The Names by N. Scott Momaday

First published: 1976

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: 1934-1976

Locale: The Southwest

Principal Personages:

• N. Scott Momaday, a Native American writer and poet
• Alfred Morris Momaday, his father, a schoolteacher and painter
• Natachee Scott Momaday, his mother, also a teacher
• James, his uncle
• Mammedaty, his grandfather
• Pohd-Lohk, a tribal storyteller, his step-grandfather

Form and Content

In 1968, thirty-four-year-old N. Scott Momaday wrote to his old friend and academic mentor, Yvor Winters, that he was planning a book of nonfiction, “an evocation of the American landscape informed by autobiographical elements and the history of the Kiowas.” His goal was to write “an indigenous book.” At this point in his life, Momaday, whose father was a full-blooded Kiowa and whose mother was of English, French, and Cherokee extraction, had begun to wonder about his Indian heritage and to explore his tribal and familial history. He had visited many of the places along the Kiowas’ migration route from Yellowstone to the Staked Plain of Texas, worshiped in front of the sacred Tai-me medicine bundle in Oklahoma, and collected ancient stories from tribal elders, all in an effort to define his place in the traditions of his forebears. Artistically, this exploration yielded Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, published in 1969, a year after his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, House Made of Dawn. Encouraged by his editor, Frances McCullough, to write an autobiography about growing up Indian, Momaday began work on The Names.

The Names is divided into four parts, framed by a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue recalls the Kiowa creation story about the tribe’s emergence from an underground world through a hollow log. In the epilogue, Momaday relates the last stage of his journey along the Kiowas’ migration route. Entering the Staked Plain, Momaday imagines the presence of the buffalo, of his ancestors engaged in storytelling, and of the Kiowas’ deserted camps. He celebrates the beauty of the land along his way, which finally leads him to a hollow log, like the one that gave birth to his tribe. The prologue and the epilogue, then, form a circle, outlining the larger racial story surrounding Momaday’s personal account.

The four parts of The Names follow Momaday’s life chronologically and geographically, from his early infancy in Oklahoma to his childhood on the Navajo reservation at Shiprock, New Mexico, and Tuba City and Chinle, Arizona, and his boyhood among the people of Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico. Within this rough structure, however, Momaday constantly moves back and forth between the present and the past, creating a sense of cotemporality, a dimension of personal time in which the boundaries between past and present are fluid.

The Names cannot easily be attributed to a single genre; rather, it is a collage of vignettes of people and places, family photographs, landscape pictures, poems, imaginary dialogues between ancestors or between Momaday and his forebears, family stories, renderings of sense impressions from early childhood, and tales of adventures and conflicts about growing up as a modern Indian in a multicultural environment. A genealogical chart and a glossary of Kiowa terms and names help the reader follow Momaday’s explorations, in the course of which the author-subject negotiates myth and autobiography, tribal and individual experience, racial and personal identity.

Part 1 brings to life Momaday’s European ancestors who settled in Kentucky; it relates how Momaday’s mother, in tracing her Cherokee heritage, provided a model for what he himself would later pursue in exploring his father’s Kiowa background. Through stories and photographs, Momaday introduces not only Kau-au-ointy, Keahdinekeah, Aho, Guipagho, and Mammedaty but also the Galyens, Scotts, Ellises, and McMillans. Of particular significance is the portrayal of Pohd-lohk, the man who gave Momaday his Indian name, because by calling him Tsoai-talee, he integrated the boy into tribal myth and landscape, affirming “the whole life of the child in a name.”

Part 2 deals with Momaday’s childhood years in Navajo country, but his memories of Oklahoma remain a constant presence. The two landscapes are fused into a single whole in Momaday’s imagination. The long and moving story of Uncle James, which concludes this part, is a sad reminder of what can occur when an Indian fails to accommodate himself to the modern world. Momaday’s tribute to his relative, who sought refuge in alcohol, underscores the need for creating a personal myth which gives order and meaning to a life between two cultural worlds.

In part 3 Momaday relives his early boyhood in New Mexico during World War II and illustrates that modern America—the films, popular songs, and football— became as much a part of his imagination as Kiowa warriors and chiefs. It also reveals some of the conflicts Momaday encountered in reconciling his modern self with his tribal antecedents, for example, when he confesses, “I don’t know how to be a Kiowa,” or when his shortsightedness causes this anguished response: “The Indians didn’t wear glasses not the Kiowas how can you hunt buffalo with glasses on I broke my glasses.” The extended stream-of-consciousness section, which makes up more than half of part 3, allows the reader to participate directly in the process Momaday called the creation of an idea of himself.

Part 4, finally, explores Momaday’s formative years at Jemez Pueblo, where he grew up among the Jemez and Navajo peoples. This part of the memoir contains loving renditions of neighbors, feasts, ceremonials, and adventures in a spectacular and spiritually meaningful landscape. Like Tolo, the protagonist of the Christmas story, Momaday enters into the landscape of his adopted home, the Canyon de San Diego, appropriating it to his physical and spiritual experience. The Names ends with Momaday’s symbolic fall from innocence into experience. The reader leaves him facing the world beyond childhood, equipped with a strong sense of self and the certainty of being rooted in an ancient tradition and a spiritually sustaining landscape. The book’s form and content reflect the author’s purpose in piecing together stories, images, and names from the past to create a personal myth, whole and intricately interwoven with the larger story of his ancestors.

Critical Context

In The Names, Momaday pursues the theme of identity which dominates his two earlier works. For him, as for many other contemporary Native Americans, tribal identity is no longer a given but rather a consciously constructed concept, which allows them to participate in the mainstream of American society without sacrificing their attachment to a cultural heritage. Storytelling is central to this process, as it has always been in tribal societies; it is not an art for art’s sake but a matter of individual and communal survival.

The Names continues Momaday’s exploration of tribal identity which began in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, House Made of Dawn. This novel reflects, both in form and content, the threat of personal and cultural fragmentation and disintegration which modern Native Americans often face. Momaday argues that only through trust in language, in the oral tradition, and in the continuing validity of ancient stories can a sense of wholeness be preserved. In House Made of Dawn, the protagonist’s loss of voice accounts in large measure for his nightmarish existence between two worlds. The restoration of his voice at the end of the novel becomes one of the prerequisites for healing and reunifying him with his tribe.

In The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday charts the process of placing himself into his Kiowa background. It is the account of a physical, spiritual, and intellectual journey through stories and places, a blend of myth, history, and autobiography which crystallizes into Momaday’s personal reality. While he emphasizes the relationship between racial experience and tribal consciousness in The Way to Rainy Mountain, he examines his sense of self in a more direct and detailed fashion in The Names, examining family influences and the impact of other cultures. In doing so, he offers the reader a deeper insight into the components and the process which have made Momaday the unique individual that he is.

Bibliography

Abbey, Edward. “Memories of an Indian Childhood,” in Harper’s Magazine. CCLIV (February, 1977), p. 94.

Schubnell, Matthias. “Myths to Live By: The Names: A Memoir,” in N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background, 1985.

Stegner, Wallace. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXII (March 6, 1977), pp. 6-7.

Velie, Alan R. “The Search for Identity: N. Scott Momaday’s Autobiographical Works,” in Four American Indian Literary Masters, 1982.