N. Scott Momaday Books in Order

Kiowa legends, historical accounts and personal memories follow a people’s migration and the sacred figure Tai-me. Returning to his grandmother’s grave, Momaday retraces his ancestors’ route and considers how landscape, family memory and storytelling preserve a disappearing way of life.

Drawing especially on Native American oral traditions, Momaday's poems move between the natural world and human society. Memories, legends and present experience meet in a collection shaped by several poetic traditions and ways of seeing.

Momaday revisits his Oklahoma and Southwestern childhood through family memories, photographs and imaginative reconstruction. The memoir follows the people, places and inherited stories that shaped his identity, exploring how personal history connects with the life of his Kiowa ancestors.

Raised away from his Native heritage, artist Locke Setman returns to tribal lands for his grandmother’s funeral. There he encounters a young medicine woman and the Kiowa story of a boy transformed into a bear, unsettling his understanding of himself.

Poems, stories and drawings bring together three decades of Momaday’s work, drawing on Kiowa rituals, landscapes and oral traditions. Animal dream-songs, imagined Western histories and meditations on sacred shields explore the relationship between memory, place and cultural survival.

After his grandfather dies, young Tolo retreats into loneliness. During the Christmas season, a vision leads him into the mountains and meadows, where encounters with wild creatures help him understand a sense of connection that reaches beyond his grief.

Drawing on Kiowa family stories and memories of growing up at Jemez Pueblo, N. Scott Momaday explores language, identity, and relationships with the land. His essays consider Indigenous history, oral traditions, and the possibilities of American literature.

Using Bear as an expression of wilderness, Momaday explores solitude, violence and the sacred through prose, poetry and art. The collection considers the animal that has haunted his imagination and the relationships between human identity, spiritual life and the natural world.

Two Kiowa children experience the dangers and wonders of a changing world in this illustrated retelling of their people's arrival in Oklahoma. Their story connects ancestral memory with the present, introducing young readers to Kiowa history and legend.

These theatrical works bring Momaday’s interest in Native history and storytelling to drama. Combining literary craft with oral traditions, the collection explores how a tribal community’s myths and cultural identity endure under pressure from an increasingly uniform surrounding society.

New poems join selections from four earlier collections in a survey of Momaday’s poetic work. Kiowa traditions, the natural world and reflections on mortality recur alongside elegies, light verse and translations of songs, revealing the range of his forms and concerns.

Drawing on personal memories and stories passed through generations, Momaday reflects on his people’s relationship with the American landscape. These meditations present the earth as a source of belonging and healing while urging respect for a natural world under threat.

More than two hundred new and selected poems trace Momaday’s relationship with Kiowa heritage, language and the Southwestern landscape. Alongside an honor song for Sitting Bear, the collection reflects on mortality, love, loss and the enduring power of oral tradition.

A hundred short prose pieces explore the meeting of language, dreams and imagination. Influenced by Native storytelling traditions and accompanied by Momaday’s paintings, these sketches consider animals, landscapes, warriors, memory, love and loss as expressions of the human spirit.