Scott Momaday Interview (page: 2 / 5) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction	Print Interview

What were you like as a school boy? Did you get along with your classmates?

Scott Momaday: Yeah, I've always gotten along with classmates. I was in schools that were remarkable in one way or another. For example, many times I was the only person for whom English was a first language. I was in school with a lot of Pueblo kids, and Navajo kids. They spoke a kind of broken English, and I didn't. I suppose that was to my advantage in some ways, but a disadvantage in others.

I wasn't really challenged when I was in the early grades. That's pretty much true all up through high school. I think I was ill-prepared for college. I hadn't had a lot of really valuable training. So it came as a kind of shock to me. But I managed to do what I was supposed to do. I wasn't a great student. I didn't care that much about grades until I got into graduate school. Then I thought, the time has come to really make an effort now, and so I did. More important, by that time I had put myself in a position where I could hold my own.

All the way up to your senior year in high school, you were in reservation schools.

Scott Momaday: Pretty much. I was in all kinds of different schools, some on the reservation, some off. I went to four different high schools, and for two of those years I rode a bus 28 miles one way to school. I boarded with an old German couple in Albuquerque in my sophomore year, and then I went to military school for my senior year. I had run out of schools and my parents and I thought that if I really wanted to go to college, I had better go to a school that could give me some college preparation. So I selected a military academy in Virginia and I went there my senior year.

What possessed you to pick a military academy in Virginia?

Scott Momaday: I don't really know. It was a romantic kind of thing. My mother was born in Kentucky and some of her ancestors had come from Virginia. She was always very interested in that part of the world, and in that part of her ancestral experience. So I had an interest in the Old South, in the Old Dominion. So when I got these catalogues, that's where I gravitated, to the Shenandoah Valley.

How did it affect you, moving from one world to another, back and forth between the Indian world of the reservation, and the one outside, especially at so young an age?

Scott Momaday: I think that's the answer. It happened when I was young, and kids take things like that for granted. If it had happened to me at a later time in my life I probably would have been terrified. But going back and forth between the Indian world and the white man's world was a piece of cake at the time. It's like learning a language. Language is child's play, and the kind of experience I had was child's play.

Did you always have this sense of Indianness wherever you went?

Scott Momaday: Yes.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. That's interesting, as I look back on it because I was very frequently among Indians who were not of my tribe. We couldn't converse, we didn't have the same language, but I always had a sense of being one of them because I'm Indian. They had the same sense of me. We got along well because we were all Indians together. That's something I think that is of importance, and something that happened in my lifetime. When I was little, people didn't think of themselves as Indians. They thought of themselves as Kiowas, or Comanches, or Crees, or whatever. But in the last 50 years or so, the tribal distinctions have broken down. But the sense of Indianness has remained as strong as ever, and maybe it has become stronger. And, I can't account for that except to say that the outside world has made incursions, and the Indians have left the reservation, and so there's been a much greater kind of communication back and forth. And now we have things like pow-wows, which are extremely important in bringing young people especially, together from every kind of different tribe and language. And they trade words, and dance steps, and music, and so on. And so, they bond and become a people, instead of the members of a lot of different tribes, and I think that's healthy.

There's no question that this sense of Indian identity has enriched and informed your life and your work.

Scott Momaday: That's very true. One of the things that amazes me is that I think the Indian is more secure than he was a half-century ago. He has a much better idea of himself and of the contribution that he can make. He's only two percent of the population, but has an influence much greater than that would indicate.

Could you define a turning point, or a defining moment, a big break in your career?

Scott Momaday: I suppose the fellowship I was awarded to at Stanford. I could say that was my first big break. It was an opportunity that I was not expecting, and it turned out to mean a great deal to me.

What do you think Stanford saw in you?

Scott Momaday: I don't think Stanford saw anything in me particularly, but Yvor Winters did. He was the man who chose the poets for the fellowship. I didn't know him at the time, but when I applied, I submitted several poems, and the outline for a collection of poems.

He saw in it something that he wanted to encourage, so he wrote to me and said, you've been awarded the poetry fellowship. There was only one that year, this was 1959. He became my advisor. That was an important moment in my life, because he was extremely knowledgeable about poetry. I was very much interested in poetry at the time, and he was in a position to take me over and help me learn poetic forms and so on.

Why was that a turning point for you?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Scott Momaday: I had not wanted to go on with my schooling. I had graduated from the University of New Mexico with a BA. I had taken a job on the Jicarilla, Apache Reservation, teaching [at the Dulce School]. I was quite pleased to be there, I spent a year and loved it. Wonderful setting, great people, the kids were wonderful. I was teaching seventh graders, up through eleventh or twelfth graders. And I was a bachelor earning the princely sum of $4,000 a year. Nothing to spend it on, except steaks down at the trading post. I'd go buy the best piece of meat you've ever seen and bring it home and feast on it. But then, I won the fellowship to Stanford. And I thought, "Hey, I'll go to Stanford, I'll live off the fat of the land there for a year. I'll learn something about writing. It's a great opportunity, but then I'll come back here." I took a year's leave of absence. I meant to be gone for a year. I ended up staying 20 years in California because Yvor Winters talked me into going through the mill there. So I took the bachelors and then stayed in and took the doctorate. By that time I was overqualified for Dulce, so I got into the business of college teaching.

Is it possible to articulate what Yvor Winters saw in the poems that you submitted?

Scott Momaday: I was writing in a kind of native voice. I had already become interested in the Indian oral tradition and I wanted to incorporate elements of that tradition into my work. I think he thought that was exciting. It had interesting possibilities and he responded very favorably to it.

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