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“NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.
Jeffrey Palmer: N. Scott Momaday is a Kiowa poet and novelist. His novel, House Made of Dawn, won the Pulitzer for Literature in 1969. It was such an—an unexpected victory for him to win that award, for a Native artist to—to win such an award in 1969, that it opened the door for many, many writers in what we call the Native American Renaissance, but not only writers. What I found is that artists, musicians, actors, filmmakers have all had this type of connection to N. Scott Momaday being able to be a—a groundbreaker and somebody that opened doors for us and including me, as a filmmaker. It’s many generations that he’s influenced and has really paved the way for us to do the work that we do.
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Jo Reed: That’s filmmaker Jeffrey Palmer talking about Kiowa writer and painter, N. Scott Momaday. He’s the subject of Jeff’s first feature length documentary, N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and can be seen on the PBS series, American Masters. And this is the Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.
2007 National Medal of Arts recipient N. Scott Momaday celebrates Native American culture, art and oral tradition in all of his work. A member of the Kiowa Nation, he is a novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, painter, photographer, storyteller, and professor of English. He’s also one of the most captivating speakers I have ever heard.
Scott Momaday was born in Oklahoma, in 1934. His father was a painter. His mother was a writer. Both taught on Indian reservations in Arizona and New Mexico when Scott was growing up, and he lived in a home steeped in Native culture and art. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of New Mexico, and then won a poetry fellowship to the creative writing program at Stanford, where he earned a doctorate in English literature. In 1969, his first novel, House Made of Dawn, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and 50 years later, he remains the only Native author to be so honored. As you heard, Scott Momaday’s influence on Native artists and on anyone interested in American culture has been profound.
Like N. Scott Momaday, filmmaker Jeffrey Palmer is Kiowa and was born in Oklahoma. His short films have been screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Hot Docs, The Seattle International Film Festival, and many others around the world—and he teaches media arts at Cornell University. Still, Jeffrey Palmer couldn’t believe his luck when American Masters reached out to him about making a film about N. Scott Momaday.
Jeffrey Palmer: When American Masters really came to me and—and asked if this was a film that I wanted to do and of course I said, you know, “Yes.” <laughs> You know?
Jo Reed: Seriously, they—they came to you and said, “Would you like to do a film about N. Scott Momaday?”
Jeffrey Palmer: They did. It was really serendipity because my first short film that got into the Sundance Film Festival—Shirley Sneve, who’s the executive director of Vision Maker Media, which is a diversity strand for PBS for Native people—
Jo Reed: Yeah, and she’s been a guest on this podcast.
Jeffrey Palmer: Yes. She was there at that Sundance in 2015 and so was Michael Kantor of American Masters and they sat down and said, “We’ve got to make a film about a Native subject. Who’s it going to be?” and she said, “Well, it has to be N. Scott Momaday” and he agreed. He had—he knew who Scott was and in fact did a play using Scott’s poetry when he was here at Cornell University. And so, they started looking for filmmakers, and at that time my film had just come out and Shirley said, “Well, Jeff Palmer’s Kiowa and I just saw his film. I loved the film” and it kind of went from there. And the next thing I know, a few months later is, I got a call and it was a major life-changing moment that I just said, “Yes, absolutely.” And really the—the first time I walked in the door in New Mexico, I took my father with me because I know that they had a relationship throughout the years. We sat down with Scott and I went through the ideas that were going through my head and he went through the ideas that were going through his head and they matched up perfectly, as you can imagine, because of our—our own trajectory in our lives and it just was supposed to happen.
Jo Reed: Was he somebody that you always wanted to create a documentary about? Had you known him earlier and--
Jeffrey Palmer: Yeah.
Jo Reed: --you were just percolating with this idea?
Jeffrey Palmer: Sure. We’re both Kiowa and Scott actually, where he spent some of his time growing up in Oklahoma on a homestead was really just a few miles away from where I grew up so we shared a lot of things. And I had met him once at a Fourth of July powwow in Carnegie, Oklahoma; my father introduced me to him. And he’s this rather large, six-four man with a very deep voice and, you know, put his hand out to shake my hand and it was, you know, the size of a pitcher’s mitt <laughs> and—and so I put my little hand in his and instantly—I think it was a cathartic moment for me that we as Kiowa people can do great things and he had that essence about him. He was different in that way, and it showed what the possibilities were, the inspiring things that we could do. And from there on out, I—I was always interested in N. Scott Momaday and always felt that maybe in writing or in the work that I did that he would be there as an influence. I had no idea though that I would be walking into his house 30 plus years later asking him to do a film, but if there was a film that was made for me, this was it. <laughs>
Jo Reed: Well, let’s just have a moment of true and deep and solid appreciation for N. Scott Momaday’s voice, which is one of the best voices I’ve ever heard in my life. He could talk to me for the rest of my life and I would be very happy.
