N. Scott Momaday Brought Native American Oral Storytelling to the Masses

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Nov 26

Have you ever thought about using Oral Storytelling to help you become a better writer? Sure, stories passed down from generation to generation can provide wonderful source material for novels and short stories, but oral storytelling can do more for writers than just provide content. N. Scott Momaday was a Native American poet and writer who championed the importance of traditional oral storytelling in preserving his cultural heritage, but he also demonstrated how oral storytelling can make us better storytellers on the page as well.

If you’d like to hear more about N. Scott Momaday and his story, listen to this episode of the Reed, Write, & Create podcast.

N. Scott Momaday Was A Native American, Literary Success Story

N. Scott Momaday was born in 1934 in Lawton, Oklahoma. His father, a member of the Kiowa tribe, was a painter and his mother, who claimed some Cherokee heritage, was a writer known for her children’s books. Both of his parents earned their living as elementary school teachers. For the majority of his childhood, Momaday’s family moved around to different reservations in the southwest wherever his parents found teaching positions. From all accounts, Momaday enjoyed his upbringing, despite the material poverty he often dealt with. After all, he was an only child, with loving, creative parents, and he benefited from the attention and teachings of his extended paternal family. Influenced by his artistic parents, Momaday knew he wanted to be a writer from the time he was 12 years old.

After college at the University of New Mexico, Momaday got his doctorate at Stanford University with a speciality in poetry. Momaday was on the path to achieving the so-called American dream, studying American literature and the “cannon of American literary greats.” He was taught that American literature began in the 17th century in New England, but he pushed back on that lesson when he realized that oral storytelling predated literature on the page by thousands of years. And that the indigenous people of what we call the United States were telling their stories more than 2000 years before any Puritan set his black-buckled shoe on American shores.

Once he made that realization, Momaday decided he was going to focus on the most American stories of them all, Indigenous stories.

Collecting the Oral Stories of Native-American People

Driven by a love of his people and his passion for oral storytelling, Momaday collected and wrote about Native people, for Native people and for the wider mainstream public so that they would understand and appreciate Native cultures. He also created a class on Oral Storytelling and taught it at the different colleges and universities where he worked, including at Stanford University.

When Momaday was in his early 30s, feeling a bit confined with his poetry, he decided to try his hand at writing fiction. He wrote a novel and then secretly submitted it to a writing contest, but missed the deadline. But every story has a plot twist, and in Momaday’s case, the plot twist was that one of the editors judging the contest decided that even though Momaday missed the contest deadline, his book should still be published.

Momaday and the Native American Literary Renaissance

That book was called, House Made of Dawn. Published in 1968 by Harper & Row, it tells the story of a Native American war veteran with PTSD who comes back to live on the reservation after serving in WWII. His struggles to reconnect with his people are culturally specific to the Native protagonist, but his experience really resonated with veterans of various backgrounds. House Made of Dawn was widely praised by critics not only for the timely topic, but also because Momaday used techniques of oral storytelling in the book. Considering the book was just a distraction from his poetry, you can imagine how shocked Momaday was when House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969.

People say that House Made of Dawn was the book that launched Momaday into mainstream literary success. More than a personal win however, is that House Made of Dawn and N. Scott Momaday set the stage for what is known as the Native American Renaissance for writers. In other words, that Pulitzer win made mainstream publishers open the doors to other Native American writers.

The Perks of Being a Storyteller

Over the course of his career, Momaday wrote more than 13 books of poetry, plays, prose, and children’s stories. He also took up painting, like his father, and illustrated some of his own poetry and story collections. He was awarded numerous honors, including a National Medal of Arts, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and 12 honorary degrees. And yet, his greatest accomplishment, was being an oral storyteller.

“One of the things that I would like to say is that I think that storytelling is one of the great inventions of man,” Momaday said. “The acquisition of language itself, the oral tradition which goes back to the beginning of time, begins with the acquisition of language. When somebody calls me a storyteller, I am just delighted. I can think of no greater name than that, the storyteller.”

According to Momaday and other BIPoC writers, Oral Storytelling structures can provide new ways to tell stories on the page. In addition, oral storytelling requires both storyteller and audience to be better listeners and observers. They must have excellent memorization skills and high-powered imaginations. And of course, all of these skills becomes perks on the page.

N. Scott Momaday is Gone But Not Forgotten

N. Scott Momaday became an ancestor in January, 2024. Of course his work still lives on in all of his books, poetry and paintings. . What’s more, PBS did a wonderful documentary about Momaday called Words from a Bear. Hopefully, his life story inspires you to investigate the magic of oral storytelling. How might it help you be a better storyteller on the page, and in real life? How can you collect the stories of your people so that they might be shared with generations to come?

“My father told me stories from the Kiowa oral tradition even before I could talk. Those stories became permanent in my mind, the nourishment of my imagination for the whole of my life. They are among the most valuable gifts that I have ever been given.” - N. Scott Momaday

More Literary Ancestors Like N. Scott Momaday

If you like learning about BIPoC literary ancestors, you’d probably want to know about Mexican poet, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and Harlem Renaissance writer, Jessie Redmon Fauset. They are both led extraordinary literary lives, but have been forgotten by history.