BACKGROUND
N. Scott Momaday is a poet, novelist (receiving the Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn), playwright, storyteller, artist, and a professor of English and American literature.
He has numerous affiliations that support the future of Native American people. Scott created the Buffalo Trust. Its mission is to help young people regain the reverence for the sacred. It is an important reminder for all humanity. Scott was also a founding Trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian, and sits on the Boards of First Nations Development Institute and the School of American Research.
Scott is a Kiowa.

ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION
Scott was called "the Keeper of the Flame" in the PBS series "The West". I decided to use that as one of the metaphors in my painting. Among the other images, I use the eagle to suggest personal power and freedom. I also wanted to integrate the Eagle nubula because the long separation in its gasses suggests an entry way between two dimensions. That could suggest many things. The bear is used in mythology and in Scott's writing and has to do with human-animal relations and transformation. It emerges from Scott's left arm. On dogs, Scott says "The Indian feels that he is related to the animal world. That all living things are related. In the Kiowa oral tradition, one of the ways to indicate time long past, is to say, "Well this happened when dogs could talk."