Jeffrey Palmer: Absolutely.
Jo Reed: It’s so beautiful. It’s so resonant and rich and powerful.
Jeffrey Palmer: Yeah, and you know, it’s important to storytelling. You know, one of the things that, in Kiowa tradition, we—we have a mode of speaking and the language actually changes in this mode too; it’s called storytelling mode and you actually take on and embody that type of storytelling and your voice changes and—and it’s performance. And I think Scott, from his own experiences with grandparents—Kiowa grandparents and certainly his father, would have evoked that type of performance. And I think that that comes out, but—but there’s obviously things going on there <laughs> that most of us don’t have, you know, in terms of being able to have the richness and control of the language and tone of voice. And the only person that I can think of that is close is James Earl Jones, and he’s in the film. But, it’s an amazing thing that—that really can put you into a trance which I think storytellers are supposed to do.
N. Scott Momaday: “I found a way to deal with the deadly boredom of swimming laps. I compose epitaphs as I swim. <laughs> I have 2-line lap epitaphs, 4-lap epitaphs, 6-laps—and so I have included a couple of them in this—in this collection, and I would like to share them with you, just—just two or three. Here is one called The Death of Beauty. It’s a two-lapper. And you must bare in mind that I compose these without benefit of paper and pencil, and while completely wet <laughs>. Ok, the Death of Beauty. She died a beauty of repute, her other virtues in dispute.”<laughs>
Jo Reed: What you wanted to convey about him—it clearly wasn’t a journalistic appraisal. You had a particular perspective, a story that you wanted to take us along on. What was that story?
Jeffrey Palmer: I think that when you think about Kiowa people’s lives and—and trying to understand them, I tried to divide these things into transcending time in some way. I think with Native people, especially with Native storytelling, it’s not a linear process, it’s—it’s more of this circular process, things in cycles, and so the ancient always has to be involved in our lives in some way. And so, that was really, kind of, the fundamental basis of this, was like, I wanted to let people know who Kiowa people were and who they are. And I had to do that by going back in time to the ancient and bringing these early oral narratives, origin stories—we don’t know how old they are but—but they’re hundreds or maybe thousands of years old, and place them into the context of his life because that was the only way that I knew how to describe a Kiowa person, is going through that process of telling those stories of where we came from. And then I also put historical information in there. So, I went into the historical record pretty deeply in looking at Native American culture in the twentieth century because of his positionality in the twentieth century but also to unpack things and issues that I think we don’t talk about enough. So, if we’re talking about the boarding-school era or we’re talking about ethnic cleansing, all of those things, I think, happen within this 90-minute unpacking of Scott’s life and his testimonials and his poetry pave the way. That’s the unique thing about Scott is that he transcends with his writing. His writing could be for anybody. I could see Kiowa people listening to Scott’s work a thousand years ago, you know, just as relevant as it would be to us now and he was the best screenwriter I could have ever had. If you have his work and his words, it creates this trail for you to follow and I think that putting those pieces together and making it all function was—that was the mission, and to do it in 90 minutes—and really it was 84 minutes, but I think we were successful in kind of packing all of that in. And so that’s how biography I think for—for a Kiowa should be is adding all of those elements in there and not just looking at someone’s personal story.
Jo Reed: That’s one of my notes, that the Kiowa religion, history, story, community, forms the spine of the film, I thought--
Jeffrey Palmer: Uh huh, it does.
Jo Reed: --and then everything emanates from that.
Jeffrey Palmer: Right, and that’s—and that’s important too, is that, although we’re reaching a Kiowa audience, I think that everybody can find something within this. It truly is an American story and part of the American dream and I always say that I—I think of Scott as being an American original and his story can relate to a lot of people in a lot of different ways. And it reaches out beyond the space of just understanding who Kiowa people are; it’s—it’s really a story about who we are as American people and the struggles that we face and the things that have happened that sometimes are not good. Those things are, I think, important for us to discuss and that’s really what the, you know, the film is about, is creating discourse between us to listen to each other.
Jo Reed: You use animation when Scott is reading poems or when we’re hearing some origin stories and some of them almost look like CGI. Can you tell me what you did and—and why you did it? It was really very striking.
