The Way to Rainy Mountain
The Way to Rainy Mountain
by N. Scott Momaday
THE LITERARY WORK
A memoir set alonj; the migralory route of the Kiowa tribe [Monlana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Oklahoma] in 1965, including stories reaching back to 1700; published in 1969.
SYNOPSIS
Momaday recounts the movement of his iribe, the Kiowas, from the source of the Yellowstone River in Montana to Rainy Mountain Cemetery in Oklahoma, where his grandmother is buried.
Events in History at the Time of the Memoir
Born February 27, 1934, in Lawton, Oklahoma, Navarre Scott Momaday was reared in New Mexico and Arizona as well as Oklahoma. He is of mixed Kiowa, Euro-American, and Cherokee descent. Momaday studied at the University of New Mexico, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in political science in 1958, and at Stanford University, where he received his master’s degree in I960 and his Ph.D. in 1963. The Way to Rainy Mountain was published the same year that Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (also in Literature and Its Times) won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Weaving together three distinct voices—Kiowa tribal stories, history, and personal narrative—The Way to Rainy Mountain is largely an exploration of American Indian identity. The book represents the author’s attempt to uncover and preserve the stories and history of the Kiowas and to determine his place among them. After the 1965 death of his paternal grandmother, Aho, Momaday retraces the travels of the Kiowas across what would become the United States. With the help of the three distinct voices specified above, the memoir shows how myth, history, and individual experience intersect to create a person’s, indeed a people’s, identity.
Events in History at the Time of the Memoir
American Indian identity
For more than 300 years, British and American colonial powers attempted to wipe out those cultural markers of language, religion, and livelihood that distinguish American Indian tribal identities. Then came a reversal in this pattern. The 1960s, in particular, witnessed the reversal, and a corresponding rise in Indian self-awareness and self-determination. The result was that more tribes, or Indian nations, reclaimed their status as distinct peoples (or groups) within the United States. Today there are more than 500 tribes in the United States, each maintaining a particular belief system.
The civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s incorporated a diverse group of U.S. citizens. African Americans, women, Latinos, Asian Americans, homosexuals, and American Indians all worked to push their political and social agendas to the fore of national awareness. In relation to the Indians, debates centered on such issues as land loss, adverse legal decisions, and ineffective educational policies—all of which left many Indians without a clear vision of themselves. There was, meanwhile, a social side to the civil rights movement that amounted to a cultural unearthing for many native peoples. American Indians began to question their identity, asking themselves what exactly distinguished them from other groups in the nation. More pointedly, they began to ask, What (and Who) is an American Indian? a question Momaday has answered: “An Indian is an idea which a given man has of himself. And it is a moral idea, for it accounts for the way in which he reacts to other men and to the world in general” (Momaday in Hobson, p. 162). A Native American, in other words, is more than a racially distinct person, more than a person of minimum blood quantum, as the federal government has defined it. (The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 had qualified as Indian those of Indian descent who belonged to a tribe under federal jurisdiction, as well as their descendants and anyone with at least one-half Indian blood.) A native lives life in a manner separate from non-native peoples.
This kind of cultural introspection had become a crucial aspect of native life precisely because for 400 years American Indians were denied the public practice and celebration of traditions that marked them as unique. Broken treaties, mass slaughters, geographic removal and isolation, harsh government-run boarding schools (teachers beat children and put them in solitary confinement when they spoke their own language), and urban relocation ensued from contact between whites and native nations. Centuries of attempted cultural genocide left many native peoples without a publicly recognized cultural identity. Along with attempts to erase Indian uniqueness had gone other attempts to force a sham cultural identity on native nations, through such falsified popular images as Longfellow’s Hiawatha (in the 1855 poem of that name), Twain’s sinister Injun Joe (in the 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer), and twentieth-century sports mascots. The civil unrest of the 1960s and early 1970s began to reverse these trends, offering native nations a new chance to pronounce their distinct tribal voices and talk back to an erstwhile colonizer that had silenced them for too long. The talking back took various forms, from the development of a new American Indian literary movement (inaugurated by Mo-maday’s 1968 House Made of Dawn) to massive protests and demonstrations. The year The Way to Rainy Mountain was published, to take one example, a group calling itself Indians of All Tribes seized Alcatraz Island, the site of a defunct maximum-security prison near San Francisco. The group occupied the island for 19 months, claiming it as soil belonging to the tribal nations. Hundreds of native peoples from various tribes came together to demand cultural and political recognition from the American mainstream. Their insurgency gave rise to both the Red Power Movement and the American Indian Movement (AIM). The two would take dramatic action against the federal government over the next ten years, effecting, among other incidents, the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in 1972.
