Native Americans On Writing Their Stories

 I found Julian Brave Noise Cat's Place Determines Who We Are through The Paris Review's newsletter. What I thought I might get out of the title was not what I did get. The article profiles N. Scott Momaday who received the 2021 Hadada Award. Another writer, I now need to read. 

What else I out of the article are some things to meditate on about my writing, too.

Matters of voice and the written word cannot be easily separated from questions of agency, power, and politics, however. Not long after he finished teaching War Jack’s course, Momaday published his pathbreaking first novel, House Made of Dawn, which won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and helped Native authors break into the mainstream—the beginning of a literary renaissance that paralleled our political resurgence.

I have long thought that Momaday’s seeming absence from the political scene was curious, especially after I learned that he was War Jack’s professor—just offstage as one of the defining Indigenous political dramas of the twentieth century played out on Alcatraz Island, which can be seen from Berkeley. But after revisiting his books, I realized that Momaday is apolitical only if one takes a limited view of politics. His work gestures toward an Indigenous, spiritual, culturally rooted, and place-based ethic that resonates with the thrust of Native activism from Alcatraz to Standing Rock and beyond.

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Putting Momaday’s work in conversation with the past half century of Indigenous activism it has paralleled is, I think, an illuminating way to consider both his books and the ideas undergirding Native movements. Voice is a fundamental building block for change, and ideas often have roots that run deeper than their political valence. If Momaday can speak so authentically to the Indigenous experience—our long odyssey through an imperial apocalypse, and the enduring power of our ceremonies and cultures, rooted in land and place, as organizing and governing principles—without saying a word about a political party, politician, or even an act of protest, then that just illustrates how fundamental the things he depicts are to our people. Epistemology, grounded in who we are and where we come from—our very being—becomes ontology. It’s from that starting place, that hearth, that you get the Alcatrazes, Standing Rocks, and Lanada War Jacks.