Passings of Note

N. Scott Momaday

N. Scott Momaday Photo by Steven St. John

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, poet and storyteller N. Scott Momaday (89) died in Santa Fe in January. After earning a BA degree in English at the University of New Mexico, Momaday won a poetry fellowship to the creative writing program at Stanford University, where he received a doctorate in English literature.

His ground-breaking novel, House Made of Dawn, the story of a young Native man who returns to Jemez Pueblo to heal after serving in WWII and struggles to reconcile the man he has become with the man he was before leaving, is considered a masterpiece of Native American literature that has been credited with ushering in a period known as the Native American Renaissance. “He was the first,” said Institute of American Arts President Robert Martin. “He paved the way for all the Native writers of today. Before that there had been Native American writers and storytellers, but they had never been acknowledged for their importance or contributions until Scott Momaday came along.”

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Stanley Crawford

Stanley Crawford Photo by Don Usner

Writer and farmer Stanley Crawford died in Dixon, New Mexico, in January at the age of 86. Educated at the University of Chicago and the Sorbonne, Crawford moved to Dixon in 1970, where he co-founded El Bosque, a garlic farm, with his wife RoseMary. For decades he sold produce at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market and served as the market’s president. Crawford published several novel and nonfiction books. Among the latter, A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm won the NMBA’s inaugural Richard Harris Award in 2013.

“In order to become a bona fide New Mexican,” Crawford wrote in New Mexico Magazine in 2017, “it is best to submit to a number of initiation activities. A short list would include hunting for piñon nuts in scrubland hillside forests of the north in the fall, digging out an acequia in the spring, making adobe bricks in the summer, and building your own adobe house. Add: learning at least a few words of the unique norteño patois of northern New Mexico.”

NMBA Treasurer Paula Lozar traveled to Dixon for Crawford’s garlic on more than one occasion.

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