was the year in which the old woman Kau-au-ointy died... and was buried at Cemetery... The Kiowas, who stole people as well as horses... took her from her homeland of Mexico when she was a child. ...Kau-au-ointy outlived her slave status, married, and brought new blood to the tribe... In my dreams she [my great-great-grandmother] told me wonderful stories.
Kiowa author and academic (1934–2024)
N. Scott Momaday (February 27, 1934 – January 24, 2024) was a Kiowa novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet. His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance. His follow-up work The Way to Rainy Mountain blended folklore with memoir. Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 for his work's celebration and preservation of indigenous oral and art traditions. He held twenty honorary degrees from colleges and universities and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Birth Name:
Navarre Scott Momaday
Alternative Names:
Navarre Scott Mammedaty
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Tsoai-talee
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Rock Tree Boy
From Wikidata (CC0)
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The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming; a long outwaiting.
A single knole rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Witchita Range. For my people, the s, it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name . ...To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.
La tierra del Encanto
Clouds build on the northern ridge
Where the shades of night grow pale
And there comes a rain like smoke.
The mountains loom and recede. And
Below, the umber plain is a pitted hide.
There the distance of time runs out.
And the mind extends beyond itself.
I have seen in the twist of wind
The landscape severed and heard
The edged cries of streaming hawks
First light is a tapestry on canyon walls,
And shadows are pools of illusions.
I am a man of the ancient earth
For I have know the desert at dawn
Sampt'e drew the string back until he felt the bow wobble... and he let it go. It shot across the long light of the morning and struck the black face of a stone... glanced then away... limping... then it settled down in the grass and lay still. ...he believed that the arrow might take flight again, so much of his life did he give into it.
as if the prehistoric civilization had gone out among the hills for a little while and would return; and then everything would be restored to an older age, and time would have returned upon itself and a bad dream of invasion and change would have been dissolved in an hour before the dawn. For man, too, has tenure in the land; he dwelt upon the land twenty-five thousand years ago, and his gods before him. The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.
It is in human nature to pray. It is appropriate that we lay our words upon the earth. And so: Great Mystery, you who dwell in the endless beyond, you who spoke the first word and made of your breath the mountains and the waters, the trees and the grasses, the man and the woman and the child, hear me in my small voice. I am your thankful creature.