40 pages • 1 hour read
N. Scott MomadayThe Way to Rainy Mountain
Nonfiction | Anthology/Varied Collection | Adult | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Story and the Kiowa Connection to Land
The Way to Rainy Mountain illuminates the role of story in creating and sustaining the Kiowas’ connection to the land they now inhabit, as well as ancestral lands. Because the stories are closely connected to a specific, physical landscape, they form a collective mnemonic device—imbuing the land with meaning and allowing it to exist in the memory even of tribal members who have never seen it. Aho’s stories of the Great Plains are detailed enough to provide the map for Momaday’s journey, though she never saw the plains herself. Though she never saw the rock formation known as Devil’s Tower, in Wyoming, she could tell of the incident with the seven sisters and their brother bear that made the tower tree grow. To know and retell the story constitutes a spiritual claim on this sacred landmark. After the Kiowas “made a legend at the base of the rock,” they had “kinsmen in the night sky. Whatever they were in the mountains, they could be no more” (8). The telling of the Devil’s Tower story, Momaday claims, is an act of performative speech that transforms the Kiowas from mountain people to Plains people, a heritage that Aho and Momaday renew when they retell the story.
Personal as well as legendary incidents are tethered to their particular locations in Momaday’s stories. He knows the place in Rainy Mountain Creek where Mammedaty saw the great creature; he knows where Cheney the arrowmaker stood to pray and “where his voice goes on the rolling grasses”—a notable use of present tense, for the long-dead Cheney remains an active presence on the land for Momaday through his own father’s stories (47). By presenting these personal stories in the same textual space as much older tribal legends, Momaday establishes a continuity between them: His own family’s experiences are part of the same chain of story as the seven sisters and their brother the bear.
Momaday concludes in the final story that “a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth […] 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” (83). The phrase “remembered earth” alerts us that this is a historical project, not just a matter of appreciating the landscape before one’s eyes. The call to see the landscape from “many angles” suggests the kind of polyvocality on display in Momaday’s book: Many stories from many storytellers illuminate the land as a single story cannot. Whatever contribution The Way to Rainy Mountain makes to this endeavor, the true work is done by a community of voices enacting the oral tradition that Momaday’s book both derives from and reflects.
Kiowa Culture Under Settler Colonialism
The Way to Rainy Mountain is simultaneously a celebration of continued Kiowa culture and traditions and a reckoning with the losses the nation suffered under settler colonialism, genocide, and deicide. To read Momaday’s book is to confront the tribe who “owned the greatest number of horses” (31) forced to eat them in starvation, offer them in sacrifice against smallpox, and finally watch them slaughtered at Fort Sill (67, 71). The loss of these horses is more significant than a livestock loss, as the horses are a fundamental part of Kiowa culture: a symbol of freedom for the young men who explore the plains and of courage and dignity for warriors and buffalo hunters. The loss of the horses is the loss of the pride of the nation.
With sacred awe, Momaday is able to approach Tai-me, the “sacred Sun Dance doll” who is the “object and symbol of [Kiowa] worship, and so shared in the divinity of the sun” as a bundle (6). But this is a diminished experience. He will never see Tai-me exposed for a Sun Dance because the Kiowas have “backed away forever from the medicine tree” as a result of the slaughter of the buffalo, the dispersal of the last Sun Dance, and the end of the free life on the plains (10).
The book also confronts language loss. Momaday sprinkles Kiowa words throughout the text, hinting at the richness of knowing the world through them and using them to move through it. He recounts how Aho used the word “zei-dl-bei, ‘frightful,’” as “a warding off” when she encountered evil in the world (33). This is the kind of word he is thinking of when he asserts that “a word has power in and of itself” and “gives origin to all things” (33). This passage functions as a powerful credo for a writer, but it is also a testimony to limitation, because Momaday does not have the Kiowa language. Describing how he used to listen to his grandmother Aho praying, he notes, “I do not speak Kiowa, and I never understood her prayers, but there was something inherently sad in the sound, some merest hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow” (10-11). In just two generations, Aho’s fluency has subsided into Momaday’s gathering of stray words and tones from outside the circle of understanding. The language today remains critically endangered.
The Survivance of Kiowa Culture
Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor locates within much contemporary Indigenous literature a quality he calls “survivance,” which he defines as “an active sense of presence, the continuance of Indigenous stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry” (Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners. University of Nebraska Press 1999 p. vii). Survivance is different from mere survival because it invites readers to see Indigenous peoples as the active party in resistance, continuity, and cultural production. The Way to Rainy Mountain is a testimony of Kiowa survivance.
Momaday emphasizes unbroken genealogy throughout the book, both the line of descent that connects Momaday to Aho, Mammedaty, Guipahgo, and Kau-au-ointy, and the spiritual line that, through the twins and the seven sisters, connects the Kiowa to the sun and the stars. In Story IX, Momaday juxtaposes his great-grandmother Keahdinekeah’s “glad weeping” with the tears of the wise grandmother spider who raised the Sun twins, thus showing the continuity of the roles of elders down to the present day (35).
When Momaday places personal and family memories alongside the oldest traditional stories, his own actions become further evidence for the lessons in the stories: running from a buffalo, he “knew […] what it was to be alive” (55); on horseback he “came to know that country” (67). These experiences of the world are a form of embodied research, reinforcing the sense of buffalo hunting as an act of great heroism and the horse as the key to mobility and freedom. Likewise, when Momaday looks at a lodgepole pine and sees how “the uppermost branches of the tree seemed very slowly to ride across the blue sky” (23), his vision of that tree is clearly informed by the two stories of trees that ascended into the sky, both the redbird story on the preceding page and the Devil’s Tower story from the Introduction. The stories shape his vision, and his vision deepens his understanding of the stories.
In the third section, “The Closing In,” stories featuring Aho and Mammedaty begin to infuse the ancestral voice that once held stories as old as the Kiowa presence on the Great Plains. The story of Mammedaty losing his temper, for instance, is introduced with all the same verbal markers, including, “you know” and “This is how it was,” that are used in other, more traditional stories like the creation of the horse and the story of the young men who rode south until they found monkeys (76, 48, 60). In this way, Momaday’s own recently living relatives take their place as ancestors, showing that Kiowa stories are still vital and still give meaning to Kiowa lives.