Anthropology and American Indians
At the time of publication, The Way to Rainy Mountain was distinct from other works on American Indians in that it presented Indian tradition and life as an ongoing process, one that has been evolving, incorporating new stories and visions along the way. One of the memoir’s many lessons is that, although fragile, native traditions have not been lost but continue to survive despite years of suffering.
Until the late 1960s, when new and sometimes radical thought regarding American Indians emerged, native peoples were publicly represented in large part by anthropologists who specialize in the study of human beings, their environment, and their culture. Anthropological work in the 1960s (and before) often misrepresented native peoples as static or extinct in its attempts to piece together American Indian cultures before white contact. While valuable in many ways, as evidenced by the anthropological data in The Way to Rainy Mountain, anthropologists’ observations and interpretations were often misguided and limited. Their status as outsiders made it difficult for the anthropologists to accurately portray American Indian lifestyles, which entail a more diversified view of the world. Acknowledging this more diversified view, The Way to Rainy Mountain, also challeng thropologists and challenges the limited tone of their work. It adds a modern tribal voice to the mix of anthropological data acquired over time. Conversational phrases dot the narrative, reminding readers that tradition is still alive, still being passed down orally from one generation to the next. Momaday, unlike mainstream anthropologists, offers up information in Kiowa storytelling style, from the start— “You know, everything had to begin”—through the middle— “The Kiowa language is hard to understand, but, you know, the storm spirit understands it”—to the end—- “This is how it was …” (Momaday, Rainy Mountain, pp. 16, 48, 80). His text represents Kiowa history from a tribal perspective, providing a new, authentic view of Native American life, as a rather indulgent corrective. “They’re a mischievous bunch,” observed Momaday about the anthropologists, “out to put literature in its place, … My feeling is that the anthros need only to be converted, not destroyed” (Momaday in Lincoln, p. 108).
Momaday was not the only native writer of the time questioning academic anthropology. Vine Deloria, Jr., whose Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto was published the same year as The Way to Rainy Mountain, also challenged contemporary anthropology. For example, Deloria discussed a 1968 book by anthropologist Peter Farb (Man’s Rise to Civilization as Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State): “Sometimes Farb’s anthropological references to the Plains Indians are irrelevant and ridden with historical mythologies… . The Mandans, for example, are found to be extinct—which they will be happy to know about. Plains Indians in general are declared to be as make-believe as a movie set—which will make them welcome Farb warmly when he next appears on the plains” (Deloria, p. 99). Once American Indians began to talk back to these scholars, anthropologists worked to change their approaches and methods, consulting more closely with tribes and incorporating tribal ideologies into their studies.
CHRONOLOGY OF THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN AND THE KIOWAS’ MIGRATORY MOVEMENT
1700 Approximate emigration of the Kiowas from the Yellowstone region of Montana.
1740 Golden era of the Kiowas commences.
1770 Approximate date of expulsion of the Kiowas from the Black Hills of Wyoming.
1790 Peace and alliance established with the Comanches.
1833 Osages massacre Kiowas; Tai-me, the tribe’s sacred Sun Dance doil, is stolen by the Osage; Leonid meteor storm (November 13).
1834 Kau-au-oirrty, Momaday’s great-great grandfather, is born; official contact between the Kiowas and the United States Government begins.
