Claiming Oral Sovereignty Over Literariness: The Arrowmaker According to N. Scott Momaday

Abstract

Recent scholarship on American Indian literatures has shifted away from emphasizing the theoretical relationship between oral traditions and writing toward a greater focus on sovereignty. If sovereignty is one’s concern, there are worthwhile reasons not to get caught up in tired questions of oral traditions and writing. But what if oral-written dynamics can bear importance for the sovereignty turn in American Indian literary studies after all? I explore this possibility by taking a new look at a key series of essays by N. Scott Momaday. By analyzing Momaday’s commentaries on the traditional Kiowa story of the arrowmaker, we can see a way of re-exploring the relation between oral traditions and writing that affirms, rather than erodes, Indian sovereignty. For Momaday, the arrow-maker serves to undo Western thought’s subordination of oral traditions to written literature, ultimately reestablishing oral traditions rather than writing as the primal source of literariness.