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.
Preface, Prologue, and IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary
In the Preface, Momaday reflects on how The Way to Rainy Mountain has remained relevant for 25 years. He connects its vitality to the timelessness of oral tradition. He provides information about the structure of the stories in the book. Each is told in three voices: the first is the ancestral voice of oral tradition, including as told by his father. The second provides historical commentary. The third voice is his own personal memory and observations. He dedicates the book to his parents, whose language and storytelling inform it.
Prologue Summary
The Prologue tells the history of the Kiowas from the beginning, when they entered the world through a hollow log in the northern mountains, until they moved out onto the plains for a 100-year “golden age” that ended with the destruction of the buffalo by colonizers. Momaday explains how the Kiowas came of age as a people on the plains and “conceived a good idea of themselves” (4). He calls this act of self-revelation the miracle, and describes the oral tradition, though fragmentary, as a continuation of this self-determination.
Introduction Summary
In the Introduction, Momaday describes Rainy Mountain, located northwest of the Wichita Range in Oklahoma. It has fierce blizzards in winter and searing heat in summer. He introduces his present-day situation by explaining that he returned to Rainy Mountain in July upon the death of his grandmother, Aho. Reflecting upon her life, he considers how she knew the Plains through the oral traditions although she had never seen them.
Aho’s memory of the plains and the northern mountains had inspired Momaday to see them for himself, a 1500-mile pilgrimage that begins in Yellowstone, the place of the Kiowas’ emergence from the mountains. He next goes to Devil’s Tower in the Black Hills of Wyoming. There, he recounts a 200-year-old legend, as told by his grandmother, of how the tower grew as a tree to carry seven sisters into the sky in order to protect them from their brother, who had turned into a bear and wanted to eat them. The sisters became the Big Dipper. He connects this legend to the Kiowas’ spiritual transformation from mountain people to Plains people who would later worship the sun.
Momaday also reflects on how his grandmother was born only eight years after the Kiowas’ defeat and imprisonment at Fort Sill. She bore witness in 1890 to the disruption of the last Sun Dance, “a vision of deicide” (10). Though she became a Christian late in life, he remembers her praying at night in the Kiowa language. Ending his journey by returning to her home after her death, he finds it diminished and empty of all the usual visitors and talk. In the morning, he sets out on foot for the nearby Rainy Mountain.
Preface, Prologue, and Introduction Analysis
The Preface, Prologue and Introduction all work to flag important themes and to establish the book’s structure, content, and themes. Momaday’s journey retraces the journey of the Kiowas from the Rocky Mountains to Devil’s Tower to the Plains, and these early sections make clear that book’s structure will follow the path of this journey, constituting a modern exploration, in writing, of the geographic and historical memory that lived in his grandmother through the oral tradition. This negotiation between oral and written modes of storytelling is made explicit in the Prologue, as Momaday lays out the structure of the chapters, which place the oral tradition in dialogue with historiography and the author’s own experiences. The project asserts the continued vitality of this oral tradition—a key marker of The Survivance of Kiowa Culture—even while acknowledging that it is fragmentary, a trace memory that survives after genocide and deicide.
Momaday’s work also illuminates the vital connection between Story and the Kiowa Connection to Land. In his work with the Western Apache, anthropologist Keith Basso introduces the idea of the chronotope: a place where geography and story are fused together in the human imagination so that, for those who live within an oral tradition, the landscape becomes a carrier of histories and their moral teachings (Keith Basso. Wisdom Sits in Places. University of New Mexico Press, 1996.) The legend of Devil’s Tower is one classic example of such a chronotope, imparting cultural pride for Kiowa who, “so long as the legend lives” know that they “have kinsmen in the night sky” (8). The rock formation itself provides both evidence and occasion for the story, marking a shift in identity as the Kiowa transitioned from a mountain to a plains-dwelling people. Momaday’s note that the deicide of Tai-me “was July 20, 1890, at the great bend of the Washita” likewise fuses that place on the river forever with the day of the last sun dance (10)—even as it marks the end of a way of life, it also establishes a continuity such that this momentous past even is always part of the present landscape.
The Devil’s Tower story also intersects with contemporary Indigenous politics. Devil’s Tower is sacred to numerous Indigenous nations, including the Arapahoe, Lakota, Crow, and Cheyenne, as well as the Kiowas. It is also included within the boundaries of the Black Hills land claim, an unceded portion of territory guaranteed to the Oceti Sakowin (also known as the Sioux Nation) in the treaty of Fort Laramie. The land was later illegally seized and became the site of both Mount Rushmore and Devil’s Tower National Monument, as well as other public and private land holdings. The legal status of Devil’s Tower was a live political issue when Momaday published The Way to Rainy Mountain in 1976, and it remains so today. The Oceti Sakowin pressed their claim to the Black Hills in the courts between 1920 and 1980, when the Supreme Court sided with them and awarded monetary compensation. The Oceti Sakowin have refused to accept the money, desiring instead the return of the land, and the monetary value of the settlement now stands at $1 billion dollars. Though the Kiowas are not party to this land claim and settlement, the legend of Devil’s Tower included in The Way to Rainy Mountain is a strikingly detailed example of the relationship between a landscape and the people who fill it with stories and make it sacred.