Jeffrey Palmer: Yeah. So, when you—when I was thinking about the ancient I thought, “How am I going to do this, you know? Am I going to do it through live action?” There had to be some type of aesthetic there that could work. And I started thinking about the magical realism of it, that even though these stories do have myth involved in them, we also think of those things as being real to us. They’re—they’re very real to us and—and in some cases are historical to us as—as people. And so, the idea then was to say, “How do we place the landscape into the shot and have these things happening at the same time so that we do get the sense of what might have really happened?” So, the story of Tai-me, which is the Kiowa medicine bundle, and how the Kiowa received Tai-me—we were able to utilize the landscape that the Kiowa might have been on in that particular period using drone shots in these canyons, these sort of beautiful desert spaces, and animate within them. And Molly Schwartz, who’s fantastic, she’s done a lot of documentaries, took the challenge on and I—I didn’t believe it was possible. I mean, I know you can do a lot of things with animation but I wanted it to have a—a sense of realism as though you were watching something really happening as it would have happened, possibly. And she did it in a way that the aesthetics were so perfect and dead on. I think that those moments touch people the most in the film and I always get questions about those moments.
Jo Reed: I can see why you would.
Jeffrey Palmer: Yeah. <laughs> We also used another animator named Kelly Gallagher who did a lot of the stop-motion material and sometimes those connected more directly to the poetry or the storytelling that Scott was saying. And—and it wasn’t necessarily as much of the historical origin ancient stories of Mankiah or Tai-me but the Seven Sisters—I thought she did fantastic. It’s the opening animation and it’s just this beautiful cut-out stop motion that I think, for me, I wanted children to relate to this film as well, not just, you know, adults but—but younger people to be able to say, “Wow. This is—this is so exciting and so dramatic” and--
Jo Reed: And the colors were so beautiful.
Jeffrey Palmer: They’re so beautiful, yeah.
Jo Reed: Can you walk me through some of the other decision-making processes like bringing in outside voices? And you had quite a few, some of whom were very well known—the decision to add them and why you know, and also how much to bring in. And obviously he’s done so much and you want to say so much, but at the same time you want to give film room to breathe, and I’m just curious how you juggle all that.
Jeffrey Palmer: Yeah. It was difficult. I think that the voices—there’s always a push in documentaries to bring in voices that people can relate to and sometimes those are celebrities and I think that Scott is an artist’s artist. <laughs> He’s more recognized by the artist community, I think, than—than the public community so, he knew so many people. I mean, there were people we could not get into the film that I wish we could have—just a multitude of very, very important people. And Robert Redford was really the key for us, I think, in a lot of ways because of his long-term relationship with Scott. In the DVD there’s a huge amount of material that didn’t necessarily make the cut because they weren’t relevant to how we were telling this narrative.
Jo Reed: Oh, I’m putting that on my Christmas list.
Jeffrey Palmer: Yeah. It’s like a 40-minute extra of them talking and there’s so much history, not only between Robert and Native people and the way that he’s helped Native people over the years, but between the two of them. They’ve just been architects in a lot of ways. He was—was an important key, but Beau and Jeff Bridges I think were keys too because we wanted to really look at the breadth of work that Scott has done and not many people know that he had written screenplays for theater and for movies and worked with—with Jeff and—and Beau on one movie in particular that was, I think, at first something that was done on the stage and then was turned into a screenwriting thing for Scott and that was The Moon in Two Windows. And so, that was one of the choices I made there to show his breadth of—of work. And then, we also wanted to have Native people, obviously, talking about his work and the person that was really fundamental for me was Joy Harjo. She wasn’t the U.S. Poet Laureate at that point <laughs>
Jo Reed: But she is now.
Jeffrey Palmer: --she is now, <laughs> which is fantastic and well deserved, but she represents, I think, one of those poets that came early in the Native American Renaissance that was heavily influenced by Scott and somebody that he opened the door for, I think, and—and that she respected his work. And you see now the fruition of that in what’s—what’s happening in her life and I think she attributes a lot of that to N. Scott Momaday for the opportunity or the chance—I think what she says in the film is that to win the Pulitzer is astounding and—and she says it’s still astounding and it is. And for her to win, you know, or to be selected as the U.S. Poet Laureate is astounding too, and it just shows that we’re moving in the right directions but there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Jo Reed: How long did you shoot?
Jeffrey Palmer: Total production time I think was about two years.
Jo Reed: Wow, and how long did you shoot with Scott?
Jeffrey Palmer: He could only do hour interviews at a time because of his health and his age so we spread out the interviews. We did six or seven interviews over that two-year period and—and it was all of that two years. Yeah.
Jo Reed: How long did it take you to edit?
Jeffrey Palmer: About a year.
Jo Reed: Okay, how long was the first cut? I’m always curious about that.
Jeffrey Palmer: Probably three and a half hours. I would have to ask Nancy, you know, about that but I would assume that we were deep in the weeds <laughs> and we had—
Jo Reed: It’s hard not to be. Come on.
