Wallace Stegner and N. Scott Momaday: Chroniclers of the American West

What It Takes®

Academy of Achievement

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4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2018

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

These two great American writers reflect on their place in the landscape, the history and the culture of the West. One is Kiowa Indian, one is White. One was raised in Arizona and New Mexico, one in Montana and Utah. During the 1960's one was a student, the other his professor. But both writers created works reflecting a deep reverence for the West and its peoples, and both were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2018

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi and welcome to another episode of what it takes.
0:04.0	You know, I've always lived in the northeast,
0:08.0	but I've been thinking a lot about the West lately.
0:11.0	We just took our kids on a road trip through Arizona and New Mexico
0:15.2	to let them experience a very different America from the one where we live near Washington,
0:20.6	D.C. And wow, it is different from the ground up. The writer Wallace
0:26.3	Steggner once said that to see the beauty of the West, quote, you have to get
0:31.3	over the color green. You have to get over the color green.
0:33.0	You have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns.
0:38.0	You have to get used to an inhuman scale.
0:41.0	You have to understand geological time.
0:46.8	And so it was still with the dust of sandstone on my hiking boots that I mined the Academy of Achievement's Archive looking for the wisdom of Wallace
0:55.9	Stegner and another of the greatest writers ever to come out of the American West,
1:01.3	and Scott Mamaday.
1:03.4	Mamaday is a Kiowa Indian, a poet and a novelist who was exposed early on in life to the
1:09.6	storytelling traditions of several tribes. Here he is reading an excerpt from one of his poems,
1:16.4	Crow Dance at Zia.
1:18.8	Even before some rise, there is color everywhere and the good smell of smoke and coffee.
1:26.0	Where crows feet stamp the earth a friction rises an old ceremonial heat and there is in the ancient order a balance of all things in the
1:38.6	universe and the formidable carriage of crows.
1:44.0	When Scott Mamade was a creative writing fellow at Stanford in the 1960s,
1:52.0	he studied under the other featured writer of this episode,
	...

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