Maurice Gee won over young New Zealand readers 40 years ago with his Halfmen of O trilogy (1982–85)—a Kiwi Narnia where the magical world lies on the other side of an abandoned gold mine. He had equal success with adult fiction: his 1978 Plumb denounced a strand of puritanism that had tainted the national culture. The prolific author of novels combining ambition with popular appeal, Gee was a staple of school reading lists and a perennial prizewinner. Yet when he died in June 2025, aged 93, he remained virtually unknown beyond his homeland.

Going West, a triumphant summation of his aesthetic and themes, ought to have changed that. The story of a friendship between two poets—one an aging failure, the other dead but renowned—this 1992 novel revels in the irony of writing from a position of self-conscious provincialism. Like many literary men of the mid-20th century, its heroes are motivated by the dream of inventing an aesthetic for a still-new country. Gee’s title highlights the tension between an imported tradition of peripatetic nation-making and the realities of life in a Pacific archipelago. New Zealand’s islands are narrow and oriented north-south. If American or Australian writers (Jack Kerouac or Patrick White, say) could send their characters on cross-continental voyages of poetic enlightenment—journeys in which “west” becomes the direction of authenticity, freedom, and self-discovery—Gee’s have nowhere to go. His protagonist, Jack Skeat, is left chasing the virile, creative, and elusive Rex Petley across a landscape more conceptual than geographic.

What might Going West mean in a country where that direction barely exists? Like many New Zealanders, Jack and Rex grow up conscious of foreign role models. Jack seems to have the potential, but despite a name that evokes John Keats, his poems are clunky and overwritten. “‘Good stuff, Jack,’” Rex humors him. “I like the way you colour it all up. And then, bang, the big generalization.’”  Rex is instinctively the better writer, inventing a localized modernism rooted in material specificity. “Stone was stone for Rex and clay was clay.”

The friends’ poetry mirrors their attitudes to life. A university dropout who prefers fishing to fame and leaves his first wife for a younger woman and a career making wine, Rex embraces experience in ways that make Jack both envious and anxious. Like Kerouac’s On the Road, Going West is shaped by its protagonist’s frustrated admiration for a man who embodies a seemingly more authentic way of life. Jack, a library archivist in staid Wellington, spends his life hoping for something from Rex. There is no beckoning west, though, where their relationship can unspool into an epic of revelatory wandering.

In the absence of horizons to cross, Gee implies, adventure becomes a matter of imposing meanings on places that are never quite the epic landscapes they are supposed to be. One of Jack’s great memories is Rex buying a motorbike and giving him rides across the island, Jack “on the pillion like a girlfriend but […] my hands behind me like a man”:

We drove thirty miles up Muriwai beach, with the dunes on one side and slow green rollers, half a mile apart, on the other. Rex wound the Beezer up and we seemed to run on a mat of air. […] If we’d hit a patch of soft sand the bike would have stood on its nose and somersaulted and we’d have bounced along the beach and crackled with the breaking of our bones. “You’ve been a hundred miles an hour,” Rex told me when we stopped.

It’s a great memory and Muriwai is sublime. But Jack can’t shake the idea that New Zealand needs a moral geography, one where “naked beaches” oppose the “opulence and commerce, bright lights” and “sin” of a city. Rex has no such preconceptions, which is why his poetry is better. “When we started writing verse I dealt with what I saw and how I felt about it, and what my feelings meant; Rex with what he saw and what he saw next. If he played a part it was usually to go away and leave things as they were.” That attitude makes Rex the embodiment of cultural nationalism, his “images of small town, country school, kitchen, workshop, creek” expressing belonging in a place that warrants no comparisons. For a generation of mid-20th century commentators, such disengagement from foreign norms promised a national awakening. Yet if Rex is the Kiwi hero, it is Jack’s anxious vision that Gee centers. What kind of world can you make out of obsessive rumination on what it should be?

