N. Scott Momaday Quotes (1934-2024)

“It is a dream. It is what people who have come here from the beginning of time have dreamed. It's a dream landscape. To the Native American, it's full of sacred realities: powerful things. It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And, as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen.”

“Leslie Silko's Ceremony is an extraordinary novel, if indeed 'novel' is the right word. It is more precisely a telling, the celebration of a tradition and form that are older and more nearly universal than the novel as such...Her talent is real and remarkable.”

“(Q: Is conversation an art form?) Oh yes. Certainly. And I have delighted in overhearing conversations that were artistic. I like to listen to people talk. I enjoyed the Dick Cavett show, because Cavett is so articulate and apparently at ease, and his guests on that show were by and large people who were very interesting to listen to, and Cavett had the knack of bringing them out. So when I watched that show, I had the sense that it was an art form. Cavett was making it artistic. (Was he creating himself as well as creating language?) Absolutely. (And there were different Cavetts? There were different selves in different circumstances?) I think he was a different man depending upon who he talked to. He was a different man every time.”

“I wouldn't be writing now if Momaday hadn't done that book. I would have died. (JB: What did it do for you?) ALLEN: It told me that I was sane-or if I was crazy at least fifty thousand people out there were just as nutty in exactly the same way I was, so it was okay. I was not all alone. It did that and it brought my land back to me.”

“The voice with which he greeted me was warm and deep, and the words spoken in a way which gave weight to every syllable. It was a voice which one might expect from a man who wrote and continues to write of the magical nature and power of language.”

“The authors who really touched my heart, of course, are authors like Vine Deloria and Scott Momaday...I mean, I've never read a novel as compelling as House Made of Dawn......there's not a word, a phrase that he can use that doesn't just haunt me. That includes much of his prose.”

“Momaday speaks with a deep resonance using cultivated speech, for he cares as much about language sounds as how his words look on the page.”

“House Made of Dawn borrows its title from a Navajo healing ceremony centuries old. The novel tells of a young Jemez Indian named Abel from the Pueblo where Momaday grew up, the age of twelve through high school. Its prose rhythms, complex narrative points-of-view, and flashbacks assimilate experimental techniques in modern fiction and New World romantic themes. ...Abel's dislocations as a contemporary Indian fracture a voice that searches for consciousness. His ancestors were exiled from the plains by plague and taken in at Jemez. ...Abel was kidnapped from his grandfather and put into a government boarding school, drafted into a world war, and sentence to prison for ritual homicide, then relocated in the urban ghetto of Los Angeles. Past, present, and future—Indian life as-it-was, then estranged among whites, followed by a prolonged return—disjoint the narrative. School, war, prison, and the city are white institutions where the martyred son of the earth, the biblical Abel, lives through the Indian nightmare of a machine come into the garden.”

“Once into the novel... a perceptive reader may begin to realize that sophistication in House Made of Dawn is of a different order from that in canonized texts. It is a sophistication of "otherness," a discourse requiring that readers pass through an "alien conceptual horizon" and engage a "reality" unfamiliar... What has matured with Momaday is not merely an undeniable facility with techniques and tropes of modernism, but... the profound awareness of conflicting epistemologies... With Momaday the American Indian novel shows its ability to appropriate the discourse of the privileged center and make it "bear the burden" of an "other" world-view. Momaday's novel represents more fully than any Native American novel before it the "assertion of a different perspective."”

“if Indians are left out of every other class on the university campus, even where they are pertinent-for example, leaving Scott Momaday out of a class on twentieth-century American literature, something like that somewhere else there has to be a balance. There has to be someone somewhere else who is going to emphasize Scott Momaday to the exclusion of the ones who are emphasized in the other class. I hope that at some point that will become balanced. I hope that pretty soon an American literature class will just automatically include someone like Scott Momaday-and some of the other people: Charles Eastman, you know, the other writers in our history.”

“The new images of the Indian in the public mind have emerged as a result of primitivistic longings in a society whose trust in limitless technological advance and a purely scientific, materialistic view of the natural environment is no longer secure. The Indian as keeper of mystical knowledge or as natural ecologist is an updated version of earlier images which reveals more about the state of the dominant society than about contemporary Indians. Ironically, Momaday himself has come close to falling victim to the temptation of image making in his contributions to the Indian-as-ecologist debate. This shows that Indians are not immune to adopting images created by mainstream American culture. On the whole, however, Momaday's work depicts the worlds of American Indians objectively and without racial bias.”

“I have seen him gradually comprehending, accepting, and even asserting his Indianness. Actually, of course, his Indianness is as much assumed as inborn.”