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.
Key Figures
Navarre Scott Momaday
Navarre Scott Momaday is a Kiowa writer and professor born in 1934. He earned a BA in English from the University of New Mexico in 1958 and a PhD in English from Stanford in 1963. His first novel, House Made of Dawn, was published in 1968 and is largely credited with inspiring the first wave of the Native American Literary Renaissance. He is a significant influence on the work of later Indigenous writers, especially the novelist and poet Leslie Marmon Silko. House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1969 and brought Indigenous writing widespread recognition on the world stage. He followed this work with The Way to Rainy Mountain in 1969.
Though The Way to Rainy Mountain is dedicated to both his parents, Momaday’s Kiowa heritage is on his father Al Momaday’s side, and this is the family line reflected throughout the book. In some sense, The Way to Rainy Mountain began as an earlier project, the 1967 book, The Journey of Tai-me, which was initially published in an art edition of just 100 copies. That earlier work contained a collection of folklore that he had gathered through interviews with tribal elders regarding the Tai-me bundle. His father served as his translator during these interviews, which formed the basis for the ancestral voices in The Way to Rainy Mountain. The Way to Rainy Mountain is also illustrated by Al Momaday, draws heavily from his storytelling, and includes incidents from Al Momaday’s life, as well as the life of his mother, Aho, and father, Mammedaty, who was a peyote man.
Aho
Aho is N. Scott Momaday’s paternal grandmother. Aho’s death is mentioned in the Introduction and sets the stage for Momaday’s quest to see with his own eyes the northern mountains and the Great Plains landscapes that Aho knew only by inherited story. Her account of the Devil’s Tower story is the first ancestral voice in the book, and her witnessing of the disruption of the last Sun Dance in 1890 helps make The Way to Rainy Mountain’s reckoning with history both personal and immediate.
Aho appears in all three of the voices that intertwine to make the stories of The Way to Rainy Mountain. At times, she supplies the ancestral stories, as with her experience visiting the Tai-me bundle in Story XXIII, but in the same story, she offers historical commentary on the nature of medicine bundles, and she and her home appear in Momaday’s personal reflections (80-81).
Mammedaty
Mammedaty, N. Scott Momaday’s paternal grandfather, was “a peyote man” (39). This marks him as a medicine man—not one who oversees the Sun Dance as in previous generations, but rather one associated with the Native American Church, a religious practice involving the ritual use of peyote that arose in the southern Great Plains after the Kiowa surrender in 1890. Mammedaty is nonetheless a figure of great pride and a man who has the power to see things that others cannot. Mammedaty is also a farmer, a horseman, and a grandson of Guipahgo, (often called Lone Wolf), the last Principal Chief of the Kiowas.
Momaday reveals in the Epilogue that Mammedaty died before he was born (86), but he is one of the most vivid presences in the book and, like Aho, appears in each of the voices. Stories XXI and XXII recount incidents from his life in a style much as if he were a figure of legend, while Momaday’s borrowed memories of him fold him into the personal reflections and the historical sections, as well. In this way, Mammedaty is a vital link between the three forms of memory that make up Momaday’s image of his people: ancestral, historical, and personal.
James Mooney
The anthropologist James Mooney appears four times in The Way to Rainy Mountain, first introduced as “the anthropologist Mooney” (25) and thereafter merely block quoted as a historical voice. James Mooney was born in Indiana in 1861 and worked for the Bureau of American Ethnography from 1885 until his death in 1921. The bureau published the work from which Momaday quotes, Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians, in 1898. Mooney’s book focused on the Kiowa calendars, which were hides on which tribal representatives illustrated the most significant events of each winter and summer.
Mooney was a more sympathetic and interested observer of Indigenous culture than most Euro-Americans of his time, and even believed in the Indigenous right to self rule, but the short excerpts Momaday chooses show that he is a limited and problematic observer nonetheless. He is invested in racial hierarchies that elevate some tribes (including the Kiowas) at the expense of others.
