The Journey of Tai-me (review)

The publication of a trade edition of the volume which anticipated N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) is an important event for students of American Indian and of western American literature. Until now The Journey of Tai-me has been available only in a limited run of one hundred copies, which was issued collaboratively by Momaday and two colleagues at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1967. That small volume consists of Momaday's retelling of traditional Kiowa stories, most of which he had heard from his father and from the female elder Ko-Sahn, reproduced on handmade paper in an original typeface and illustrated with etchings prepared for the volume. The stories begin with the emergence myth and continue through accounts of the origin of the Tai-me bundle and other aspects of Kiowa culture to a description of the Sun Dance.

Many readers will be primarily interested in the relationship of this volume to The Way to Rainy Mountain, which includes all but about a half dozen of the stories that comprise The Journey of Tai-me. For Way, Momaday added commentaries which offered historical, ethnological, and personal responses to what the Kiowa storytellers had to say. He also appended a prologue, introduction, and epilogue, a pair of poems, and line drawings by his father, Kiowa artist Al Momaday. Students of Momaday's work can now see how the material originally published in Journey evolved into Way.

But The Journey of Tai-me can stand on its own merits. Momaday's succinct and vivid rendering of these stories showcases the concrete, pithy style which characterizes his fiction, essays, plays, and poetry. These one- or two-paragraph versions of Kiowa myths and legends reinforce the idea propounded by some figures in the ethnopoetics movement that orally performed verbal art is most effectively perceived as poetry. While it makes no effort to reproduce the specific exigencies of oral performance, Momaday's non-prosaic prose evinces qualities that parallel those fundamental with such performance.

Momaday retold these stories with the assumption that if he did not do so, they would disappear from memory. He also believed, as he states in his preface to this new edition, that his retellings "come as close to the oral tradition as it is possible to come on the written page" (viii). Both these assumptions are questionable—first, because of the continued vitality of Kiowa oral tradition into the twenty-first century and, second, because of the efforts of ethnopoetic translators who have been attempting to transform performance into print. No matter what motivated him, though, Momaday produced a collection of Kiowa materials that demonstrates effectively how an artist of the written word can deploy material from oral tradition to create something distinctively his own.

The University of New Mexico Press has served the material well in this reasonably priced edition. In addition to a new preface and the story texts from the limited edition, this volume includes the color illustrations by Momaday that appeared in 1967. The Journey of Tai-me is important for students of Momaday's work, of course. It is also a volume that those interested in western American literature, Native American oral tradition, and poetically charged prose can linger over with pleasure.