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His daughter Jill Momaday confirmed his death but did not cite a cause.
Steeped in tradition, metaphor, imagery and reverence for the nature of the American Indians, “House Made of Dawn” centers on a young man named Abel who struggles to adapt to life on a New Mexico reservation after fighting in World War II. World. Struggling with his identity, he suffers from depression and alcoholism, has an affair with a white woman, is sent to prison for murder, and beaten by a police officer. He longs for spiritual healing and eventually returns to the reservation to find it.
“Abel’s story is that of a man of a generation,” Dr. Momaday later wrote. “For the rest, it is a story of world war, cultural conflict and psychic dislocation. And finally it is a story of the human condition.”
Dr. Momaday’s work is credited with opening doors for generations of Native American authors, including James Welch, Sherman Alexie, Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich, whose 2020 novel “The Night Watchman” won the Pulitzer in fiction.
“Momaday was the one we all admired,” poet Joy Harjo told the PBS documentary series American Masters. “His works were transcendent. “There was always a point where, despite challenges and losses… there was some moment that imparted beauty.”
One of the first Native American writers to publish works of fiction, Dr. Momaday found himself at the forefront of a Native American literature that sought to incorporate traditional tribal customs while also capturing contemporary experience.
“One of the things about (“House Made of Dawn”) that’s so important,” said Craig Womack, a retired professor of literature at Emory University in Atlanta, “is that Momaday takes this tribally specific approach that’s really rich and “puts it into conversation with other tribal traditions and the outside world; in this case, the Kiowa tradition in conversation with the Jemez Pueblo tradition in conversation with the urban Indian diaspora in Los Angeles.”
Womack added: “Many critics have said that the novel is about a return to reservation traditions, but it is also an exploration of Native people adapting those traditions to urban life off the reservation and forming tribal alliances in places where Native people they had settled or were relocated. by the federal government after World War II.
Dr. Momaday considered himself a noted poet and said the widespread success of “House Made of Dawn” came as a shock. “I had a hard time moving on to the next book,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “What could I have done to get over it?”
His second novel, “The Ancient Child” (1989), also addressed questions of identity and meaning for Native Americans longing to integrate a tribal spirit into their modern lives.
Unlike some of his fictional characters, Dr. Momaday said he had little difficulty assimilating. He described himself as a proud Kiowa who was equally comfortable at tribal pumpkin dances and on the college campuses where he taught.
“This bicultural identity came naturally to me,” he told the Times. “I was born in two cultures and grew up in two. I learned to exist in both worlds quite early. Although I was sometimes the only Indian in school, I was proud of my identity. And I got into a lot of fights with kids because of it.”
As a writer and scholar, Dr. Momaday dedicated himself to preserving Kiowa oral traditions and legends by printing them.
“A horrific amount has been lost, but there is still a lot left and it must be preserved,” he told the New York Times shortly after receiving the Pulitzer. “This will require a determined effort by scholars and publishers to systematically record these tales before the tradition is completely lost as young people leave the reservations and are absorbed into the technological world.”
Dr. Momaday’s writings turned again and again to the image of Devils Tower, a towering natural monolith in present-day Wyoming that figures prominently in Kiowa narrative.
When the Kiowa found Devil’s Tower during their migration from the Yellowstone region to southwestern Oklahoma 300 to 400 years ago, they explained the existence of the colossal hill with a myth about a boy and his seven sisters. The brothers were playing when, suddenly, the boy turned into a bear. Terrified, the sisters climbed a tree and became the seven stars of the Big Dipper, and the tree became an immense stone formation, which the Kiowas called Tsoai (Rock Tree).
“Think about the person who first told that story,” Dr. Momaday told the Oklahoman newspaper in 2007. “He not only explained the Rock Tree, but also a feature in the heavens. Now that is a story.”
Bears feature prominently in Dr. Momaday’s work, and not just because Kiowa oral tradition uses them frequently. When he was young, he was given the tribal name Tsoai-talee, or Rock Tree Boy, in reference to the boy who turned into a bear. “I consider myself the boy reincarnated as a bear,” he told the Oklahoman. “Sometimes I turn into a bear.”
Navarrese Scott Mammedaty (the family later changed their name to Momaday) was born in Lawton, Oklahoma, on February 27, 1934, and grew up on Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. His father, of Kiowa descent, was a painter and his mother, of English, French and Cherokee descent, was a writer.
Dr. Momaday spent most of his adolescence in the Jemez Pueblo, a tribal community in New Mexico where his parents became teachers. He rode horses while dreaming of being a writer. “My imagination ran wild with cowboys and Indians,” he recalled in a video interview with the Academy of Achievement.
In 1958, Dr. Momaday received a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The following year, while teaching on the Jicarilla Apache reservation in New Mexico, he won a poetry fellowship at Stanford University.
That year, some of Dr. Momaday’s poetry was published for the first time: three poems, one of which, “Los Alamos,” spoke of his concern for the environment and his alarm at its destruction by humanity.
Machinery is scattered across the land like tossed coins.
I have heard the angry monotone
Arcades in the pinholes of war
When I walked through the forest to listen to the rain.
At Stanford, where he was mentored by the poet Yvor Winters, he earned a master’s degree in 1960 and a doctorate in 1963, both in English literature. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, he wrote “House Made of Dawn” in the morning before teaching classes.
In 1969, Dr. Momaday joined the UC-Berkeley faculty as a professor of English and comparative literature. In 1981 he settled at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he retired in 2005. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2007.
Dr. Momaday’s marriages to Gaye Mangold and Regina Heitzer ended in divorce. He was predeceased by his third wife, Barbara Glenn. A daughter from his first marriage, Cael Momaday-Doran, died in 2017.
He is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Jill Momaday of Santa Fe and Brit Momaday-Leight of Kauai, Hawaii; a daughter from his second marriage, Lore Denny of Tucson; eight grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Dr. Momaday’s books include “The Way to Rainy Mountain” (1969), a collection of Kiowa myths and oral legends combined with elements of poetic autobiography, and “Angle of Geese and Other Poems” (1974). He published two volumes in 2020, the poetry collection “The Death of Sitting Bear” and “Earth Keeper,” a set of stories about the earth.
Each summer, as a senior, he returned to Oklahoma City to join other Kiowas for the Pumpkin Dance, the jubilant celebration of the tribe’s creation.
“When the drums start beating and the eagle feather fan is in my hand,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1989, “it’s like I go back 200 or 300 years, and my father, my grandfather and my great-grandfather are dancing to my side”.
“It catches you,” he added. “It is intense and mystical, a kind of restoration. I feel like I am where I should be and where I have always been.”