Another great book by M. Scott is a collection of essays, stories and passages entitled "The Man Made of Words"

What a great author - his poetry is outstanding and brings you right into his web of enticement.

Have done Google search and, quite honestly, can't find any other Native American who has won the Pulitzer - but I'm sure there are.

When I read his words, what went through my mind is that he "paints" with his words and phrases, they create visions.  Absolutely amazing use of the language - bringing it to life.  He is not only an author, but an artist as well.

Dear Friend 1st Warrior: Thanks so much for sharing this.

As it it written in the Talmud, "Who is the wise person? One who learns from all people".

You, and through you Mr. Momday give us an opportunity to learn.

We are the better off for it.

P&AB.

Enoch.

Here is an excerpt from one of this authors books, "The Names"

english.illinois

THE NAMES AT FIRST are those of animals and of birds, of objects that have one definition in the eye, another in the hand, of forms and features on the rim of the world, or of sounds that carry on the bright wind and in the void. They are old and original in the mind, like the beat of rain on the river, and intrinsic in the native tongue, failing even as those who bear them turn once in the memory, go on, and are aone forever: Pohd-lohk, Keahdinekeah, Aho.*

And Calyen, Scott, McMillan, whose wayfaring lay in the shallow traces from Virginia and Louisiana, who knew of blooded horses and tobacco and corn whiskey, who preserved in their songs the dim dialects of the Old World.

The land settles into the end of summer. In the white light a whirlwind moves far out in the plain, and afterwards there is something like a shadow on the grass, a tremor, nothing. There seems a stillness at noon, but that is illusion: the landscape rises and falls, ringing. In the dense growth of the bottomland a dark drift moves on the Washita River. A spider enters a small pool of light on Rainy Mountain Creek, and downstream, at the convergence, a Channel catfish turns around in the current and slithers to the surface, where a dragonfly hovers and darts. Away on the high ground grasshoppers and bees set up a crackle and roar in the fields, and meadowlarks and scissortails whistle and wheel about. Somewhere in a maze of gullies a calf shivers and bawls in a tangle of chinaberry trees. And high in the distance a hawk turns in the sun and sails.

Gyet'aigua. Where you been?
'Cross the creek.
'S'hot, ain'it?

The angle of the Washita River and Rainy Mountain Creek points to the east, and the thick red waters descend into the depths of the Southern Plains; as if they measure by means of an old, organic equation the long way from the Continental Divide to the heart of North America. This angle is a certain delineation on the face of the Great Plains, an idea of geometry in the mind of God.

The light there is of a certain kind. In the mornings and evenings it is soft and pervasive, and the earth seems to absorb it, to become enlarged with light. About the noons there are edges and angles-and a brightness that is hard and thin like a glaze. There is something strange and powerful in it. When you look out across the land you believe at first that it is all one thing; there appears to be an awful sameness to it. But after a while you see that it is not one thing at all, but many things, all of which are subject to change in a moment. At times the air is thick and languid, and you imagine that the world has grown very old and tired. At other times the air is full of motion and commotion. Always a hard weather impends upon the plains. In advance of a storm the plains are a strange and beautiful thing to see, concentrated in random details, distances; there are slow, massive movements.

There in the hollow of the hills I see,
Eleven magpies stand away from me.

Low light upon the rim; a wind informs
This distance with a gathering of storms

And drifts in silver crescents on the grass,
Configurations that appear, and pass.

There falls a final shadow on the glare,
A stillness on the dark, erratic air.

I do not hear the longer wind that lows
Among the magpies. Silences disclose,

Until no rhythms of unrest remain,
Eleven magpies standing in the plain.

They are illusion-wind and rain revolve-
And they recede in darkness. and dissolve.

Water runs in planes on the earth, in ropes in the cuts of the banks; the wind lunges; lightning is constant on the cold, black hemisphere; and everything is visible, strangely visible. Oh Man-ka-ih!

Beautiful writing.

Beautiful choices John - Thanks.

THE NAMES AT FIRST are those of animals and of birds, of objects that have one definition in the eye, another in the hand, of forms and features on the rim of the world, or of sounds that carry on the bright wind and in the void.

The imagery in that sentence covers so very much ground.

Mr. Momaday has always been one of my very favorite writers. 

