SOURCE: "N. Scott Momaday: A Man of Words," in World Literature Today, Vol. 64, No. 3, Summer, 1990, pp. 405-07.

In the essay below, Meredith discusses Momaday's literary attempts to preserve Native American culture and examines his use of Kiowa traditions as a narrative form and "a measured angle of vision" through which to view the world.

N. Scott Momaday marks a decisive line of demarcation in the cultural tradition of the Kiowa people. In doing so, he has struck a responsive chord among the other diverse peoples of North America. He is a collector of the ancient traditions that circulated orally among the Kiowa people and others of the American Southwest. With him begins a literary tradition of those prose narratives which previously had circulated almost exclusively within specific tribal contexts. This process is one in which a great literary work, House Made of Dawn, issued at a stroke.

Such...