Attuned to the Earth's moods, revered Native writer N. Scott Momaday sounds an alarm

N. Scott Momaday captures not only how a landscape looks but how it lives. How dawn paints a canyon wall. How dusk shifts a valley's mood.

In decades of prose and poetry, he describes the spirit of a place.

That place, most often, is the Southwestern wilderness Momaday first explored as a boy on horseback. It's the setting for his novel "House Made of Dawn," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 and led a renaissance of Native American writing, as well as many poems since. In his newest work, "Earth Keeper," the place is the Earth itself.

The book, a slim collection of short meditations, is an homage and a handbook.

"It's a call to action to wake up to the importance of the Earth and to save it — because we are losing it," said Momaday, who will appear in a virtual Talking Volumes event Tuesday. "We stand in danger of losing so much of it that it becomes for us maybe the end of our civilization."

Native American tradition, much more than the broader culture, appreciates the great gift of nature, he said, to which we are indebted. "We are obligated to respect it — to revere it, even."

These days, Momaday, 83, is writing as a grandfather, concerned about the animals his eight grandchildren will never glimpse. As a poet and a painter, intent on capturing those creatures on paper. As an elder in the Native American tradition, a keeper of stories.

"By this time in my life, I'm well beyond elderhood," he said with a sly chuckle. "I've become a member of the geezer society."

Momaday spoke by phone from his Santa Fe, N.M., home studio, where he spends his mornings writing or painting, pursuits he picked up from his mother, a writer, and his father, a painter. Rose bushes frame his window and, across some distance, lilac bushes were bare but considering their own bloom.

"There are so many moods to the Earth," he said, of writing about the land. "I want to be attuned to as many of them as I can be."

When Momaday was 6 months old, his family took him to Devils Tower, a sacred place the Kiowa call Tsoai, or Rock Tree, and gave him a sacred name, Tsoai-talee, or Rock Tree Boy. It comes from the Kiowa story of how that massive tower came to rise from the Wyoming grasslands, a story that involves a boy who turns into a bear.

"I am somehow bound to that to story and to that place," he said, a tie that has only grown stronger as he's grown older. "I believe I am the incarnation of that boy.

"And indeed, I turn into a bear on occasion."

Momaday was an only child who, living in remote places — Native communities in the canyon country of Arizona and New Mexico — had to rely on his imagination.

He delighted in stories. His mother read to him from the good books that were always around. His father, a member of the Kiowa tribe, told him stories from that tradition.

"I fell in love with them," he said. "I memorized some of them."

While on a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University, Momaday wrote a poem called "The Bear," which concludes:

More scarred than others
These years since the trap maimed him,
Pain slants his withers,
drawing up the crooked limb.
Then he is gone, whole,
Without urgency, from sight,
As buzzards control,
Imperceptibly, their flight.

The poem earned attention and, in 1962, the Academy of American Poets prize. But it was his first novel, which he typed each morning before teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara, that made him famous.

"House Made of Dawn" tells the story of Abel, who represents a generation of Native American men who served in World War II and struggled to find their way back to their traditional way of life.

It's a tale steeped both in old Kiowa stories and modern societal stresses. It's also a story of the land.

"And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land," he writes, "low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed."

In its June 1968 criticism, the New York Times Book Review praised the novel — saying it was "as subtly wrought as a piece of Navajo silverware" — but condescended, too.

"American Indians do not write novels and poetry as a rule or teach English in top-ranking universities either," critic Marshall Sprague wrote. "But we cannot be patronizing."

A few months later, "House Made of Dawn" won the Pulitzer Prize.

At the time, Linda LeGarde Grover was in her late teens. She remembers her father reading the news aloud and checking out the book from the library.

"It was a breakthrough," said Grover, 70, a writer and professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Here was a Native writer, defining the Native experience for himself.

Reading "House Made of Dawn" the first time, she didn't understand every metaphor. But the novel's existence buoyed her as she struggled through school and wrote her own stories.