His character, Abel, reminds me of another Indian that returned from WWII, Ira Hayes...

Kudos once again to Mr. Momaday. 

Side note....Louise Erdrich book, ''Plague of Doves'' was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 

Louise Erdrich book, ''Plague of Doves''  (excerpt)

Chapter One In the year 1896, my great-uncle, one of the first Catholic priests of aboriginal blood, put the call out to his parishioners that they should gather at Saint Joseph's wearing scapulars and holding missals. From that place they would proceed to walk the fields in a long, sweeping row, and with each step loudly pray away the doves. His human flock had taken up the plow and farmed among German and Norwegian settlers. Those people, unlike the French who mingled with my ancestors, took little interest in the women native to the land and did not intermarry. In fact, the Norwegians disregarded everybody but themselves and were quite clannish. But the doves ate their crops the same.

When the birds descended, both Indians and whites set up great bonfires and tried driving them into nets. The doves ate the wheat seedlings and the rye and started on the corn. They ate the sprouts of new flowers and the buds of apples and the tough leaves of oak trees and even last year's chaff. The doves were plump, and delicious smoked, but one could wring the necks of hundreds or thousands and effect no visible diminishment of their number. The pole-and-mud houses of the mixed-bloods and the bark huts of the blanket Indians were crushed by the weight of the birds. They were roasted, burnt, baked up in pies, stewed, salted down in barrels, or clubbed dead with sticks and left to rot. But the dead only fed the living and each morning when the people woke it was to the scraping and beating of wings, the murmurous susurration, the awful cooing babble, and the sight, to those who still possessed intact windows, of the curious and gentle faces of those creatures.

My great-uncle had hastily constructed crisscrossed racks of sticks to protect the glass in what, with grand intent, was called the rectory. In a corner of that one-room cabin, his younger brother, whom he had saved from a life of excessive freedom, slept on a pallet of fir boughs and a mattress stuffed with grass. This was the softest bed he'd ever lain in and the boy did not want to leave it, but my great-uncle thrust choirboy vestments at him and told him to polish up the candelabra that he would bear in the procession.

This boy was to become my mother's father, my Mooshum. Seraph Milk was his given name, and since he lived to be over one hundred, I was present and about eleven years old during the time he told and retold the story of the most momentous day of his life, which began with this attempt to vanquish the plague of doves. He sat on a hard chair, between our first television and the small alcove of bookshelves set into the wall of our government-owned house on the Bureau of Indian Affairs reservation tract. Mooshum would tell us he could hear the scratching of the doves' feet as they climbed all over the screens of sticks that his brother had made. He dreaded the trip to the out-house, where many of the birds had gotten mired in the filth beneath the hole and set up a screeching clamor of despair that drew their kind to throw themselves against the hut in rescue attempts. Yet he did not dare relieve himself anywhere else. So through flurries of wings, shuffling so as not to step on their feet or backs, he made his way to the out-house and completed his necessary actions with his eyes shut. Leaving, he tied the door closed so that no other doves would be trapped.

The out-house drama, always the first in the momentous day, was filled with the sort of detail that my brother and I found interesting. The out-house, well-known to us although we now had plumbing, and the horror of the birds' death by excrement, as well as other features of the story's beginning, gripped our attention. Mooshum was our favorite indoor entertainment, next to the television. But our father had removed the television's knobs and hidden them. Although we made constant efforts, we never found the knobs and came to believe that he carried them upon his person at all times. So we listened to our Mooshum instead. While he talked, we sat on kitchen chairs and twisted our hair. Our mother had given him a red coffee can for spitting snoose. He wore soft, worn, green Sears work clothes, a pair of battered brown lace-up boots, and a twill cap, even in the house. His eyes shone from slits cut deep into his face. The upper half of his left ear was missing, giving him a lopsided look. He was hunched and dried out, with random wisps of white hair down his ears and neck. From time to time, as he spoke, we glimpsed the murky scraggle of his teeth. Still, such was his conviction in the telling of this story that it wasn't hard at all to imagine him at twelve.

If Erdrich was only a finalist for the Pulitzer, who was the winner?  Hemingway?

Prize Winner in   Fiction   in   2009 :

Olive Kitteridge , by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

A collection of 13 short stories set in small-town Maine that packs a cumulative emotional wallop, bound together by polished prose and by Olive, the title character, blunt, flawed and fascinating.

