'Angles of vision': N. Scott Momaday, the Native American renaissance, and effect on American identity

This dissertation is concerned with the search for "a bridge of understanding" between first nation cultures and the American, national multi-culture. This study focuses on the leadership in the professorial ranks of higher education, specifically in university classrooms using native-authored texts. This was a qualitative study, using triangulation methods: document review, professor interviews, and college class observations of dialogues around native-authored texts from the renaissance period, the last three decades of the twentieth century. This study traces the search for the "bridge of understanding" starting with the early texts by N. Scott Momaday, who has been credited with starting the renaissance period in the late 1960s---through the native-authored film texts of the 1990s. In particular, this study focuses on several Momaday texts from different genres, and takes an in-depth look at his unified philosophy concerning the importance of language, imagination, word-image theory, the oral tradition and how it informs modern Native American literature. The study further examines how seven Native American-authored films have certain "cultural ambassador elements" that act as cross-cultural transmission of native values, particularly those relating to earth stewardship, and concludes that Momaday and his colleagues who teach Native American topic courses may be instrumental in the reimagination of American identity.