Jeffrey Palmer: <laughs> Yeah. I mean, there was so much. The great thing about this project is that from an archival standpoint, we’ve got hours and hours of material of Scott doing readings in recording studios and—and interview footage and hours of stuff that nobody’s ever heard. Even the winning of the Pulitzers was fantastic because it turns out that a receptionist at Harper & Row secretly entered House Made of Dawn into this competition and when it won the award, when it won the Pulitzer, everybody was taken by surprise including Scott and I think in The New York Times article they didn’t even know-- Harper & Row didn’t even know Scott was one of their writers <laughs> so—
Jo Reed: Oh, my God.
Jeffrey Palmer: I mean, it couldn’t have been more fairy tale than the way that it happened.
Jo Reed: I have to ask you, what was it like spending as much time as you did with N. Scott Momaday?
Jeffrey Palmer: It was life changing. I think that one of the things that I’ve learned in this process is how to be a better artist from what—what he’s taught me, but also understanding how to wield this type of knowledge and to be able to do it in a way that, again, I think affects a large audience, a—a way to bring in people into the conversation and that it’s not just being specific about who you are in talking about your culture and I think Scott did it better than anybody. I think that that’s one of the reasons why he won the Pulitzer was because he was able or had the ability to open the doors to so many people to peer in and get an understanding of—of Native people’s lives. And being with him in all that time I—I understand it now; I—I understand more about how he’s able to do that and how he can essentially meld himself to any situation and be able to talk about things with the breadth of knowledge that he has. But he still understands what being a Kiowa is and I think in the film you know, he says, “I’m a Kiowa and I identify myself as being Kiowa.” And so, the question of that is, “How do you do that? How do you—how do you juggle all of these different ways of being able to tell these stories and be able to define yourself?” and I think that that’s something that I’m still trying to learn in my own life but I got a great deal of understanding from him and being around him of how to do that and be able to do it effectively that people listen. And I think that that’s why the film affects so many people when they watch it and they come up to me and I have people from all different places and of all different backgrounds that come up to me and they say, “You know what? That really affected me” and I think a lot of that comes from just learning how to do that from Scott and—and looking at his work and just being with him.
Jo Reed: What brought you into filmmaking to begin with? What drew you to this, Jeff?
Jeffrey Palmer: <laughs> That’s a—that’s a long story. It really started when I was an undergrad at the University of Oklahoma and I was an undergrad in anthropology and I started watching a lot of ethnographic films at that time. And I was pretty shocked by the amount of exploitation that I was seeing until I saw a Victor Masayesva Jr. film, who’s a Hopi filmmaker, and he was essentially making ethnographic films about his own people. And I thought, “You know what? I can do that.” I didn’t know I could do that. I thought that it had to be this objective examination that you couldn’t be inside, and especially from my anthropological training that was usually a no-no, of having any type of subjectivity, that you needed to be objective. But when I saw those films, they affected me so much that I felt like this is something that I would like to do. I just didn’t know how to get the technical skills behind it to make it happen. And so, over time, I just started dabbling as any amateur filmmaker does by looking at camera magazines and figuring out what I wanted to do, buying a camera, you know, a video camera, and eventually I made a couple of films and sent them off to film schools not thinking anything would happen and I got into every film school that I applied to and I realized at that point that maybe there’s something here. And so, I ended up at the University of Iowa, which is kind of an unlikely place to go to film school, but it’s actually a fantastic place in that it’s small and there was a lot of people there that were very interested in the things that I was doing and both of the professors that were there were very interested and took me under their wing and trained me in a way that I could be effective in it. So that’s the story. But, you know, what’s interesting is I’ve always made Kiowa films; I’ve never really strayed from that. It’s just been something that’s just been continuous and this is just one film that sort of came into my life and had to do with Kiowa people and I’ve just been lucky in that sense, I guess, of really following that first idea that I had is that “Yeah, I can make films about my own people.”
Jo Reed: And always documentaries. Have you made narrative films?
Jeffrey Palmer: I’ve made hybrids. There was a film called Isabelle’s Garden that I—I sent in to Sundance that—that was a hybrid, which was—it was a documentary but it—it was similar to what we did in Words from a Bear where there’s this magical-ness to it that goes a little bit beyond reality. I see things that way, I guess. I—I need, I guess, to add fiction elements in it or to push the limits of where documentary is fiction or nonfiction.
Jo Reed: What’s the most challenging part of your field do you think, for you?