Never read the novel, but the HBO movie Olive Kitteridge, based on the novel, was outstanding.  One of the best things I've ever seen on tv, actually.

I assume the book was excellent as well.

The spiritual reality of the Indian world is very evident, very highly developed. I think it affects the life of every Indian person in one way or another. F. Scott Momaday.

You are right Kavika, this is a great article and Mr Momaday's words seem more true, the more thought I give them.

Dave - don't give the words "thought" - just feel them and you'll enjoy and see more.

You know, really, there is a little bit o familiarity to  House Made of Dawn seems close to home.

1st, great article, I am glad you posted it.

John, the quotes are appreciated.

Yes, the quotes John posted were a gift.

Glad we got it.

I just learned something today. I have never read any of F. Scott Momaday's works. Now I am going to put some time aside to read 'House Made of Dawn". Can't be a bad place to start. 

Thanks for this great article 1st! 

Coyotes have the gift of seldom being seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to.

N. Scott Momaday

Luv the coyote/Trickster

Reminds me of a few folks I know here

Not mentioned in the thread is that Mr. Momaday also was awarded the "Premio Letterario Internazionale 'Mondello'" - Italy's highest literary award.

As mentioned in the article will receive the Ken Burns Heritage Award. 

Here is a little about the award and what it takes to be chosen for the great honor. 

AMERICAN INDIAN AUTHOR N. SCOTT MOMADAY WINS KEN BURNS AMERICAN HERITAGE PRIZE

https://nativenewsonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/scott-momaday-768x881.jpg 768w, nativenewsonline 523w, nativenewsonline 1465w" sizes="(max-width: 262px) 100vw, 262px" >

Momaday is the recipient of the 2019 Ken Burns American Heritage Prize

Published January 8, 2019

BOZEMAN, Mont.  — American Prairie Reserve is proud to announce that Kiowa novelist, essayist, and poet N. Scott Momaday, Ph.D., has been named the recipient of the 2019  Ken Burns American Heritage Prize . The award will be presented May 1, 2019, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The evening’s festivities will include remarks by Ken Burns, Dr. N. Scott Momaday, Meryl Streep, the 2019 Chair of the National Jury Dawn Arnall, and American Prairie Reserve CEO Alison Fox.

Named in honor of America’s most revered visual historian and filmmaker, the  Ken Burns American Heritage Prize  recognizes individuals whose achievements have advanced our collective understanding of America’s heritage and the indomitable American spirit of our people. Nominees for the annual Prize consist of visionary artists, authors, educators, filmmakers, historians, and scientists. The candidates are chosen by a National Jury of distinguished leaders who represent communities across the country and share a common appreciation of America’s heritage.

“It’s a privilege to lend my name to a Prize honoring individuals whose accomplishments reinforce the nation’s understanding of all that is possible. Scott Momaday has spent his life introducing the world to Native American culture through literature that has elevated our collective consciousness about what it means to be indigenous in the United States.” –  Ken Burns

Dr. Momaday is a Kiowa novelist, short-story writer, essayist and poet. His novel  House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance. Momaday was a founding Trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian, holds 21 honorary degrees from colleges and universities around the world and received the National Medal of Arts in 2007.

“I am truly honored to be named the recipient of the 2019  Ken Burns American Heritage Prize  and left speechless by this recognition. The prairie is a landscape of great clarity and has had extraordinary meaning in my life. None of us lives apart from the land entirely and I am deeply concerned about conservation. I fully support American Prairie Reserve’s remarkable and courageous effort to preserve a disappearing landscape that is sacred to so many Native Americans.” –  Dr. N. Scott Momaday

American Prairie Reserve, which created the Prize, is a modern-day embodiment of America’s optimistic and boundless approach to accomplishing the unprecedented — in this case, by creating the largest nature reserve in the continental United States, located on the Great Plains of northeastern Montana.

21 Honourary Degrees!!!!

Dear Brother Kavika: We are indebted to N. Scott Momaday for his literary contributions.

His writings bring to us the sagacity and perspective of those who lived and built in this land for many thousands of years. 

As it is written in the book of a prophet, "Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths. Where is the good way? Walk in it and find rest for your soul". (Jeremiah 6:16).

P&AB.

Enoch.