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2. N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain: Vision, Textuality, and History
- University of Nebraska Press
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 2 N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain Vision, Textuality, and History The great adventure of the Kiowas was a going forth into the heart of the continent. . . . In the course of that long migration they had come of age as a people. They had conceived a good idea of themselves; they had dared to imagine and determine who they were. | N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain Offering both a critical methodology and an articulation of key critical concepts in ways that resolve the apparent binary of oral and literate elements, N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain provides a model for interpreting American Indian literature. The narrative describes a transformative intellectual journey in which a tribe reconceives itself as a people by establishing relationships with a new homeland. Alienated from his ancestors’ way of knowing their world, the modern 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1| n. scott momaday's the way to rainy mountain 54 narrator juxtaposes personal, family, and tribal history as a means of constructing a Kiowa identity. Imaginatively retracing the critical conceptual journey of his ancestors, he enlivens the oral, graphic, and critical impulses in his relationship to Kiowa life. In offering the narrator’s conceptual predicament as emblematic of modern American Indian existence, Rainy Mountain shows how oral, graphic, and critical impulses may be brought back into more dynamic balances that serve the larger needs of Native American communities. Published in 1969, The Way to Rainy Mountain is Momaday ’s most philosophically and structurally complex text, a work whose centrality to Native literary discourse is well recognized . Part oral tradition, part history, part personal reminiscence , Rainy Mountain is most often described as a memoir. But with its unnamed narrator and fragmented style, the text is less concerned with telling the story of a single person’s conceptual journey than it is with presenting a type of map or template for reclaiming worldviews. Not autobiographical in any simple sense, the text is a work of ideas exploring through its narratives and structure the relationships between oral, graphic, and critical impulses. Rainy Mountain offers its readers a “way” of reconciling the apparent contradictions of modern Native life. Time and again the text intervenes in static cultural traditions, undercutting both Western and Native expectations regarding the function of and relationships between land, stories, and history. Rather than reifying either Western literate or Native oral traditions, Rainy Mountain instead aims at placing these traditions in conversation by invigorating the critical impulse. The text accomplishes this by undercutting the dominance of the graphic impulse in the narrator’s epistemological perspective and reclaiming [3.90.202.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:43 GMT) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 n. scott momaday's the way to rainy mountain | 55 the social function of oral tradition. Privileging neither the oral nor the graphic, Rainy Mountain models how both forms may mutually support one another. When the oral and graphic are in conversation with one another the critical impulse flourishes. The narrator’s literal and metaphorical journey to Rainy Mountain, the heart of Kiowa country in what is now Oklahoma , provides a critical template for the reader to follow in reestablishing this dynamic balance between the oral, graphic , and critical impulses. Although he is a Kiowa by descent, the narrator recognizes that he does not understand the world through a Kiowa worldview as expressed by his relatives and ancestors. His preconceptions, which have been gleaned from Western notions of not only Kiowa but Native American culture and history, betray his initial privileging of a Western epistemological framework. Informed by both the oral-literate binary and colonialist conceptions of Native cultures and American history, the narrator begins his journey to Rainy Mountain as a way of trying to understand the past glories of a dead culture. The misconceptions that structure the narrator’s initial understanding of his Kiowa heritage concern relationships to the Kiowa homelands, the definition of history, and oral tradition. His early experiences in the Kiowa landscape evoke emptiness, loneliness, and disconnection...