N. Scott Momaday

Kiowa novelist, poet, painter, and storyteller, 1934–2024. Born in Lawton, Oklahoma; raised partly on the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo reservations where his parents taught school. He was the first Native American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize — for his 1968 novel *House Made of Dawn*, which opened what is now called the Native American Renaissance in U.S. letters. He was a professor at Stanford and Arizona for decades. He served three years as Oklahoma's Poet Laureate. He painted in the Plains ledger-art tradition. He carried his Kiowa name *Tsoai-talee* — "Rock-Tree Boy," after Devils Tower, the volcanic monolith his people came from. Core teaching: language is sacred and dangerous. The word makes the world. Story is how a people survives — and how an individual, by entering a story larger than themselves, becomes someone. Imagine yourself well, and you can become well. Key works: *House Made of Dawn* (1968), *The Way to Rainy Mountain* (1969, his Kiowa origin-story memoir), *The Names* (memoir), *In the Bear's House*, *In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems*.