I turn inward on a wall of books.

They are old friends, even those that

Have dislodged my dreams. One by one

They have shaped the thing I am.

—N. Scott Momaday, from A Benign Self-Portrait

In Memoriam

New Mexico, indeed the world, mourns the loss last week of N. Scott Momaday and Stanley Crawford, two literary luminaries who called our state home. Both were cherished friends of the Santa Fe International Literary Festival. We, too, grieve their passing, hope for solace for their loved ones, and celebrate their lives as passionate believers in the power of story. Their words will echo forever across the time-etched terrain of our natural and narrative landscapes.

Photograph by Darren Vigil Gray

N. Scott Momaday died on January 24 in Santa Fe, surrounded by his loving family and having realized a wish he set upon himself as a student at the University of New Mexico: “If I could be recognized as a poet, that seemed to me the kind of immortality I could claim.” At its heart, the wish held Scott’s desire to stay close to the oral traditions of the Kiowa, the tribe of noted storytellers into which he was born a member of the Bear Clan eighty-nine years ago. He surpassed his goal wildly, achieving international fame as a distinguished man of letters who, in poetry and prose, fiction, memoir, essays, and more, inspired the world like no other.

In 1969, at a time when Indigenous voices were rarely heard or invited into the mainstream, the Oklahoma-born author became the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize, for House Made of Dawn, a novel set among the red-rock canyons of Walatowa (Jemez Pueblo), where he spent much of his boyhood. His depiction of the struggle of Native peoples to straddle the Native and non-Native worlds opened the door to a flourishing of Indigenous writers to come. It also rooted him deeper in a life as a poet, storyteller, teacher, artist, and scholar. His commitment to his calling and to his Kiowa heritage led to other acclaimed books—The Way to Rainy Mountain, The Man Made of Words, The Names, Words from a Bear, and many more—earning him countless international awards and accolades, including the prestigious National Medal of Arts. But perhaps nowhere was his larger-than-life persona and legacy more treasured than in New Mexico, the place he considered home.

Scott is rightly renowned as a literary giant whose booming baritone commanded our attention for decades. He must also be remembered as a visionary who understood that everything is connected in memory and time, that the voices of the ancestors are the essence of modern language, and that, like the land he so reverently portrayed in his last book, Earth Keeper, our past, present, and future are intertwined. He remains a vital, transcendent voice in that continuum. He rests now in that timeless space he spent his life imagining, where the man, the bear, and the poet truly become one.

Photo © Don J. Usner

Stanley Crawford was already an accomplished novelist when he arrived in northern New Mexico’s Embudo Valley in 1969. A self-described “Anglo intellectual” schooled at the University of Chicago and the Sorbonne, in Paris, he might have felt out of place in Dixon, a tiny rural town steeped in a centuries-old Hispano culture. Instead, his idiosyncratic nature fit right in. He planted his six-foot-plus frame deep into the agricultural traditions and cultural community of his adopted home, seeding a literary legacy that blended his writer’s soul with the village soil.

When he died there on January 25 at age eighty-six, with his beloved children at his side, Stanley had become an icon of acequia tending and garlic growing—subjects he explored in two nonfiction New Mexico classics, the award-winning Mayordomo and A Garlic Testament. The former detailed Stanley’s immersion in the complexities of community water sharing and governance, and his remarkable accomplishment of being elected as village mayordomo, or ditch boss. His acceptance and respect among the locals spoke to his commitment to a rich and responsible community life that observed and honored the ways of the past. His love of the land, and its direct connection to community, played out in the farming lessons of A Garlic Testament and in his seasonal appearances at the Santa Fe Farmers Market, where the fruits of his El Bosque Garlic Farm were on full display.

Beyond his other New Mexico–based writings, including the fictional, satirical Village, Stanley built a sizable and important oeuvre that reflected the span of his storytelling skills and imagination. A New Yorker writer described him as “a postmodern poet” who “bends the whole world to the shape of his fancy.” Considering the “loopy poetic grace” of Stanley’s celebrated Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine and other novels alongside the “plainspoken wisdom” of A Garlic Testament, the same writer marveled at Stanley’s evolution. The transition was more than a testament to the talent of the author, who ironically was a quiet man of few words. It spoke to his wide-ranging interests and keen understanding of New Mexico as precious ground. He embraced every day here as a rite of passage, and he remained a maverick to the end. His work now flows forward in the rhythm of the acequia and the seasons of the farm.