1837 Kiowas sign first treaty with the U.S. Government at Fort Gibson.
1839 Smallpox epidemic.
1849 Cholera epidemic.
1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty, in which Kiowas agree to move to a reservation. 1 B68 Battle ot Washita; Utes steal Tai-me.
1869 Kiowas move to reservation in southwest Oklahoma.
1874-75 Kiowas confront US troops at Palo Duro Canyon in Texas; Kiowas surrender: their golden era ends.
1880 Aho, Momaday’s grandmother, and Mammedaty, his grandfather, are born.
1887 Kiowas hold their last Sun Dance north of Rainy Mountain Creek.
1890 U.S. federal agent ends the Kiowa Sun Dance.
1913 Mayme Natachee Scott (Mo ma day’s mother) is born; Aired Morris Mammedaty (Momaday’s rather) is born.
1934 Navarre Scott Momadav is born.
1963 Momaday, along with his father and Aho, visits the Tai-me bundle.
1965 Aho dies; Momaday traces the migration of the Kiowas and, with the assistance of his father, collects stories from Kiowa elders.
(Adapted from Roemer, pp. 156-157)
Kiowa Sun Dance
In The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday describes the coming of Tai-me (the tribe’s sacred medicine doll) to the Kiowas. During a period of starvation, sometime in the mid-eighteenth century, a Kiowa man left camp to search for food. After four days, the man arrived at a canyon.
Suddenly there was thunder and lightning. A voice spoke to him and said, “Why are you following me? What do you want?” The man was afraid. The thing standing before him had the feet of a deer, and its body was covered with feathers. The man answered that the Kiowas were hungry. “Take me with you,” the voice said, “and I will give you whatever you want.” From that day Tai-me has belonged to the Kiowas.
(Rainy Mountain, p. 36)
Accompanying this tribal story is a historical description of the Tai-me doll. The figure is “less than 2 feet in length” and is “preserved in a rawhide box in charge of the hereditary keeper, and is never under any circumstances exposed to view except at the annual Sun Dance” (Rainy Mountain, p. 37). Thus, with the arrival of Taime came the Sun Dance, a ceremony of great religious import. Held just once a year, the ceremony’s spirituality remained with the tribe throughout the year, reaffirming Kiowa traditions until the performance of the next Sun Dance. The importance of the ceremony can be seen in events recorded on Kiowa calendars, which reference time according to the Sun Dances.
The Sun Dance itself, called Skaw-tow in the Kiowa language, was held during early summer, when all six bands of the tribe reunited after a year of traveling separately to hunt and raid. When the six bands came together for the Sun Dance, they camped in a circle in a particular order, according to their roles in the ceremony. The Tai-me keeper, a priest of sorts, decided the exact place and time for the ceremony and sent messengers out to inform the other Kiowa bands of the tribal meeting. Often the site was near a river close to cottonwood trees, used in the ceremony. “The Kiowa Sun Dance usually included about ten days of tribal activity, including four to six ‘getting ready days’ and four dancing days” (Boyd, p. 38). On the first day of preparation, the Tai-me keeper carried the figure around the camp and encouraged people to act respectfully toward each other. Two men searched for the sacred tree to be used as the central pole of the Sun Dance lodge. The search began with their purification, after which they discovered the tree and notified the Tai-me keeper. Then, the tribe relocated around the tree
The second day was spent honoring the buffalo through a ceremonial kill. Buffalo provided all the material possessions the tribe needed to survive—tipis, hides, bedding, food, clothing. Because the animal was central to their lives, its head and skin would be placed on the y-shaped pole that held up the Sun Dance lodge. Kiowa warriors performed a mock battle on the third day, entering the ceremonial circle from the east and surrounding foot soldiers and a makeshift fort around the sacred tree. After circling the fort four times, the mounted warriors had “won” the tree, and it was cut down to become the Y-shaped center pole of the Sun Dance or medicine lodge. The next two days were reserved for building the medicine lodge, from cottonwood logs around the sacred pole. More wooden poles from the top of the central forked pole to the surrounding logs formed a circular bower that would be filled in with branches. In the end, the lodge was enclosed completely, save for a small door. The sixth day of preparation was marked by humor, as the mud heads, mud-covered clowns, ran through the encampment tricking people. The same day, a buffalo-hunting ceremony featured tribal members disguised under buffalo skins. Hidden under the hides were the four greatest warriors; revealed in the finale, they were cheered and honored for their brave deeds. The day ended with the presentation of Tai-me, which was decorated and placed on an altar inside the lodge.
