Always Living and Learning

Decorated Native American writer and college professor N (Navarre) Scott Momaday once wrote an essay about his one and only meeting with his great grandmother, an aged, loving woman named Keahdinekeah. The essay appeared in Momaday’s 1976 book called `The Names,’ a memoir of his life.

In the essay, Momaday recalls, as a six or seven-year old, the experience of meeting his great-grandmother and the impressions it left on him.

Momaday, born in Lawton, Okahoma in 1934, is currently 88 and a member of the Kiowa American Tribe of the Great Plains in Oklahoma. His parents were writers. His mother loved English literature and his dad loved the Kiowas storytelling tradition.

As a child, Momaday often visited his grandparents, whose home was a meeting place for elderly Kiowas. He described these people as being `made of lean leather’ – tough, hardened but kind people.

Momaday and his parents moved to Tucson, Arizona when he was young and eventually eastward to Jemez, Pueblo New Mexico in 1946 during his teenage years.

Many of his writings were inspired by his boyhood experiences and the Kiowas heritage. He is perhaps most famous for being the forefather of the Native American Literary Renaissance (along with female writer Leslie Marmon Silko) - a time in the mid to late 1960’s when mainstream America finally realized the wonderful writings, music, and artwork of Native American cultures.

Momaday attended and graduated from The University of New Mexico (UNM) in 1958 (he would later teach at UNM during the 2014-15 school year) and went on to earn his PhD in English Literature at Stanford in 1963. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969 for his prize-winning novel, `House Made of Dawn’ (1969). The book is considered one of the first major works of the Native American Literary Renaissance movement.

Momaday, years later, would receive the National Medal ofArts in 2007, an award created by the United States Congress to honor arts and the oral tradition. President George W. Bush presented the award to Momaday.

`House Made of Dawn,’ his breakthrough 1969 book, is a fictional novel about life growing up in Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico. It’s about a young Native American boy, Abel, torn between his roots and white society. In the story, Abel, like Momaday, experiences his teenage years in both the Native American and mainstream society. Momaday, in writing the novel, utilized both his real life experiences as well as his extraordinary imagination in the breakthrough work.

Momaday, as a teenager, learned about both his Native American culture as well as modern mainstream education. “I grew up in two worlds and straddle both those worlds even now,” he said. “It has made for confusion and a richness in my life.”

In his essay, `Keahdinekeah,’ Momaday recalls he and his father journeying by foot to Keahdinekeah’s wilderness house in Oklahoma. They walked through woods and crossed streams and creeks to get to the old woman’s humble home. Here is an excerpt of Momaday’s essay:

My father leads me into her room. There is a certain odor in the room and not elsewhere in the house, the odor of my great-grandmother’s old age. It is not unpleasant, but it is most particular and exclusive, as much hers as is her voice or her hair or the nails of her hands.

This old blind woman is like no one I have ever seen or shall ever see. To a child her presence is formidable. My father is talking to her in Kiowa, and I do not understand what is being said, only that the talk is of me. She is seated on the side of her bed, and my father brings me to stand directly in front of her. She reaches out for me and I place my hands in hers. `Eh neh neh neh neh,', she begins to weep very softly in a high, thin, hollow voice. Her hands are little and soft, so soft that they seem not to consist in flesh and bone, but in the softest fiber, cotton or fine wood. Her voice is so delicate, so surely expressive of her deep feelings.

Momaday, years later, said, “That was a wonderful and beautiful thing that happened in my life. There, on that warm, distant afternoon: an old woman and a child, holding hands across the generations. There is great good in such a remembrance; I cannot imagine that it might have been lost upon me.'

What can we learn from Momaday’s essay? Don’t take your family for granted. Momaday met his great grandmother once and it stayed with him forever. None of us knows our lifespan so take advantage of every family gathering, parties, eat-outs, happy occasions in which family and friends are involved. Love those God has put into your life and be thankful for departed loved ones and the time you had with them.