, reiterated the power of words. Coming from a place of orality, words are experienced as powerful beings made of breath, thought and dreams; they emerge from the ancestors and go out into the field of being to connect with those who are becoming. We must take care with what we say and how we speak, for we are creating a potent present and future.

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This man made of words was also an artist and imagined himself as a bear. Bears cross realms of being and communication. They walk on all fours and on two legs, as do humans. In all Momaday’s manifestations of creativity — his art, his story and poetry making, his speaking, his presence — he emphasized a continuum between history, the present and the future. His legacy leaves evidence of the continual Indigenous presence and imagination that defines America.

I leave these words as a tribute to a father, a grandfather, of contemporary Kiowa, Native, American and world literature and art, in gratitude for making a door that wasn’t there in the generations that preceded him. It took bravery, imagination, listening to what isn’t always heard and, most of all, a great love of the word and how it can and will remake us.

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