N. Scott Momaday Quotes

I looked southward into the plain; there a caravan of covered wagons reached as far as the eye could see. These were the s... I had never seen such a pageant; it was as if the whole proud people, the Diné, had been concentrated into one endless migration. There was a great dignity to them... And when they set up camp in the streets, they were perfectly at home, their dogs about them. They made coffee and fried bread and roasted mutton on their open fires.

The sun cast a golden light upon the adobe walls and the cornfields; it set fire to the leaves of willows and cottonwoods along the river; and a fresh cold wind ran down from the canyons and carried the good scents of pine and cedar smoke, of bread baking in the beehive ovens, and of rain in the mountains.

I was embarked upon the greatest adventure of all; I had come to the place of my growing up.

When my parents and I moved to Jemez I was twelve years old. ...The village and the valley, the canyons and the mountains had been there from the beginning of time, waiting form me.

One autumn morning in 1946 I woke up at Jemez Pueblo. ...in the bright morning ...I found the last, best home of my childhood.

...
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water...
I am the farthest star... the cold of dawn... the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake
I am a flame of four colors...
I am the whole dream of these things You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth... the gods... to all that is beautiful...
Mine is a... shield...
there is [the dangerous] anger... boasting in it
there is [the beautiful] yellow pollen... red earth in it. ...
there is [the sacred] vision... remembrance in it. ...
there is [the powerful] medicine... a in it.
My life is this shield...

The dullimer is... one of two known to exist, the second... unearthed... at Coatepec in 1958... Mine is... the better example of the armorer's art, especially with respect to the amulet, a leather bracelet to which the dullimer can be affixed and... activated with remarkable dispatch... used, according to oral tradition, to fell even the great beasts of the jungle. ...[O]ne day I laid the dullimer to rest once and for all. I had a dream in which it seemed to me that I could decipher the ancient markings on the amulet:
I, Chopetl, am grown weary of war;
I have been deadly even to the gods.

Consider this ritual formula from the : ...
My voice thou restore for me.
Restore all for me in beauty.
Make beautiful all that is before me.
Make beautiful all that is behind me.
It is done in beauty...
...the achieves a remarkable stability, an authority not unlike that of Scripture.

It is sometimes enough that one places one's voice on the silence... [S]ilence too is powerful. It is the dimension in which ordinary and extraordinary events take their proper places. In the Indian world, a word is spoken or a song is sung not against, but within the silence. ...[S]ilence is the sanctuary of sound.

At the heart of American Indian oral tradition is a deep and unconditional belief in the efficacy of language. Words are intrinsically powerful. They are magical. By means of words one can bring about physical change in the universe... one can quiet the raging weather, bring forth the harvest, ward off evil, rid the body of sickness and pain, subdue an enemy, capture the heart of a lover, live in the proper way, and venture beyond death. ...there is nothing more powerful. ...To be careless in the presence of words... is to violate a fundamental morality.

Imagine: somewhere in the prehistoric distance a man holds up in his hand a crude instrument— ...like a daub or a broom bearing pigment—and fixes the wonderful image in his mind's eye to a wall or a rock. In that instant is accomplished... the advent of art. ...in the long reach of time he is utterly without distinction, except: he draws. ...all the stories of the world proceed from the moment in which he makes his mark. All literatures issue from his hand.

If an arrow is well made it will have tooth marks on it. ...The Kiowas ...straightened them with their teeth. Then they drew them to the bow to see that they were straight.

The story of the arrowmaker, the "man made of words," is perhaps the first story I was told. ...it is a story about a story, about the efficacy of language and the power of words. ...I am sure I do not yet understand it in all of its consequent meanings. Nor do I expect to understand it so. The stories that I keep close... are those that yield more and more of their spirit in time.

My father told me stories from the Kiowa oral tradition even before I could talk. Those stories became permanent... the nourishment of my imagination for the whole of my life. They are among the most valuable gifts I have ever been given.

The Kiowas migrated from the Yellowstone to the southern plains, arriving at the drainage in the early 1700s. They were hunters and nomads and storytellers. ...They defined the warrior ideal, and they brought the... horse culture or culture to its fullest expression.