Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land by N. Scott Momaday

We humans must revere the earth, for it is our well-being. Always the earth grants us what we need. If we treat the earth with kindness, it will treat us kindly. If we give our belief to the earth, it will believe in us. There is no better blessing than to be believed in. There are those who believe that the earth is dead. They are deceived. The earth is alive, and it is possessed of spirit. Consider the holy tree. It can be allowed to thirst. It can be cut down. Worst of all, it can be denied our faith in it, our belief. But if we speak to it, if we pray, it will thrive.

Last week I had the great fortune to be able to visit Walatowa, the main community of the Pueblo of Jemez. Walatowa is the setting of N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn; I received a grant in order to visit this and other Pueblo sites in New Mexico. Walatowa is closed to visitors, but has a visitor center with a small museum; a very friendly man there guided me to a photograph of Momaday's mother on the wall, in an exhibit about the local school. She was a teacher, a Kiowa who took a job with the Indian school service, and who brought her son with her. The photo reaffirmed something that I'd been thinking about during my recent re-read of the novel: Momaday, though he too is a Native person, was a stranger at Walatowa, as much a stranger as I was, and House Made of Dawn is a book written by an outsider, who saw in the place a certain fundamental beauty that speaks to larger truths about the world. Here's what Momaday writes about his childhood at Walatowa:

At the pueblo of Walatowa I came to know a world that was remote in time and space. I was twelve years old when my parents and I moved there. In my day the life of the town had remained by and large unchanged for hundreds of years. The people grew corns and melons and chili; they hunted deer and bear in the mountains, they captured golden eagles for use in their ceremonies. Time was told on a solar calendar, according to the position of the sun on the horizon. There were ceremonial dances and feast days of marked activity and color. I fitted myself into the ancient rhythm of life there and came to know that country far and wide on the back of a horse. Then that world began to change with the return of young men form World War II. Many of them had been psychologically severed from the traditional earth. It was a time of loss.

Yet, Momaday too suffered a kind of loss in the move, or if not a loss, at least a fundamental change, in the separation from the Kiowa landscape of his mother, father, and ancestors. In Earth Keeper, a new short book of prose poetry from Momaday, he writes about an old Kiowa man named Dragonfly who teaches a respect and regard for the living world. The earth, Dragonfly instructs, relies on our belief in it: "He was told every day he must pray not only to witness the sun's appearance, but indeed to raise the sun, to see to it that the sun was borne into the sky ,that each day was made by the grade of Dragonfly's words." What a responsibility--to pray the sun into the sky! And yet, Dragonfly describes a burden that each of us must take up, to be an "earth keeper" and maintain the processes that keep the spirit of the earth alive.

But Momaday never met Dragonfly, who was an old man when his father was a boy. "This happened a long time ago," Momaday writes about Dragonfly's lesson. "I was not there. My father was there when he was a boy. He told me of it. And I was there." As in House Made of Dawn, which includes a fictionalized version of the Momaday's Kiowa grandmother's story that is repeated more pointedly in The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday suggests that storytelling and oral tradition are methods of maintaining a link to the earth even when a physical connection is absent. I was touched to think of the young Momaday, impressed by the longstanding ties between the Jemez people and the earth, thinking of his own connection to his Kiowa lands back home in Oklahoma.

Earth Keeper is interesting because it is a reminder of the way that the lessons of House Made of Dawn and Rainy Mountain remain relevant in the 21st century. "Ours is a damaged world," Momaday writes. "We humans have done the damage, and we must be held to account. We have suffered a poverty of imagination, a loss of innocence." It's a shock to see, among Momaday's plainspoken and old-seeming language, references to climate change: "But on the immediate side there is the exhaust of countless machines, toxic and unavoidable. The planet is warming , and the northern ice is melting." Can we think of climate change as the inevitable result of the loss of ancient wisdom? That we have failed, collectively, to live up to Dragonfly's instructions to be an "earth keeper?" Earth Keeper is a small book, and may seem slight and light on ideas, but this, I think, is a powerful message, and it makes the book an important and interesting context in which to read Momaday's other books.