The Names: A Memoir by N. Scott Momaday (review)

86 Western American Literature he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He’d of helped build up the country.” It’s a pity that Gatsby, the hero who was all style and no substance (the precursor of our contemporary celebrities), never went back to the substantial West of his origin and then farther West aboard Jim Hill’s Great Northern. He might have prospered in such a country of adventure “commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” Albro Martin’s book offers us a ticket for just such a journey, however, and passengers will not be disappointed in either the service or the scenery which the thoughtful biographer provides along the way. Although his book is ambitious in the immensity of its conception, the biographer’s reach to recreate the life of Hill has neither exceeded nor eluded his grasp. We see the man himself, not (as is usual in biography) in a mirror darkly, but face to face. We do not remain his spectators; we become his intimates. It is an admirable achievement, and an enviable one. HOWARD LACHTMAN, University of the Pacific The Names: A Memoir. By N. Scott Momaday. (New' York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1976. 170 pages, ill., glossary, $10.00.) Novarro Scott Mammedaty’s charming work is an intensely personal memoir of a childhood in the 1930s and ’40s among kindred Kiowas in Oklahoma and with Hobbs school-mates and Jemez Pueblos in New Mexico. It is about growing up as a mid-twentieth century American Indian, and is prelude to The Way to Rainy Mountain. As Momaday makes clear, his poetic prose narrative recreates “the imaginative part” of his own boy-mind. It tells of his increasing selfawareness as an Indian without thought of resistance against the High Plains pick-up and football life-style. Rather, he adds to it those gradually discovered Indian parts of himself. In piecing those together lies the completion of his self-knowledge, the base of his separateness and dignity, strengthened but not molded entirely by his Indianness. Acutely perceptive of individuality, Momaday focuses sharply in his portraiture. Grandfather Mammedaty (whom he never saw) he has “imagined posthumously in the going on of his blood.” After the Seventh Cavalry defeated his people and the buffalo had vanished, Mammedaty quit the horse for the plow, though still a peyote priest at rituals in Quanah Parker’s house. His other grandfather, Kentucky tobacco-grower Theodore Scott, was a “man of unusual composure” and a mighty grip of the hand. From the two lines, Kiowan and Kentuckian, sprang N. Scott Momaday. In his mother, Natachee Scott Momaday, the blood of her Cherokee great­ grandmother returned with her name, and she deliberately recouped Reviews 87 her Indianness. A teacher, she married the Kiowa, Huan-toa Alfred Mammedaty. Family and tribal stories lodge in the boy’s memory like experiences of his own. Into his imagination march the names to reinforce his Indian self as Kiowa customs and rituals disappear. Great-grandmother Keahdinekeah (“Throwing It Down”) ignores tradition. His father, Huan-toa (“War Lance”) paints Indian subjects and teaches art. In one of the book’s most moving memories elderly Pohd-lohk (“Old Wolf”) gives Scott his first Indian name. In Monument Valley rises a stone monolith called Tsoai (“Rock Tree”), sacred to the Kiowas. Once it wras a tree that flung seven sisters into the sky, rescuing them from their brother, who had turned into a bear. Hence, the Big Dipper; hence, Pohd-lohk named Keahdinekeah’s grandson Tsoai-talee (“Rock Tree Boy”). Combined with Mammedaty (“Walking Above”) there could be no finer name for a poetic author. In Momaday’s memoir there is neither conflict of loyalty to separate codes nor the dilemma of choosing between cultures recurrent in Indian fiction. In his shaping, Friday night football in Hobbs has weight the equal of prayer to the sun in Oklahoma. There is pathos when he tells an inquisitive teacher, “I don’t know how to be an Indian.” Transplanted into the alien tribal culture, the boy’s Kiowa being defines itself sharply. Of special meaning are his horseback walk through a herd of tame buffalo, his mastering dangerous horseback...