Rex himself is the biggest missing piece. Jack’s narrative is haunted by the mystery of his friend’s death at 58. Rex drowned trying to swim ashore from a swamped dinghy, “out past Tiri in the Hauraki Gulf.” The location of the accident—suspiciously unlikely for a fisherman like Rex—means his route to safety would have led due west, a formidable distance for even the strongest of swimmers. Jack wonders if Rex killed himself, and “going west” becomes a euphemism for suicide. Gee wants to ask—without saying it outright—if there is a dark side to the values Rex represents. What if the ethos that made his poetry great has something life-negating at its core?

The key to this question is Tod, Rex’s unsettling younger relative, a double in whom Jack sees “a bit of young Rex.” Where the latter’s amorality is tempered by concern for others (he kills a pedophile to protect a child he barely knows), in Tod it becomes narcissism and greed. Tod craves Rex’s attention but the older man reacts with hostility. In one of Gee’s most resonant scenes, the friends, with Tod tagging along, take Rex’s daughter canoeing. Jack is nervous about drowning, but Rex seizes the moment for fun. He and Fiona dig chutes in the creek bank and “climb and slide,” getting “drunk with sun and mud and being submerged.” When they turn for home, Tod “travelled back in the mangroves, keeping pace with us as we paddled against the tide. He slid and wriggled, flashing brown, he splashed in the leaves and angled his body through the branches, keeping up a Tarzan yell, until Rex shouted, ‘Shut that bloody racket.’”

By the novel’s end, “going west” has acquired all the connotations of the absent referent. Jack’s story reveals the pitfalls of trying to reenact an Anglophone tradition of nation-making that does not account for its South Pacific placement…

That image—the hero’s animalistic, degenerate shadow—hints at political allegory. If Rex, living “in a capsule labelled ‘here and now,’” embodies cultural independence, Tod (who grows up to be a banker) thrives in the neoliberal 1980s, with its “adjustment to the instinct of greed.”  Rex’s dislike suggests he recognizes their affinity. Jennifer Lawn argues that 20th-century cultural nationalism, in representing “the settler provincial condition as derivative, stagnant, horizonless, torpid, complacent, adolescent and maladaptive,” helped facilitate “the transition from provincialism to cosmopolitan modernity and from a protectionist economy to neoliberalism.”¹  From that point of view, Rex’s death is revealed to have been an act of resistance. Jack discovers that when Rex learned of a heinous crime committed by Tod on the Hauraki Gulf, he “took responsibility” for the perversion of the values he represented. His fatal swim was an attempt at symbolic reclamation, a declaration that his way of life need not culminate in libertarian brutalities. “He was swimming westwards in the end,” Jack concludes. “The whole thing has the arrogance of his best poems, which never fail.”

By the novel’s end, “going west” has acquired all the connotations of the absent referent. Jack’s story reveals the pitfalls of trying to reenact an Anglophone tradition of nation-making that does not account for its South Pacific placement (let alone the cultural resources of a Polynesian poetics of which Jack and Rex are unaware). “Westwards became our direction,” Jack recalls of his days on the motorbike with Rex. “The coast out there crushes language flat.” 

Perhaps that was where they went wrong: in imagining a world in which the ocean is nothing but a boundary—signifier of absent opportunities, a space beyond the possibility of adventure. What could life on an island ever mean but constraint and disappointment? Jack feels “there’s a cure” in writing about Rex. He ends his narrative watching the “liners and container ships going in and out,” admiring “the little yachts” that “stand upright on the sea.” In this passage, he is looking east for the first time: perhaps toward a vision of oceanic inhabitation yet to be imagined. 

In many cases, Indigenous enslavement adds new dimensions to familiar histories of the Americas—and to some of their most famous actors. Christopher Columbus sold hundreds of Indians into slavery in Europe. Hernán Cortés owned hundreds of enslaved Indigenous people, more than anyone else in Mexico. The Pueblo Revolt, in 1680, during which Indians destroyed missions and churches and renounced their baptisms and Christian marriages, was a rebellion against the widespread enslavement of Pueblo Indians as much as it was a rejection of the Catholic Church. Tituba, one of the first women accused of being a witch in Salem, Massachusetts, was described by nineteenth-century chroniclers as a Black woman. Historians today, based on their readings of seventeenth-century documents, believe that she was an enslaved Indigenous woman from the Caribbean or South America. For Rael-Gálvez and other scholars, Indigenous slavery expands our understanding of the history of human bondage—who its victims were, where it took place, what it looked like, and when it ended.