The Sun Dance itself lasted four days, with dancing that began at sunrise and ended at mid-night. Dancers wore white buckskin shirts and blue breechcloths, and they danced facing Taime. While spectators could leave the lodge at midnight, dancers were required to stay, and could have no food or water for the entire four days. On the last day, dancing concluded at sunset and offerings were made to Tai-me to insure a good year ahead. Tai-me was then packed away and a social dance was held for the remainder of the night. Camp broke the next morning. Unlike the ceremony as practiced by other plains tribes, the Kiowa Sun Dance did not include body piercing of the dancers as a purification rite.
The U.S. Government took great pains to stop the Sun Dance. In fact, from the end of the Civil War until the mid twentieth century, the government tried to stop all native religious practices. In 1921, an Office of Indian Affairs circular stated:
The sun-dance, and all other similar dances and so-called religious ceremonies are considered “Indian Offenses” under existing regulations, and corrective penalties are provided. I regard such restriction as applicable to any [religious] dance which involves … the reckless giving away of property … frequent or prolonged periods of celebration … in fact any orderly or plainly excessive performance that promotes superstitious cruelty, licentiousness, idleness, danger to health, and shiftless indifference to family welfare.
(Indian Affairs circular in Cohen, p. 175 n. 347)
The repression did not erase the importance of the ceremony. Although the Kiowas have not held a complete Sun Dance since 1887, many of their beliefs are still strongly affected by it. As Momaday describes in The Way to Rainy Mountain, Tai-me brought ten medicine bundles, sources of great power that are still with the tribe. The Kiowas honor these bundles and consider them infused with spiritual healing energy. Held at a sacred site, the bundles remain under the protection of a tribal member. Momaday’s text describes a visit to a Tai-me bundle:
It was suspended by means of a strip of ticking from the fork of a small ceremonial tree. I made an offering of bright red cloth, and my grandmother prayed aloud. It seemed a long time that we were there. I had never come into the presence of Tai-me before—nor have I since. There was a great holiness all about the room, as if an old person had died there or a child had been born.
(Rainy Mountain, p. 37)
Other plains tribes—the Sioux, Ute, Crow, Cheyenne, and Shoshone—revitalized the Sun Dance. This revival began around the time The Way to Rainy Mountain was published, when tribes started to reclaim their right to religious freedom and cultural independence.
The Memoir in Focus
The contents
The Way to Rainy Mountain is framed by two of Momaday’s best-known poems, “Headwaters” and “Rainy Mountain Cemetery,” which mark the book’s physical and spiritual movement through Momaday’s life as well as his understanding of the Kiowas’s historic progress. “Headwaters” describes “A log, hollow and weather-stained,” from which the Kiowas emerged into this world (Rainy Mountain, p. 2). This is the foundational moment—much like the biblical instant God created Adam—in which Momaday begins his exploration. Confronted, as the memoir progresses, with tribal stories, historic accounts, and personal anecdote, readers come to understand the importance of this introductory poem: just as headwaters merge to form a larger, much stronger river, so the tribal, historical, and personal voices distinguished in The Way to Rainy Mountain flow into Momaday’s identity and define the Kiowas’ place in the world.
DIVERGENT PERSPECTIVES
“An examination of the [Kiowa] calendars affords a good idea of the comparative importance attached by the Indian and the white man to the same event. From the white man’s point of view many of the things recorded in these aboriginal histories would seem to be of the most trivial consequence while many events which we [white rnenl regard as marking eras tn the history of the plains tribes are entirely omitted.”
