Navarre Scotte (Mammedaty) Momaday (1934 - 2024)

Born 27 Feb 1934 in Lawton, Comanche, Oklahoma, United States

Died 24 Jan 2024 at age 89 in Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States

Biography

N. Scott (Mammedaty) Momaday is Notable.

American writer, N. Scott Momady (also known as Navarre Scotte Momaday né Mammedaty) in 1969 received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel House Made of Dawn. It is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance.

Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 for his work's celebration and preservation of Indigenous oral and art tradition. He held 20 honorary degrees from colleges and universities, the last of which was from the California Institute of the Arts in 2023, and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He was born February 27, 1934, in Lawton, Oklahoma in the Kiowa and Comanche Indian Hospital, registered as having seven-eighths Indian blood. N. Scott Momaday's mother was Mayme 'Natachee' Scott Momaday (1913–1996), a writer, who Momaday claimed to be of English, Irish, French, and "some degree of Cherokee" descent, born in Fairview, Kentucky. His father, Alfred Morris Momaday, who was a full-blooded Kiowa and a painter.

As an infant, Momaday was taken to Devils Tower and given the Kiowa name Tsoai-talee (Rock-Tree Boy). In 1935, when N. Scott Momaday was one year old, his family moved to Arizona. In 1946, a 12-year-old Momaday moved to Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, with his parents and lived there until his senior year of high school.

He attended the University of New Mexico, graduating in 1958 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. He continued his education at Stanford University and earned a Ph.D. in English Literature in 1963.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1963 from Stanford University, Momaday's first book publication was The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, which he edited and wrote the "Introduction".

Momaday released a small collection of poetry called Angle of Geese. Writing for The Southern Review, John Finlay described it as Momaday's best work, and that it should "earn him a permanent place in our literature." The Gourd Dancer, which was finished while Momaday taught in the USSR, was released in 1976.

Momaday was tenured at Stanford University, the University of Arizona, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of California-Santa Barbara. Momaday was a visiting professor at places such as Columbia and Princeton, while also being the first professor to teach American Literature in Moscow, Russia at Moscow State University.

In 1963, Momaday began teaching at the University of California–Santa Barbara as an assistant professor of English. From 1966 to 1967, he focused primarily on literary research, leading him to pursue the Guggenheim Fellowship at Harvard University. Two years later, in 1969, Momaday was named professor of English at the University of California-Berkeley.

In 1992, Momaday received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas.

In 1993, Momaday received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Momaday was featured in the Ken Burns and Stephen Ives documentary, The West (1996). He was also featured in PBS documentaries concerning boarding schools, Billy the Kid, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

In 2000, Momaday received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates.

In July 2007, Momaday was honored as the Oklahoma Centennial Poet Laureate and awarded the National Medal of Arts by President George W. Bush.

Momaday received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Illinois at Chicago on May 9, 2010.

In 2018, Momaday won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, and became one of the inductees in the first induction ceremony held by the National Native American Hall of Fame.

In 2019, he received the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize and Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

He appeared in the 2023 Ken Burns documentary The American Buffalo.

Sources

• Wikidata: Item Q736570, en:Wikipedia