He had a strange feeling there, as if some ancestral intelligence had been awakened in him for the first time. There is the wild growth and the soft glowing of the earth, in the muddy water at his feet, was something profoundly original. He could not put his finger on it, but it was there. It was itself genesis, he thought, not genesis in the public domain, not an Old Testament Tale, but his genesis. He wanted to see his father there in the shadows of the still creek, the child he once was, himself in the child and the man. But he could not. there was only something like a photograph, old and faded, a shadow within a shadow,
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)
The night the old man Dragonfly came to my
grandfather’s house the moon was full. It rose like a
great red planet above the black trees on the crooked
creek. Then there came a flood of pewter light on
the plain, and I could see the light ebb toward me
like water, and I thought of rivers I had never seen,
rising like ribbons of rain. And in the morning
Dragonfly came from the house, his hair in braids
and his face painted. He stood on a little mound of
earth and faced east. Then he raised his arms and
began to pray. His voice seemed to reach beyond
itself, a long way on the land, and he prayed the sun
up. The grasses glistened with dew, and a bird sang
from the dawn. This happened a long time ago. I was
not there. My father was there when he was a boy.
He told me of it. And I was there.