The latest episide in PBS' American Masters series, "Words From a Bear" documents the life and art of N. Scott Momaday, who was awarded the 1969 Fiction prize for "House Made of Dawn." The Kiowa poet, painter and novelist was the first Native American Pulitzer winner.
In the film, Momaday speaks to his and his forebearers' relationship to the natural world, nuances of his work and questions of identity. The full film is available on PBS' website, here.
He also touches on how he learned of his Pulitzer. "The Pulitzer Prize was a complete surprise. Now, people don't believe that, but it's true. I picked up the phone one day, and my editor at Harper and Row, Fran McCullough, said: 'Scott, are you sitting down,'" Momaday also recalls in the film. "I thought she was kidding."
Momaday was born in Oklahoma and raised on several reservations across New Mexico before attending University of New Mexico as an undergraduate and Stanford University as a graduate student. He was a founding Trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian, and sits on the Boards of First Nations Development Institute and the School of American Research. He has taught as a tenured professor at Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Arizona, and has been a visiting professor at Columbia, Princeton and in Moscow.
"The spirit lives in the voice, so everybody could hear that he was carrying something very profound, and very important," U.S. Poet Laureate and member of the Muscogee Creek Nation Joy Harjo says in the film.
Actor Robert Redford adds, "When I lok at the Native American culture, and how they pass on information to generations to come, it's through stories. And what Scott has done, without losing the value of oral storytelling, he's been able to move it into writing. And that's what got me."
Previously, Scott Momaday's daughter Jill Momaday, who also appears in "Words from a Bear," made a documentary about her father's life in writing, "Return to Rainy Mountain." More information about that film is available here.
"I love it because of the simplicity," actor James Earl Jones says in the conclusion of the trailer for the American Masters episode. "I mean, he's telling a cosmically complex story, but he does it in the simplest terms."
For further details, visit PBS' website.