ABSTRACT
When discussing Native American literature, literary commentators are accustomed to turning to the story of N. Scott Momaday’s 1969 Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn as an emergence narrative for Native American writing.1 The so-called “Native American Renaissance” in literature that followed is widely regarded as one of the most signifi cant literary developments in American letters in the twentieth century. Rightly so. But it is less customary for literary commentators to describe the precise nature of Momaday’s achievement. As the story goes, Momaday’s triumph and his newfound literary prestige created a fresh reverence for Native American writing, and it generated popular and academic interests where before were none. This much we know and celebrate. Less discussed is how the deed itself was done-the discursive twists and turns in Momaday’s work that helped realign Native American literature as Literary, that is, as a mode of expression that is recognizable to dominant literary tastes and that excites elite literary pretensions. Such was the work of the modernist sensibilities on display in House Made of Dawn, and such was the work of “The Man Made of Words,” Momaday’s groundbreaking essay that interweaves personal literary refl ections, Kiowa oral tradition, and ruling class aesthetic values “within the framework of a literary continuance” that serves to refi gure indigenous literary practice in the language and style of a deeply moral humanism (“The Man Made of Words” qtd. in Purdy and Ruppert 90).2 What eventually emerged from the early days of the literary renaissance period was elite recognition of the intrinsic worth of Native American writing, and for all of the subsequent scholarship devoted to exposing the exoticism and fetish nature behind metropolitan acceptance of post-1968 Native American literature, it is also surely the case that the tantalizing “difference” of Native American writing that captured reviewers’ attentions, sold books, and altered English department course offerings in its wake proved to be not that different after all.
