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N. Scott Momaday

A truism of canon formation: unrecognized literatures need breakthrough events to gain attention and legitimacy. For American Indian literatures, the key event occurred in 1969 when a young, unknown Kiowa painter, poet, and scholar won a Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, The House Made of Dawn (1968). This event is filled with ironies, two of which offer revealing insights about the way Native American literatures have gained acceptance, about the nature of N. Scott Momaday's writing, and about the significance of contemporary Native American literature.

The most obvious irony is the great delay in recognition of literatures in several hundred languages that include centuries, even millennia-old oral narratives, ceremonial liturgies, and autobiographical accounts, as well as histories, essays, autobiographies, poetry, and fiction written in English. The delay reflects not only the power of cultural blinders, but also a 19th- and 20th-century disciplinary territorialism that placed Indians within the anthropologist's and, occasionally, the historian's camp. Of course, the breakthrough suggests the importance of the 1960's commitment to civil rights and ethnic studies. It also reflects another truism: literary critics and teachers of literature tend to recognize examples of "new" literatures that are different enough to seem Authentically Other but familiar enough to be incorporated into current interpretive discourses. House Made of Dawn fulfilled these two requirements wonderfully. The authentically different quotient was provided by the focus on a Jemez Pueblo protagonist and two significant types of Indian settings (Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico and an urban relocation center, Los Angeles); by the use of English recreations of oral literatures, both specific (Kiowa narrative, Jemez ritual, Navajo song) and general (the circular structure of the novel); and by the authority of an Indian author who "looked Indian," was a "certified" tribal member (Kiowa), and had...