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" "I am Tsoai-talee, Rock Tree Boy, and I will carry that name to the end of the world and beyond. I will keep to the trees and waters, and I will be the singing of the soil. In my truest being I am a keeper of the earth. I will tell the ancient stories and I will sing the holy songs. I belong to the land.
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.
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Those who came before me did not take for granted the world in which they lived. They blessed the air with smoke and pollen. They touched the ground, the trees, the stones with respect and reverence. I believe that they imagined me before I was born, that they prepared the way for me, that they placed their faith and hope in me and in the generations that followed and will follow them. Will I give my children an inheritance of the earth? Or will I give them less than I was given?
On one side of time there are herds of buffalo and antelope. Redbud trees and chokecherries splash color on the plain. The waters are clear, and there is a glitter on the early morning grass. You breathe in the fresh fragrances of rain and wind on which are borne silence and serenity. It is good to be alive in this world. But on the immediate side there is the exhaust of countless machines, toxic and unavoidable.
The planet is warming, and the northern ice is melting. Fires and floods wreak irresistible havoc. The forests are diminished and waste piles upon us. Thousands of species have been destroyed. Our own is at imminent risk. The earth and its inhabitants are in crisis, and at the center it is a moral crisis. Man stands to repudiate his humanity.
I make a prayer for words. Let me say my heart
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.