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.
Index of Terms
Kiowa Calendars
As Momaday explains in the Epilogue, the Kiowa began keeping calendars around 1833 (85). The Kiowa calendars were similar to the winter counts of other Plains tribes, who added to their calendars only once each year, in winter. Kiowa calendar keepers were tasked with drawing images of a memorable event for each summer and winter. When Momaday refers to the theft of the warhorse Little Red as “the most important event of the winter” (77) of 1852-1853, he is clearly drawing upon such a calendar as his source for what the Kiowas found significant that season.
Medicine Bundle
Medicine bundles are bundles of sacred objects used in ceremonies by Plains tribes, including the Kiowas. When not exposed for the Sun Dance, Tai-me resides in such a bundle (37, 80). One of the twin sons of the sun in the ancestral stories is also said to have transformed himself into 10 bundles of “boy medicine” (35). Other bundles can be personal in nature or small enough for their keepers to wear, as Mammedaty wore the grandmother bundle (81).
Peyote
Peyote is a cactus found in Mexico and southern Texas that contains mescaline, a hallucinogen. It is used in rituals in the Native American Church; Momaday describes one such ceremony in Story XI, which also notes that Mammedaty was a peyote medicine man (39). Use of peyote spread onto the plains from Mexico around 1890, after the Kiowa surrender, and represents a newer spiritual practice for the Kiowas than the Sun Dance religion of the plains.
Sun Dance
The Sun Dance was an annual ritual among the Kiowas and other Plains tribes beginning in the 19th century. It involved a community of dancers, at least one of whom pledged to dance to the point of exhaustion to receive a vision. In The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday considers the disrupted Sun Dance of 1890 the last Sun Dance, after which “the Kiowas backed away forever from the medicine tree” (10), but the Sun Dance persists in many Indigenous communities through the 20th century and into the present day.
Tai-me
Tai-me, the “sacred Sun Dance doll” is the “object and symbol of [Kiowa] worship, and so shared in the divinity of the sun” (6). The bundle was tended by hereditary keepers when not unwrapped for sacred use. In addition to referring to the doll, the name Tai-me also refers to the spirit it represents, as when he appeared to the hungry Kiowa man in Story X.