Native Bound Unbound grew out of more than three decades of research by Rael-Gálvez into the history of Indigenous slavery. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, he created a database of thousands of Indigenous slaves held in Colorado and New Mexico. By the time he graduated, in 2002, he had begun a job as the state historian of New Mexico. Then, in 2009, he became the executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center, in Albuquerque. In 2022, he began the Native Bound Unbound project, with a grant from the Mellon Foundation that allowed him to hire a team of students, professors, genealogists, and archivists to search for records of enslavement across the Americas. Researchers have since collected an abundance of materials which have revealed traces of the lives of enslaved Indians. They’ve dug deeply in some places, but not at all in others. “We have only just begun work that will extend across generations,” Rael-Gálvez told me.

The establishment of Native Bound Unbound coincided with a boom in scholarship on Indigenous slavery, much of which has focussed on specific regions in Latin America and the United States. An exception was Reséndez’s 2016 book, “The Other Slavery,” which took a more panoramic view of Indigenous slavery, from before the Spanish conquest up to the early twentieth century. “The Other Slavery” aimed to increase awareness of Native American slavery in the same way that Native Bound Unbound aspires to do. And yet, as Philip Deloria, a historian at Harvard, recently said on the podcast “Native America Calling,” “It’s been very hard to think about the ways that we can expand the narrative of Indigenous enslavement. . . . I can list off four or five or six really good books—academic books—on Indigenous enslavement that don’t seem to have made any difference in terms of the way that we think about the narrative.”

Deloria explained, “When we talk about slavery, we think about white columns, plantations in the Southeast, and African American slavery.” In fact, when African and Indigenous slavery are viewed together, it is easy to see how intertwined they are. The researchers at Native Bound Unbound have uncovered instances of African and Indigenous slaves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries working side by side in Latin American mines. Micaela Wiehe, a Native Bound Unbound researcher and Ph.D. student at Penn State, found marriage records from the sixteenth century, in and around Mexico City, which show unions between enslaved Indians and enslaved Africans. Boston newspapers in the early nineteenth century announced the escape of Indigenous slaves alongside African slaves. The Native Bound Unbound research team learned of a Black-presenting Choctaw man named Spence Johnson, who was captured in Oklahoma and taken to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was sold into slavery. He was freed after the Civil War, and spent the rest of his life in Waco, Texas. Julio Rojas Rodríguez, a doctoral candidate at El Colegio de México, who works for Native Bound Unbound and teaches history at the Cambridge School in Dallas, told me about a Cuban slave trader named Francisco Martí y Torrens who led expeditions to Africa and Mexico, where he purchased slaves and abducted previously free people to work on Cuba’s sugar plantations. To Rojas Rodríguez, figures such as Martí demonstrate how African and Indigenous enslavement “are part of the same big story—the story of slavery, the slave trade, and the replacement of slavery by new forms of coercive labor.”

N Scott Momaday, Pulitzer-winning Native American novelist, dies aged 89

Jan 29 2024

N Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer prize-winning storyteller, poet, educator and folklorist whose debut novel House Made of Dawn is widely credited as the starting point for contemporary Native American literature, has died. He was 89.

Momaday died on Wednesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, publisher HarperCollins announced. He had been in failing health.

“Scott was an extraordinary person and an extraordinary poet and writer. He was a singular voice in American literature, and it was an honor and a privilege to work with him,” Momaday’s editor, Jennifer Civiletto, said in a statement. “His Kiowa heritage was deeply meaningful to him and he devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially the oral tradition.”

More News Stories

N Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer prize-winning storyteller, poet, educator and folklorist whose debut novel House Made of Dawn is widely credited as the starting point for contemporary Native American literature, has died. He was 89.

Momaday died on Wednesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, publisher HarperCollins announced. He had been in failing health.

