A History of American Literature

The American Century: Literature since 1945 783

have been instrumental in producing a body of work that deserves to stand in the

front row of contemporary writing, Native American or otherwise.

Momaday himself lived in several non-Indian communities as a child, as well as

with several Southwestern tribes, especially the Jemez Pueblo. From his father’s

family he inherited Kiowa storytelling traditions and a love of the Rainy Mountain

area of Oklahoma. His mother, whose paternal grandmother was a Cherokee,

instilled in him both an affection for English literature and the example of how an

act of imaginative will could help him forge an Indian identity. Gerald Vizenor, in

1981, was to make the celebrated remark, “I believe we’re all invented as Indians.”

And Momaday, like so many other contemporary Native American writers, reflects

that belief in his mixed, crossblood origins, his seizure of a plural, mobile identity,

his experimenting with and mixing of different genres and his preference for hybrid

forms. Typically, Momaday sees Americans of tribal descent, past or present, as

anything but frozen in time, a specimen of immobile victimry. Survival, and the

tragic wisdom it has engendered, remain for him dynamic not static tokens of the

Native living, not dead. That, too, holds for the massive pluralities of tribal

affiliation, many of which Momaday has shared. Educated at reservation, public,

and parochial schools, the universities of New Mexico, Virginia, and Stanford,

Momaday brought a catholic reading of Dickinson, Joyce, and Faulkner among

others, as well as the oral traditions of the Navajo, Pueblo, and Kiowa, to his work,

Diversity became a characteristic, as a result, not just of his writing as a whole, but

of individual texts. In The Names: A Memoir (1976), for example, he uses fictional

techniques, as well as traditional autobiographical ones, to trace his passionate

rediscovery and reinvention of himself. The poems in his collections The Gourd

Dancer (1976) and In the Presence of the Sun (1992) range wide: from forms

recollecting Native American orality through traditional to free verse. The poems in

In the Bear’s House (1999) are illustrated by Momaday’s paintings and use the

totemic figure of the bear to investigate a range of human emotions through the

lens of the bear’s status as a loner, a fighter, and a sacred creature. His 1989 novel,

The Ancient Child, mixes ancient Kiowa bear stories, the contemporary tale of a

male artist’s midlife crisis, and outlaw fantasies imagined by the young medicine

woman who tries to cure the artist. More extraordinary still, his 1969 book, The

Way to Rainy Mountain, welds together several genres. Here, Momaday collects

stories from his Kiowa elders. To all but a few of these he attaches short historical

and personal commentaries. He then arranges 24 of these triple-voiced movements

into three sections titled “The Setting Out,” “The Going On,” and “The Closing In.”

Framed by two poems and three lyric essays that combine mythic, historic, and

personal perspectives, the three sections dramatize several kinds of journey: the

two foregrounded being the historical migration of the Kiowa and the personal

entry of the author into his Kiowa identity. As these journeys continue, The Way to

Rainy Mountain sounds the themes that resonate through all Momaday’s writing:

the uses of memory, imagination, and the oral in the formation of personal and

communal presence, the land and language as extensions of being, the beauty and

authority of the Native American sense of the sacred. And similarly resonant with

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