What is N. Scott Momadays place within the Native American literary tradition?
In the 1970s, there were all kinds of bills passed, including [a] civil rights bill for Indian people, a bill for American Indian education, religious freedom. Most people wouldn’t believe that Indian people in this country got freedom of religion in 1978. And then when Reagan came in, in 1980, he reversed some of those things. So we had freedom of religion for two years — in this country that is supposedly founded on the freedom of religion! Momaday fit right in that historic moment of Indian people coming to the fore of American imagination, not as the end-of-the-trail, bedraggled kind of warrior who’s lost vision and hope, but they came into full view as contemporary Indians. There had been as sense of Indian people being reduced to wards of poverty, policy, and programs, not having culture left, etc. And along about that time, too — well [into] the 1950s, actually — Carl Jung had become interested in Black Elk Speaks (Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the O