“Scott was an extraordinary person and an extraordinary poet and writer. He was a singular voice in American literature, and it was an honor and a privilege to work with him,” Momaday’s editor, Jennifer Civiletto, said in a statement. “His Kiowa heritage was deeply meaningful to him and he devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially the oral tradition.”

House Made of Dawn, published in 1968, tells of a second world war soldier who returns home and struggles to fit back in, a story as old as war itself: in this case, home is a Native community in rural New Mexico. Much of the book was based on Momaday’s childhood in Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, and on his conflicts between the ways of his ancestors and the risks and possibilities of the outside world.

“I grew up in both worlds and straddle those worlds even now,” Momaday said in a 2019 PBS documentary. “It has made for confusion and a richness in my life.”

Like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Momaday’s novel was a second world war story that resonated with a generation protesting the Vietnam war. In 1969, Momaday became the first Native American to win the fiction Pulitzer, and his novel helped launch a generation of authors, including Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch and Louise Erdrich. His other admirers would range from the poet Joy Harjo, the country’s first Native American to be named poet laureate, to the film stars Robert Redford and Jeff Bridges.

“He was a kind of literary father for a lot of us,” Harjo told the Associated Press during a telephone interview on Monday. “He showed how potent and powerful language and words were in shaping our very existence.”

Over the following decades, he taught at Stanford, Princeton and Columbia universities, among other top-ranking schools, was a commentator for NPR, and lectured worldwide. He published more than a dozen books, from Angle of Geese and Other Poems to the novels The Way to Rainy Mountain and The Ancient Child, and became a leading advocate for the beauty and vitality of traditional Native life.

Addressing a gathering of Native American scholars in 1970, Momaday said: “Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves.” He championed Natives’ reverence for nature, writing: “the American Indian has a unique investment in the American landscape.” He shared stories told to him by his parents and grandparents. He regarded oral culture as the wellspring of language and storytelling, and dated American culture back not to the early English settlers, but to ancient times, noting the procession of gods depicted in the rock art at Utah’s Barrier Canyon.

“We do not know what they mean, but we know we are involved in their meaning,” he wrote in the essay The Native Voice in American Literature.

In 2007, then president George W Bush presented Momaday with a National Medal of Arts “for his writings and his work that celebrate and preserve Native American art and oral tradition”. Besides his Pulitzer, his honors included an Academy of American Poets prize and, in 2019, the Dayton literary peace prize.

Momaday was married three times, most recently to Barbara Glenn, who died in 2008. He had four daughters, one of whom, Cael, died in 2017.

He was born Navarre Scott Mammedaty, in Lawton, Oklahoma, and was a member of the Kiowa Tribe. His mother was a writer, and his father an artist who once told his son: “I have never known an Indian child who couldn’t draw,” a talent Momaday demonstrably shared. His artwork, from charcoal sketches to oil paintings, were included in his books and exhibited in museums in Arizona, New Mexico and North Dakota. Audio guides to tours of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of the American Indian featured Momaday’s avuncular baritone.

After spending his teens in New Mexico, he studied political science at the University of Mexico and received a master’s and PhD in English from Stanford. Momaday began as a poet, his favorite art form, and the publication of House Made of Dawn was an unintentional result of his early reputation.

Much of his writing was set in the American west and south-west, whether tributes to bears – the animals he most identified with – or a cycle of poems about the life of Billy the Kid, a childhood obsession. He saw writing as a way of bridging the present with the ancient past and summed up his quest in the poem If I Could Ascend:

Something like a leaf lies here within me; / it wavers almost not at all, / and there is no light to see it by / that it withers upon a black field. / If it could ascend the thousand years into my mouth, / I would make a word of it at last, / and I would speak it into the silence of the sun.

In 2019, he was the subject of a PBS American Masters documentary in which he discussed his belief he was a reincarnation of a bear connected to the Native American origin story around Devils Tower in Wyoming. He told the Associated Press in a rare interview that the documentary allowed him to reflect on his life, saying he was humbled that writers continued to say his work has influenced them.

“I’m greatly appreciative of that, but it comes a little bit of a surprise every time I hear it,” Momaday said. “I think I have been an influence. It’s not something I take a lot of credit for.”