The Way to Rainy Mountain

The Way to Rainy Mountain closes with verses written at Rainy Mountain Cemetery, with Aho dead and Ko-Sahn probably also dead. Momaday sums up many things when he writes, “It was–all of this and more–a quest, a going forth upon the way to Rainy Mountain” (88). His deliberately ambiguous pronouns, “it” and “all of this” allow the summation to apply to Ko-Sahn’s account of the Sun Dance; his own journey retracing the migrations of the Kiowas, and the entire resultant book. To come so far and end in a cemetery, in “the long approach of noon / Upon the shadow that your name defines – / And death this cold, black density of stone” presents a grim and apparently final picture of the story of the Kiowas (89).

It requires meta-analysis to wrest any more optimistic notes from the Epilogue. An image of The Survivance of Kiowa Culture exists in the presence of the book itself, which—despite its elegiac tone—embodies the continued thriving of modern Kiowa culture. The opening of the Epilogue, with its focus on the Kiowa calendars, places The Way to Rainy Mountain in a genealogy with these written and graphic records, as well as with the Kiowa oral tradition and the English-language literary tradition of the colonizers. The book exists as a defiant artifact of Kiowa Culture Under Settler Colonialism—a negotiation between two storytelling traditions, one Indigenous and the other brought by the colonizers. As much as it is forced to adopt the colonizer’s language—Momaday admits that he knows no other—and conform to the colonial form of the book, this text also forces the literary tradition to adapt in order to accommodate its unique structure—a structure deeply informed by Kiowa modes of oral storytelling. To write The Way to Rainy Mountain, then, is as Kiowa as is the honored duty of being a calendar-keeper.