By the end of the nineteenth century, a few hundred remained alongside reservations. Thirty million bison roamed the American plains. Through this story, we hear the echo of an Army colonel’s voice: “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” His statement is now an archaeological fact buried in mountains made of bison bones. They could see its bright blood run into the sky, where it dried, darkening and was at last flecked with flakes of light. On the edge of the night the people gathered themselves up in their grief and shame.Īway in the west they could see the hump and spine of the huge beast which lay dying on the edge of the world. It was a great, old, noble beast, and it was a long time blowing its life away. There was a man who killed a buffalo bull to no purpose, only he wanted its blood on his hands. Consider this passage from his prose poem “The Colors of the Night,” originally published in the 1976 collection The Gourd Dancer: In his work, Momaday reaches across worlds where traditional knowledge both haunts the present and heals the wounds of the past. Mormon settlers wanted to discourage “outsiders” from infiltrating their territory, so they dressed up as Indians and persuaded members of the Southern Paiute Nation to join them in the mass murder of one hundred and twenty white emigrants to give the appearance of hostile territory. The Mountain Meadows Massacre-which occurred right outside Saint George, Utah, in 1857-was just such an incident. It was only after reading The Way to Rainy Mountain that I saw the Book of Mormon as a white supremacist fantasy that turns colonizers into prophets, legitimizing murder in the name of securing a place called Zion. In my case, his stories were a sharp invitation to examine my connection to a religion that relegates race to the curse of Cain and denounces “the sins” of Momaday’s people. He calls forth his ancestors and, in so doing, pushes you to reflect on your own. He writes and you enter his words as a lived landscape complete with familial bonds that reach back through time. Momaday doesn’t have to explain what it means to have a voice he speaks and you feel it as an echo of truth.
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The voice of the land is the voice I hear when Momaday speaks. So has our joint commitment to sacred land protection, such as the Bears Ears National Monument. Our shared concerns over landscape and story in the American Southwest have kept us close through the years. We met that night at his reading and again shortly thereafter, by chance, in New York City, where we broke bread together. I know Scott as a friend who has mentored me for more than four decades. And it could be said that their stature comes from the vantage point of their elders across the generations. “The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see,” Momaday writes in The Way to Rainy Mountain. There is an interiority to Momaday’s art that belongs to the lineage of his ancestors. They are not only paintings of place they register as moments in place. His paintings are bold, haunting portraits of people and animals, alive with impressionist sweeps of energy that you feel first and identify later. He is also an accomplished visual artist. He is a writer of uncommon versatility, equally comfortable in the roles of novelist, essayist, memoirist, poet, and playwright. Momaday has been surprising readers from the beginning. “You were expecting feathers?” he replied. “Good evening,” he said, in a strong, booming voice, deep with resonance. He was large in stature and reputation: eight years earlier, his debut novel, House Made of Dawn, had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The writer, whose Kiowa name is Tsoai-talee, or “Rock Tree Boy,” walked confidently onto the humble stage in a three-piece suit. Scott Momaday read from his book The Way to Rainy Mountain, which had just been published in paperback. But on this night in 1977, several hundred of us were waiting in our seats not to see a film but to hear the great N. A grizzly bear, black bear, coyote, pronghorn antelope, mule deer, and mountain lion perched above rows of red velvet seats and, on a typical evening, watched the audience as the audience watched the movies. We were gathered at the Teton Theater in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a historic cinema built in 1942, a testament to taxidermy where faux ledges of local mammals appeared on the north and south walls.
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How often have I used this expression, and how often have I stopped to think about what it means? Events do indeed take place, they have meaning in relation to things around them. The events of one’s life take place, take place.