"Momaday truly held me, and people like me, up," said Grover, a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe. Reviewing "Earth Keeper" for the Star Tribune, she hailed his new essays "as multilayered and majestic as the landscape that has been present in everything that Momaday has written."

The floods and fires fueled by climate change are evidence, Momaday said by phone, that "the Earth is getting angry with us."

In one of the book's essays, he too gets angry, decrying those who "poison the earth and inflict wounds upon it," enlisting a Navajo saying that begins: "I am ashamed before the earth." But he ends the piece in prayer: "Daw-kee, Let me not be ashamed before the earth."

Mostly, he focuses on tribal stories and scenes of wonder. Winter on the northern prairie, sunlit rain in a canyon. In the middle of the night, on a remote airfield, he witnessed the northern lights: "Great ribbons of dancing light unraveled on the snowy sky, and a great shiver of color enveloped the dome of the earth."

How can one witness such a thing, he seems to ask, and be indifferent to the land's destruction?

Most mornings, Momaday writes.

"It satisfies some great need in me," he said. "It's like nourishment. ... "

Sitting at his computer, the text enlarged, he's inspired by the news, by beloved books, even though his eyesight is "not what it once was."

He's begun work on a book that, in its first section, captures the Kiowa people's migration from the north, following the sun down to the southern plains. To write it, he's using the imagination he's honed over a lifetime of writing and what he calls "blood memory," a kind of genetic memory.

When he reads poetry, which he considers "the crown of literature," his resonant baritone echoes something ancient. To write a poem, you have be precise, concise, he said. "There's no room for extraneous matter."

Studying at Stanford, a teacher told him, "Write little and write well," a lesson he's carried with him. He used a Guggenheim fellowship to study Emily Dickinson's manuscripts, reading her poems in her own hand.

"I recognized in her someone who was as fascinated with words as I was," he said. Her cadence, he noted, is inimitable. "You just have to stand in wonder."

Last year, Momaday published a new collection of poems titled "The Death of Sitting Bear." Written over some 50 years, they describe wild mares and vagrant ducks, a smudged sky and a moon in mist. In an elegiac poem, written for his wife who died of ovarian cancer, a snow mare appears in a dream and disappears in dusk.

In "To an Aged Bear," he urges the old creature:

One more time. Mortality
Is your shadow and your shade.
Translate yourself to spirit;
Be present on your journey.
Keep to the trees and waters.
Be the singing of the soil.

That winter was cold and snowy at Walatowa, a good season for hunting. My friend Patricio and I were invigorated by the cold, crisp air as we walked to the river. We approached the river slowly and quietly, but when we drew near, the geese took off in tumult, with a frantic beating of their wings, trailing a great wake of water. It was a thrilling thing to see. Then at once I heard behind me the blast of Patricio's shotgun, and I saw one of the geese struggle and fall. I waded into the river to retrieve it, and I was disturbed to see that it was alive and stricken, but it was perfectly still. Its eyes were very bright, and it seemed to look forever after the pale angle that was dissolving in the dark sky. I cannot forget that look or the sadness that grew up in me. I carried the beautiful creature, heavy and helpless in my arms, until it died. I have lived in the close memory of that day for many years.

When: 7 p.m. Tue. via Zoom, featuring a post-show discussion with Winona LaDuke, the Native environmental activist and former vice presidential candidate whose new book is "To Be a Water Protector," and Star Tribune arts reporter Jenna Ross.
Tickets: $5-$20 or pay-what-you-can. MPRevents.org

Next in Talking Volumes

Chang-rae Lee: The Korean-American novelist's latest book is "My Year Abroad." (March 23)

Naima Coster: Her novel "What's Mine and Yours" deals with school integration. (March 30)

The series is produced by the Star Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio and hosted by Kerri Miller and Brandt Williams. Read more at startribune.com/talkingvolumes.