November is Native American Heritage Month, and 1969 Fiction prize winner N. Scott Momaday is raising awareness of native cultures in a new documentary made by his daughter, Jill Momaday.
"Return to Rainy Mountain" chronicles a father-daughter roadtrip from the headwaters of the Yelowstone River to the Momaday family homestead in Oklahoma, passing through sites sacred to the Kiowa people such as Deveil's Tower, the Black Hills and Medicine Wheel.
Scott Momaday visited Devil's Tower, Wyoming as a young boy, and in the trailer from the film he tells how the place and its mythology led to his Indian name, meaning Rock Tree Boy.
"It's something that I think is really important, to get to know him and be with him right now in his life. And I'm at the point in my life where these stories, and this connection, this family connection is so important," Jill Momaday says in the excerpt from the film. It first aired on New Mexico PBS, KNME-TV, on October 21 and now has been distributed nationally.
In 2007, President George W. Bush awarded Scott Momaday the National Medal of Arts. In addition to fiction, he has penned poetry and children's literature and taught at Stanford University, University of Arizona, University of California-Berkeley and University of California-Santa Barbara. He has been a visiting professor at Columbia University, Princeton University, and at Moscow State University.
Read a brief passage from his Pulitzer-winning work, on the nature of language:
In the white man's world, language, too — and the way which the white man thinks of it — has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language — for the Word itself — as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word.
Learn more about the film here.