The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday

I remember coming out upon the northern Great Plains in the late spring. There were meadows of blue and yellow wildflowers on the slopes, and I could see the still, sunlit plain below, reaching away out of sight. At first there is no discrimination in the eye, nothing but the land itself, whole and impenetrable. But then the smallest things began to stand out of the depths--herds and rivers and groves--and each of these has perfect being in terms of distance and of silence and of age. Yes, I thought, now I see the earth as it really is; never again will I see things as I saw them yesterday or the day before.

The Kiowa people, as their stories say, came out of the Rocky Mountains and into the Great Plains hundreds of years ago, settling in central Oklahoma by a hill called Rainy Mountain. The hallmarks of Kiowa culture were developed along the way: their religion, centered on a figure called Tai-me, their ways of hunting, the horse prowess that helped them, along with the Comanches, dominated the southern plains for a century and a half. When his grandmother died, N. Scott Momaday--a Kiowa who grew up not, like his grandmother, near Rainy Mountain, but in New Mexico--decided to follow the footsteps of the first Kiowa to his grandmother's home, and The Way to Rainy Mountain records his observations.

But Momaday's travels and reminiscences only make up a third of the book. "The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices," he writes. "The first is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice." The first vignette, for example, begins with Momaday's father's voice telling the story of the ancient Kiowa emerging into the world through a hollow log. On the opposite page, the historical voice tells us, "They called themselves Kwuda and later Tepda, both of which mean 'coming out.'" And below that, Momaday records his own impressions of coming out into the plains for the first time, the beautiful and simple description I have excerpted at the top of the page.

"There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout," Momaday writes, "a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself." The three voices, woven together, have a remarkable cumulative power. When they seem markedly different, they seem to suggest that the present and the past can rhyme, and that even though our language puts us at a great distance from our ancestors, something between us remains unbroken. When the voices seem strangely similar, as happens more and more later in the book, as Al Momaday's stories of the past combine with Momaday's own memory of his grandparents and great-grandparents, the past seems somehow literally present--transubstantiated. And while, as David Treuer notes in Native American Fiction: A User's Guide, claims about modernist writers drawing from oral culture are often cant, one can see how the voice of legend has influenced the style Momaday uses here and in A House Made of Dawn. Al, like N. Scott, has a way with words, and more: the book is illustrated with very impressive black-and-white drawings by Al himself.

I was touched by The Way to Rainy Mountain. Clearly the book emerges from grief, grief over the loss of Momaday's grandmother, but a loss, too, of a living link to the past at a time when the Kiowa language and culture are at risk of disappearing. Wouldn't it be a shame if the "historical voice" were the only one that remained? But Momaday's pilgrimage to Rainy Mountain, and the threading of voices together into a single tight braid, seem like a preservative and hopeful act.