(Moortey, ρ- 145)
The book begins in 1965, the year Momaday sets out for the Kiowa landmark, Rainy Mountain, where his grandmother, Aho, who has died the same year, is buried. Aho was born in 1880, at the close of the Kiowas’ golden age, when their religious practice of the Sun Dance was forbidden and their migratory lifestyle stymied by the U.S. Cavalry. Momaday realizes that Aho’s death may mark the loss of something great: the memory, first, of his tribal family; and second, because he himself is a part of Aho’s tribal reminiscences, the chance for a broader and deeper understanding of himself. “I wanted to see in reality what she had seen in her mind’s eye, and traveled fifteen hundred miles to begin my pilgrimage” (Rainy Mountain, p. 7). With this, Momaday embarks on his attempt to piece together his people’s past.
Starting in Yellowstone, in western Montana and northern Wyoming, Momaday follows the historical route of his people east over the Rocky Mountains to the Devil’s Tower region of eastern Wyoming. From there, the Kiowa author travels south through Colorado and southeast into the Kiowas’ present-day homeland, the Wichita Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma. His journey is graced with a mix of the tribe’s official history and his family’s personal narratives about life in the past and in the present, explaining how the tribe and the author himself came to be.
In addition to the poetic frame, a prologue, introduction, and conclusion encase the prose in yet another layer of reflective musings. The prose itself is separated into three sections— “The Setting Out,” “The Going On,” and “The Closing In,” and subdivided more finely into 24 story groups, or triads. A triad consists of three varieties of story—the tribal, historical, and personal—each typeset in a different font. Line drawings created by Al Momaday, the author’s father, illuminate the tribal retellings, pointing to the importance of the visual in this narrative strand.
The book’s first section, “The Setting Out,” recounts stories of long ago, beginning with the Kiowas’ emergence into this world: “You know, everything had to begin, and this is how it was: the Kiowas ‘came one by one into this world through a hollow log” (Rainy Mountain, p. 16). Mythic retellings of the sun’s child and his development and of the coming of Tai-me (the sacred Sun Dance doll) offer insight into the tribe’s subsistence and survival methods. Such Kiowa tales “constitute a kind of literary chronicle. In a sense they are the milestones of that old migration in which the Kiowas journeyed from the Yellowstone to the Wichita” (Momaday in Hobson,” pp. 170-71). They recount Kiowa history and remind tribal members how they came to their present state, spiritually, historically, and physically. The stories act as cultural signposts, directing Kiowa people through their past and into their future.
Throughout the text, the second voice, that of official history, helps flesh out the ancient tribal stories, offering a factual account of the Kiowas. This factual account occasionally provides dates and draws on the findings of anthropologists and historical scholars. Finally, the personal voice, which assumes a poetic rhythm and a deeply reflective tone, describes the author’s reactions to the land he sees and recounts personal and familial stories he recalls as he makes his way through tribal history.
The second section, “The Going On,” offers an account of the Kiowas’ golden age, from approximately 1740 to 1875, when the Kiowas become dominant on the southern plains and develop warrior skills and social systems conducive to the harsh environment. Like the rest of the book, “The Going On” is divided into three sections and explores how arrows are made, the complex relationships between men and women, the harsh weather of the plains, and the Kiowas’ relationship to the buffalo.
Throughout the third section, “The Closing In,” the three voices begin to mingle with one another. The mythic or tribal passages, for example, include discussions of Aho and Mommedaty, Momaday’s paternal grandmother and grandfather, whose lives and stories have become a part of Momaday’s individual, as well as his tribal, identity. When Momaday discusses the Tai-me bundles, or the sacred medicine bundles, central to ancient Kiowa religion, he pulls his grandmother Aho into the tribal section, making her a part of the tribe’s collective history:
Aho remembered something, a strange thing. This is how it was: You know, the Tai-me bundle is not very big, but it is full of power. Once Aho went to see the Tai-me keeper’s wife. The two of them were sitting together … when they heard an awful noise, as if a tree or some very heavy object had fallen down. It frightened them, and they went to see what on earth it was. It was Tai-me—Tai-me had fallen to the floor. No one knows how it was that Tai-me fell; nothing caused it, as far as anyone could see.
