Honoring N. Scott Momaday, Honoring Our Ancestors
NEW YORK, NY — Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, poet, playwright, and professor N. Scott Momaday, Ph.D., accepted the 2019 Ken BurnsAmerican Heritage Prize at an event held at the American Museum of Natural History. May 2019. Last week my daughter Sarah, visiting from Oklahoma, took home with her a chest filled with her great-grandmother’s antique grape-patterned silverware, and a portrait of her great-grandmother taken when she was a young newlywed. An antique pewter broach from this same great-grandmother had been the center piece of my daughter’s wedding bouquet. While organizing the silver, I shared a few family stories with Sarah. “Could you write them down, Mom?” she asked. She wanted to share the stories with her daughters when they were older. I printed out a chapter I had written for The Light Shines from the West, a book on the rural American West , which included this story: "As a young woman, my Missouri-born grandmother knew both physical isolation an