Adventure classics -- Legendary tales: a bear & a deadly boy

The Ancient Child

by N. Scott Momaday

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“My father was a great storyteller and he knew many stories from the Kiowa oral tradition. . . But it was only after I became an adult that I understood how fragile they are, because they exist only by word of mouth, always just one generation away from extinction,” says N. Scott Momaday.

And what happens if the stories are lost? Can a family, a people, a land exist without stories?

If you’re Momaday, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and professor of English, your work of preservation includes entwining and reimagining the myths and legends, as he has in The Ancient Child. This 1989 novel opens with a prologue of legend of a boy metamorphosed into a bear. Not satisfied simply with retelling, and anyway, aren’t all legends rewoven in the teller’s mind, Momaday links this story to that of another, more historical but in his own way legendary figure, Billy theKid.

Or make that William Henry McCarty. Or William H. Bonney, Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim. For someone barely beyond boyhood at the time of his death, the 19^th century baby-faced outlaw turned folk hero has been metamorphosed as thoroughly as the boy who became a bear.

Momaday’s narrative follows two members of his own tribe – the artist Locke Setman (Set) and the visionary girl called Grey. Set (his name is the root of the Kiowa word for “bear”) was severed from his roots when he was placed for adoption following the deaths of his parents. Now completely assimilated into white culture, he has become so successful as a painter in San Francisco that he is also in danger of losing his artistic integrity.

“Those who exhibited his work, who praised and purchased it, and who demanded its proliferation became to determine it,” and Set goes along, until in middle age he begins to understand that he is squandering his talent.

Oh the other hand, 18-year-old Grey is only starting to discover her talents. She is also an orphan, estranged from her Kiowa father’s family when he moved away and married a woman from another tribe. Now on her own, she returns to her father’s people in Oklahoma, to the place where her ancient great-grandmother lies dying.

“Never had Grey to quest after visions,” Momaday writes. In fact, in visions she’s visited Billy the Kid, even participating through her dreams in his initial jail break escape from execution.

So Grey is hardly surprised when “one night, when the crickets and frogs made a strange synchronism on the creek and the green moon seemed to bog and float on the clouds, the grandmother Kope’mah whispered to her great-granddaughter Grey – it was unrelated to anything she had said before – ‘the bear is coming.’” And she dreams about a bear.

Far away in San Francisco, Set receives a telegram: “Grandmother Kopemah near death. Please come at once. Notify Cate.”

But who is this grandmother he never knew? And why is he asked to notify his father Cate, death for the past 30 years? And why, when he reaches the old family home, does he learn his great-grandmother was buried on the very day the telegram was sent by someone unknown?

What is real? What is visionary? What is historic? What is legendary? What will Momaday reveal to his readers, and what will he conceal? Adventure classics will begin to unravel these threads next Friday as a June of stories about the Southwest continues.

Adventure classics -- A run to save his life

House Made of Dawn

by N. Scott Momaday

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I was astonished that Kiowa poet, novelist, teacher, and media star N. Scott Momaday chose to begin his academic career with a study of one of the most obscure of American poets (and one who might still be unknown if not for Momaday’s attention), Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. What was there in the life and work of a reclusive nineteenth century New Englander who made only one attempt to communicate with the rest of the world that would commend him to a twentieth century Native American from Oklahoma, I wondered, until I read Momaday’s words about Tuckerman -- “an eye for the minutest aspects of the world. . . pervaded by an always apparent sense of grief.”

They are words that could describe Momaday’s own 1968 first novel, House Made of Dawn, written out of the grief of a character whose entire culture was attempting to burst from obscurity.

Originally intended as a series of poems that became a novel, House Made of Dawn is as slender as last month’s novel by another poet, Dr. Zhivago, is wide. But both burrow deep into the soul.

Momaday is a member of the same Kiowa tribe as the lost, rootless renegades Larry McMurtry used as bogeymen in last Wednesday’s Lonesome Dove. Read Momaday’s version, and you’ll never see McMurtry’s enigmatic villain Blue Duck the same way again.

Even at only 198 pages, with its nonlinear narrative, multiple points of view, and harrowing descent into the central character’s emotional and physical collapse, House Made of Dawn isn’t an easy read. The opening section traces the early life of young Pueblo Indian Abel in New Mexico, brought up by his grandfather Francisco after the death of his mother. The descriptions of the natural world -- the house of dawn -- through which Abel runs in a Pueblo ceremonial, depict the setting as clearly as a landscape
painting. (Not coincidentally, Momaday is also an artist).

Abel has just returned from combat in World War II, an experience that has left him so emotionally shattered he seeks refuge in the forgetfulness of alcohol. After a doomed love affair, Abel kills a rival, the eerie albino Indian Juan Reyes, in a drunken brawl.

The book’s middle sections follow Abel’s release from prison and a forced relocation to Los Angeles, where he is severed from his land and culture. These sections are written from the point of view of Abel’s friends, fellow soldiers, and social workers, as if Abel himself is too broken to carry the burden of narrative. At the end, physically shattered by a brutal beating, Abel returns to his home. Though his grandfather is dying, his presence, his final words, give Abel the strength to take up the story again in his own voice, to find a voice, even if a silent one, in the ancient, grounded ceremonial of running.

“My father was a great storyteller and he knew many stories from the Kiowa oral tradition,” Momaday states in a discussion of his work in the PBS documentary The West. “He told many of these stories over and over because I loved them. But it was only after I became an adult that I understood how fragile they are, because they exist only by word of mouth, always just one generation away from extinction.”

(Although the main story behind House Made of Dawn was based on Momaday’s
experience in experience growing up in the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico where his parents were teachers, the book’s middle sections incorporate stories from other relocated Natives. Some of the Kiowa stories are also excerpted in Momaday’s volume of memoir and folklore, The Way to Rainy Mountain.)

Momaday received the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for House Made of Dawn, and the book’s wide acceptance paved the way for such younger Native writers as Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich. The book was adapted as a movie in 1972.

For more about Momaday, I liked the interview at
www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/program/producers/momaday.htm/

To learn about the movie’s history, see
www.nativenetworks.is.edu/eng/rose/hmod.htm/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics ends of month of writing about Texas and the Southwest with Laura Esquivel’s magical romance, Like Water for Chocolate.)