(Rainy Mountain, p. 80)
The personal stories Momaday told of his grandmother in the first part of the book become tribal stories as Momaday moves toward the Kiowa present. Similarly the historical voice becomes more entwined with the personal and tribal accounts, this time in connection with his grandfather: “For a time, Mommedaty wore one of the grandmother bundles … on a string tied around his neck [personal and tribal] … If anyone who wore a medicine bundle failed to show it the proper respect, it grew extremely heavy around his neck [historical]” (Rainy Mountain, p. 81). The tribal, historical, and personal sketches, which complement each other in the beginning of the text, meld together toward its close, showing Momaday’s integrated idea of himself as an American Indian.
FROM MOONEY’S CALENDAR HISTORY OF THE KIOWA INDIANS
“Sett’an stated that he had been fourteen years drawing it [the calendar]; i.e., that he had begun work on it fourteen years before, noting the events of the first six years from the statements of older men, and the rest from his own recollection…. This will be understood when it is explained that it is customary for the owners of such Indian heirlooms to bring them out at frequent intervals during the long nights in the winter camp, to be exhibited and discussed in the circle of warriors about the tipi fire.... At these gatherings the pipe is filled and passed around, and each man in turn recites some mythic or historic tradition, or some noted deed on the warpath, which is then discussed by the circle. Thus this history of the tribe is formulated and handed down.”
(Mooney, pp. 144-45)
The last personal narrative sums up the journey Momaday (and his readers) have just taken: “Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it” (Rainy Mountain, p. 83). By knowing the earth from whence his people came and recounting their perceptions of the world, Momaday has come to understand himself.
The Kiowa calendars
The Way to Rainy Mountain relies heavily on tribal history and stories, the cruxes of native identity. In addition to tribal stories, which were passed through the generations verbally, pictographically designed calendars also perserved Kiowa history. Prior to the reservation period, when the Kiowa people were forced onto a specific territory, these tribal calendars, which were created by specialists in the tribe, highlighted important events in the Kiowas’ past. Present-day historians do not know how many calendars existed. Many of them may have been buried with their keepers or otherwise lost through history. Thankfully James Mooney, an ethnologist of the nineteenth century, acquired three of these tribal timepieces. Mooney describes them in his 1898 Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology report, Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians, which Momaday consulted in writing The Way to Rainy Mountain.
These calendars reflect the tribe’s closeness to the land, their ideas about themselves, and the events that changed them. The pictographs, or ancient drawings, which depict the major events of each winter and summer, are arranged in a continuous spiral starting in one corner of the page or animal hide (various materials were used) and moving inward as the years marched on. A black upright bar, symbolizing the lack of vegetation, marks each winter, while summers are usually indicated by a medicine lodge, the central object of the Sun Dance.
The three calendars Mooney describes in his work are named after their creators. There are the 1) Sett’an, or Set-tan, yearly calendar (covering the years 1833 to 1893); 2) the Anko yearly calendar (1864-1893); and 3) the Anko monthly calendar, which accounts for 37 months of Kiowa life. The specialists drew the two yearly calendars with colored pencil on heavy manila paper; for the monthly account, they first used black pencil in a small ledger notebook, then redrew it with colored pencil on hide.
Recorded on the calendars are momentous tribal incidents, happenings that were of immediate importance to the Kiowa. Many of the deeds depicted on the Sett’an calendar are mentioned in The Way to Rainy Mountain, including the “fine heraldic tipi [that] was accidentally destroyed by fire” in the winter of 1872 and 1873, the Kiowa man who stabbed his wife during the 1843 Sun Dance, and the Horse-eating Sun Dance of 1879 (Rainy Mountain, p. 45). The memoir includes a description of the Leonid meteor shower of November 13, 1833. Marking the end of the Kiowas’ golden era, the event found its way into Sett’an’s winter description of that year, which shows a child with stars above his head. This is one of the calendar’s earliest entries. Such an event, Mooney writes, is often considered the start of an era by tribal peoples. Momaday himself declares that the calendar’s pictograph “marks the beginning as it were of the historical period of the tribal mind… . The falling stars seemed to image the sudden and violent disintegration of an old order” (Rainy Mountain, p. 85).
