N. Scott Momaday

Navarre Scott Momaday

A Kiowa Indian recalls the history and legends of his people, particularly on their migration to the southern Plains

The Way to Rainy Mountain

Laura Mauler

Very cool format. On the left page there is a Kiowa story or legend, on the top of the facing page is a historical context for the story/legend, and below that is a personal recollection of the author's that ties in to either the story or the land. 

I liked the stories, but my favorite parts were his personal recollections and descriptions of the land. It made me want to go to the Plains, Oklahoma, and Rainy Mountain immediately, to see if I could feel something as powerful as he describes.

Liv Rockwell

I read this for my American Indian History class. I enjoyed the prose, and the use of three different typefaces to tell three parts of the same story. Truly reminded me of how everything contextualizes everything else in life. The stories that have formed you affect your perceptions, affecting your overall reality. From this, you push reality onto others by your actions. 

Momaday gives us a meaningful snippet of what this lost tribe believed and how his familial ties to them have affected his reality. Through reading his reality and perceptions, I have now altered my own. Really insightful. Potentially very impactful.

Lindsy Rice

alex 

Briar Rose

helena gurri

First published in paperback by UNM Press in 1976, The Way to Rainy Mountain has sold over 200,000 copies. "The paperback edition of The Way to Rainy Mountain was first published twenty-five years ago. One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for that is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness. I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth. "The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself."--from the new Preface

The Way to Rainy Mountain

Reviews