N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear
Sometimes something absolutely beautiful comes on TV when you most need to see it. Last night PBS's American Masters series was N. Scott Momaday: Words From a Bear. You can stream it online at https://www.pbs.org/video/n-scott-momaday-word-from-a-bear-odljy7/. If you do, please watch it on the largest screen you have available. The views of Scott's world are the American West and his imagination.
Momaday is Kiowa. He was born in Oklahoma's red earth country and raised in the red rock canyons of Arizona and the Jemez Pueblo in mesa country of New Mexico. Momaday grew up immersed in his father’s Kiowa traditions and those of the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo. His was a world of vast spaces and timelessness.
PBS describes Scott as a "Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet, best known for House Made of Dawn and a formative voice of the Native American Renaissance in art and literature." (You can read my review of the book at https://bit.ly/37kI3UM.)
House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction fifty years ago and I had the great good fortune of meeting him almost that long ago.
I was a single mom working full time and taking night classes at Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma. I took two and, some semesters, three classes to meet a degree requirement. But always one night a week I spent a bit of time outside my daily pressure cooker life -- in Dr. Norman Russell's poetry class. He very kindly arranged for me to continue taking his class after I took it that first semester, changing its title and number to side-step academia's practical order.
In his class we talked poetry. We read poetry. We shared the poetry we had written during the week. We discussed and argued, though always civilly, what made poetry speak to us. Rhymed, free verse, traditional, experimental. How to say what we meant to say. Which words were strong enough to touch our reader, strong enough to touch the universe. The universe both inside and outside of ourselves.
Dr. Russell was an eminent scientist in the world of botany. His day job was teaching science classes to college students. Don't get me wrong. He enjoyed teaching. He loved botany. And he loved our night class of would-be poets. We were not all working toward a degree. We were a mix of generations and professions and life experiences and goals.
He was a Native American, a Cherokee. And, most-importantly to me, Dr. Russell was a poet. A kind and generous poet. Red Shuttleworth (a much awarded Western Poet in his own right) said of Dr. Russell in a 2011 tribute, "Norman H. Russell bushwhacked a trail for many Native American poets. He was the first Indian to publish poetry widely."
Sometimes Dr. Russell had a poet friend come and read to us. One of those poet friends was N. Scott Momaday. I doubt Momaday remembers me at all, but I remember him. I remember him as a big guy with a wonderful reading voice. I don't think I realized that he was famous. That wasn't important anyway. I just liked that he talked poetry to us as one of us.
Now I'm really glad he was famous, because that got us this beautiful film, N. Scott Momaday: Words From a Bear. This film gives us Momaday's world in his own voice.
Again, here's the link https://www.pbs.org/video/n-scott-momaday-word-from-a-bear-odljy7/
Enjoy.
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