Another image, Sett’an’s pictographic description of the final, unfinished Sun Dance of 1890 shows the medicine pole left standing outside the completed lodge. As Mooney tells it:
The Kiowa had decided to celebrate their usual annual sun dance at the Piho or bend in the Washita, where they had already held it twice before, when the agent determined to prevent it. The news [that troops were coming to stop the dance] was brought to Stumbling-bear … by Quanah, chief of the Comanche, who advised him to send word to the Kiowa to stop, as the soldiers would kill them and their horses if they persisted.
(Mooney, p. 359)
Their survival threatened, the Kiowas dispersed on hearing the news, going to their respective dwellings, leaving the unfinished medicine pole and lodge standing. This was the tribe’s last attempt to practice the Sun Dance.
American Indian oral tradition
The Kiowas have a verbal tradition to be mined, says Momaday, a task The Way to Rainy Mountain begins to take up and that its epilogue calls vital:
The [Kiowa] culture would persist for a while in decline, until about 1875, but then it would be gone, and there would be very little material evidence that it had ever been. Yet it is within the reach of memory still, though tenuously now, and moreover it is even defined in a remarkably rich and living verbal tradition which demands to be preserved for its own sake.
(Rainy Mountain, pp. 114-15)
Oral tradition is always one generation away from extinction, Momaday notes, making its future precarious and its telling cherished. In his words, this tradition is the process by which the lore of a people is “formulated, communicated, and preserved in language by word of mouth, as opposed to writing” (Momaday in Hobson p. 167). Moma day insists on factoring it into his portrayal of the past. His memoir’s combination of tribal, official historical, and personal stories suggests a new way of understanding, or imagining, past events. The suggestion is that the people’s oral tradition must be taken into account when recalling years past. Because official history is often ethnocentric and incomplete, oral traditions complement and add depth to this more familiar type of documentation.
In traditional Kiowa life, verbal stories were used to address various tribal needs. Sometimes such accounts taught appropriate behaviors; other times the accounts offered serious insight into sacred religious beliefs. In either case, the art of storytelling was exceptionally refined and difficult to master.
Stories, such as the Kiowa tale describing Devil’s Tower—which became America’s first national monument in 1906—and the Big Dipper, explain how parts of the world came to be. “Two centuries ago, because they could not do otherwise, the Kiowas made a legend at the base of the rock,” says the text (Rainy Mountain, p. 8). In the legend, a boy becomes a bear and chases his seven sisters to the stump of a tree. At the tree’s command, the girls climb its trunk, whereupon they are lifted into the air and carried into the sky to become the stars of the Big Dipper. This tale is of particular importance to Momaday, for it is the source of his first Kiowa name, Tsoai-talee, or Rock-Tree Boy.
Tales such as these connect the Kiowas to the world, giving them a sense of place, helping to specify how the tribe relates to its environmental surroundings. “From that moment, and so long as the legend lives,” Momaday writes, “the Kiowas have kinsmen in the night sky” (Rainy Mountain, p. 8). As long as the oral tradition is passed from one generation to the next, the Kiowas, like other native peoples, will be able to define themselves in their own voices, using their distinct world views.
Sources
N. Scott Momaday sees all his work as connected, all part of one tribal, literary, and artistic opus. In an interview with Joseph Brachac, Momaday states:
I think that my work proceeds from the American Indian oral tradition, and I think it sustains that tradition and carries it along… . I’ve written several books, but to me they are all parts of the same story… . My purpose is to carry out what was begun a long time ago; there’s no end to it that I can see.