Jeffrey Palmer: Oh. I think people are the most challenging. I mean, you know, for the longest time I filmed things without people in them. I—I did a lot of films with just looking at the land and having this sort of disembodied voice and it was always complex for me because I—and I think with Native people in general it’s complex especially when you’re a documentary filmmaker is that you have to approach them in a way that they are giving themselves to you in some ways and that you are manipulating situations in—in ways. And there is always exploitation when you turn a camera on and I think for Native people that’s been a difficult thing, it’s been a challenging thing, and when you start bringing contracts and things like that into the situation it makes it even worse. So, those things are still, I think, complex for me and—and something that I’m working on and trying to understand. After this film, I’ve learned so much, though. I—I have a great deal of knowledge now of what that really is about and it is complex and—and in some ways can be hard to be able to give people what they want but also to be ethical and—and moral about the things that you’re doing and especially with Native people and the history that we’ve had with—with imagery.
Jo Reed: When you look back on the experience of Words from a Bear what surprised you? Was there anything really unexpected that you just didn’t see coming but was rather delightful?
Jeffrey Palmer: Yeah. I mean I <laughs> I think the most delightful thing for me in—in the process of this was being able to find myself. I didn’t realize how far away I had been from my community and it had been years and years and years and so, to be able to reconnect with my community through the making of this film was extremely delightful because I got to sit down in tribal councils and talk to Kiowa artists and experience negotiating things and talking about things. And that was really the most important thing to me when I made this film is I knew that Kiowa elders were going to see this, I knew that Kiowa people were going to see this, and I wanted it to be a positive experience, and I think that it ended up being that way. And—and there were so many people that said, “Well, you know, when you do go back to Kiowa country be ready for the critique because it’s going to be strong and it’s going to be hard.” And instead it’s just been a wonderful experience, I think, with—with the Kiowa people that have seen the film and how I negotiated with people and talked with people in the making of this and I really felt like I did it the right way by doing that and that was really the most delightful thing and in doing that I found myself again. I think I found that Kiowa side of me that really needed to be there that we can sometimes, out in the world, forget. And that’s something that Native people do have a problem with sometimes is that we have to change who we are sometimes to be able to coexist in the worlds that we walk through and so you can sometimes lose those things and so gaining back that-- being able to work with my father was fantastic and he’s getting older now and I don’t know many people that get the opportunity to work like that with a parent.
Jo Reed: And what did he do on the film?
Jeffrey Palmer: So, he was a consultant, but he also did some of the interviews with Scott. He was kind of a mediary between Scott and I because in Kiowa culture it’s not good for an elder to be talked down to by somebody that’s younger and as a director I think you can do that. So, I had my father there who is almost Scott’s contemporary and they’re friends to be able to give questions to my father and my father to talk with him. And the conversations were fantastic where they would be much tighter if I was asking the questions and I think it—it would be a totally different atmosphere, so he was integral. And then we also did a full interview with Dad because he has so much knowledge about Kiowa language and Kiowa history. So those things were—were fantastic and delightful.
Jo Reed: And finally, tell me, why did you title the film “Words from a Bear”?
Jeffrey Palmer: So, Scott is a bear. He can turn into a bear. He says he turns into a bear on occasion, and he does. I’ve seen it. He can be very overwhelming <laughs> and—and can get angry and he has a book that’s called A Man Made of Words and the word—words themselves are the most important thing in human evolution, I think, that Scott believes in. Scott said, “It’s when we had the word that we became human.” So, for Scott, words are the most important things and because he is a bear and because his name, Tsoai-talee, Rock Tree Boy, is a story that is about this boy that turns into a bear, he believes he’s the reincarnation of that boy, I think it fits. It is words from a bear and if we were to ever hear words from a bear this would be it. <laughs>
N. Scott Momaday: “One day I was driving up Filmore street. Suddenly my imagination went wild. And I thought, “Isn’t this a great place for a buffalo drive.” <laughs> And I imagined that one morning—one morning, the good people of San Francisco should be awakened by a clamor outside; they come out, look down the peninsula, there is a huge cloud of dust, and this is a remnant of the southern herd, marching into San Francisco. <laughs> They reach Broadway and hang a left. <laughs> And they go up Broadway to the top of Pacific Heights to the intersection of Broadway and Filmore street and there on the southwest corner of that intersection is an old man on an old horse waving a red chief’s blanket, driving the herd down Filmore street, into the bay. How’s that for an act of the imagination?”
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Jo Reed: I was speaking with filmmaker Jeffrey Palmer about his documentary, N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear. Words from a Bear can be seen on the PBS series American Masters. You can go to American Masters.org for more information.
You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. You can subscribe to Art Works wherever you get your podcasts, so please do, and leave us a rating on Apple because it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.
