Navarre Scotte Momaday (February 27, 1934–January 24, 2024) was a Kiowa and American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet.

His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance.

In addition, the etymology of Momaday appears in John Peabody Harringon’s Vocabulary of the Kiowa language, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1928, as an unambiguous entry on page 121: mῌm-dei ‘up, upper; roof’.

[clarification needed][5] In 1946, a 12-year-old Momaday moved to Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, living there with his parents until his senior year of high school.

[5] To challenge himself, Momaday spent his final year of high school at the Augusta Military Academy in Virginia.

[6] In a 2022 interview for the PBS show American Masters, the director Jeff Palmer asked Momaday what knowledge would he want to pass on to younger generations.

I think it gets easier all the time..."[15] After receiving his Ph.D. in 1963 from Stanford University, Momaday's first book publication was The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, which he edited and wrote the "Introduction".

[19] As other Indigenous American writers began to gain recognition, Momaday turned to poetry, releasing a small collection called Angle of Geese.

[13] According to Matthias Schubnell, Momaday's memoir The Names "is best described as an extension of The Way to Rainy Mountain: while the earlier work conveys the mythic and historical precedents to Momaday's personal experiences in story fragments within an associative structure, The Names is a chronological account of his childhood and adolescence.

Momaday taught creative writing, and produced a new curriculum based on American Indian literature and mythology.

[24] During the 35-plus years of Momaday's academic career, he built up a reputation specializing in American Indian oral history and sacred concepts of the culture itself.

[25] Momaday was a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico during the 2014–15 academic year to teach in the Creative Writing and American Literary Studies Programs in the Department of English.

[34][35] In July 2007, Momaday was honored as the Oklahoma Centennial Poet Laureate[36] Later that year, in November, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President George W.

The same year, Momaday became one of the inductees in the first induction ceremony held by the National Native American Hall of Fame.

[45] Momaday was the founder of the Rainy Mountain Foundation[46] and Buffalo Trust, a nonprofit organization working to preserve Native American cultures.