THE ANCIENT CHILD
Scott Momaday
New York: Doubleday, 1989
314 pp., $18.95
“We are what we imagine,'” N. Scott Momaday has written. "Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined." For the past two decades, the best destiny of N. Scott Momaday has been to imagine himself fully in poetry, fiction, and essays. It is a process that began with Momaday's first novel in 1968, the Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn, ascended to a lyrical apex with The Way to Rainy Mountain in 1969, and arrives now at a kind of culmination with Momaday's long-awaited second novel, The Ancient Child.
Born Navarro Scotte Mammedaty, according to the office of Indian Services, in the Kiowa and Comanche Indian Hospital at Lawton, Oklahoma, on February 27, 1934, N. Scott Momaday grew up at a distance from his father's Kiowa roots, completing a Ph.D. in literature at Stanford University (with a dissertation on the obscure nineteenth-century poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman) and going on to a career as a university professor. Addressing a group of students the author once explained,
“I think of myself as an Indian because at one time in my life I suddenly realized that my father had grown up speaking a language that I didn't grow up speaking, that my forebears on his side had made a migration from Canada along with…Athapaskan peoples that I knew nothing about, and so I determined to find out something about these things and in the process I acquired an identity; it is an Indian identity, as far as I am concerned.”
For Momaday, an essential step in the process of acquiring an identity is the act of articulation, as he explained to his biographer, Mathias Schubnell: "I believe that I fashion my own life out of words and images, and that's how I get by…Writing, giving expression to my spirit and to my mind, that's a way of surviving, of ordering one's life…that's a way of making life acceptable to one-self."
With House Made of Dawn, Momaday announced a new direction for Native American fiction. Set in Walatowa, the native name of the Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, House Made of Dawn begins and ends with the traditional invocation of Jemez storytellers: Dypaloh. Thus, away from the main current of American fiction into a realm new to our written literature: the American Indian oral tradition. Like House Made of Dawn and the Way to Rainy Mountain, The Ancient Child takes its place in that tradition, a tradition within which stories have serious responsibilities: to tell us who we are and where we come from, to make us whole and heal us, to integrate us fully within the world we inhabit, and make that world inhabitable.
Identity and myth-making
After years spent painting, traveling, and writing nonfiction, Momaday has returned to the interrelated themes of Indian identity and mythmaking in The Ancient Child. Featuring two protagonists, a young Navajo-Kiowa woman named Grey and a half-Kiowa artist named Locke Setman, or Set, The Ancient Child follows Set on a difficult and
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