(Momaday in Brachac, p. 187)
The Way to Rainy Mountain draws in particular on Kiowa oral tradition and storytelling. In the acknowledgments preceding the memoir, Momaday thanks “those of my kinsman who willingly recounted to me the tribal history and literature which informs this book.” Indeed, after the 1965 death of his grandmother, Momaday, aided by his father’s knowledge of the Kiowa language, collected tribal stories from the tribe’s elders. These tellers have been a primary source for all of Momaday’s work, particularly The Way to Rainy Mountain. The memoir draws on them for its personal and tribal narratives; for the latter, as noted, it draws also on James Mooney’s 1898 Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians.
Beyond tribal sources, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where Momaday acquired his historical knowledge. What is certain is that there were several academics—anthropologists and historians—whose work contributed to the historical portions of the book. Other probable influences include Ann Marriott’s The Ten Grandmothers (1945), Mildred P. Mayhall’s The Kiowas (1962), Elsie Clews Parsons’s Kiowa Tales (1929), and William Sturtevant Nye’s Bad Medicine and Good: Tales of the Kiowa (1962). Since Momaday is himself an academic, these types of sources were numerous and varied.
While attending Stanford University, Momaday worked closely with poet and literary critic Yvor Winters and was no doubt influenced by him. Winters supervised Momaday’s doctoral dissertation and critiqued Momaday’s later creative output, including The Journey oj Tai-me (1967), a limited-edition writing Momaday has identified as the model for The Way to Rainy Mountain.
Reception
Because of its refusal to fall neatly into an existing genre, The Way to Rainy Mountain was difficult to publish. Social scientists questioned the work, while literature lovers lauded its artful sketches of Kiowa life. When the manuscript was sent out to anthropologists for review in 1968, it was, by and large, rejected: “It isn’t the kind of book that I would go for,” one academic reviewer wrote. “The book would certainly not be of any interest to anthros or folklorists,” another crooned (Lincoln, p. 106). Thankfully, Moma-day’s editor sent the work to literary types as well. Edward Abbey encouraged its publication, saying “Scott Momaday conjures the spirit of a place” (Abbey in Lincoln, p. 110). Wallace Stegner too lauded the memoir, saying the writer’s “recreation of Kiowa myth and history, that is something no white man could ever have given us” (Stegner in Lincoln, p. 110). A few months later, The Way to Rainy Mountain was in press.
The book received brief mention in a variety of major publications, including the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, and the New Yorker, typically without being featured in many. Those who reviewed the memoir tended to praise it for its pious, stately language and captivating dignity. In The Southern Review, Kenneth Fields lauded the text as “far and away his [Momaday’s] best book” (Fields, p. 196). Despite its quiet appearance, the book would become staple reading in American Indian studies courses across the country. Ten years after its publication, the late Michael A. Dorris, then chair of Dartmouth College’s Native American Studies Department, named The Way to Rainy Mountain one of the finest books available on Native Americans (Dorris, p. 48).
—Amy M. Ware
For More Information
Boyd, Maurice. Kiowa Voices: Ceremonial Dance, Ritual, and Songs. Vol. 2. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1981.
Brachac, Joseph, ed. Survival This Way: Interview with American Indian Poets. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987.
Cohen, Felix S. Felix S. Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971.
Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1969.
Dorris, Michael A. “The Best Books on Native Americans.” In The American West, 16 (May 1979): 48.
Fields, Kenneth. “More Than Language Means: A Review of N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain.” The Southern Review (winter 1970): 196-204.
Hobson, Geary, ed. The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979.
Irwin, Lee. “Freedom, Law, and Prophecy: A Brief History of Native American Religious Resistance.” In Native American Spirituality: A Critical Reader. Ed. Lee Irwin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.
Lincoln, Kenneth. “Tai-me to Rainy Mountain: The Makings of American Indian Literature.” In American Indian Quarterly 10, no. 2 (spring 1986): 101-117.
Momaday, N. Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969.
Mooney, James. Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians. Bureau of American Ethnology, 17th Annual Report. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1898.
Roemer, Kenneth M., ed. Approaches to Teaching The Way to Rainy Mountain. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1988.