The Way to Rainy Mountain

The Way to Rainy Mountain
by N. Scott Momaday

The Way to Rainy Mountain
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Book Summary Information

Author: N. Scott Momaday
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1976-09-01
ISBN: 0826304362
Number of pages: 98
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Book Reviews of The Way to Rainy Mountain

Book Review: A mythic voyage into the Kiowa spirit
Summary: 5 Stars

THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN is a fscinating account of the Kiowa spirit's core through the poet N Scott Momaday's three voices: the collective tribal story-telling voice, the historic voice (based on historical documentation), and the poet's own experiential voice (Momaday retraced the migratory route of his ancestors from Montana to Oklahoma). These three voices work on the reader's imagination to produce a fourth voice on the stage of the reader's mind. THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN depicts an epic journey of the Kiowa people through space (Montana southward) and time (mythological to modern). The ancient Kiowa's psyche fuses with primal nature be it with dog persons, antelope beings, or the mythological (but very real) creature called Taime.Once in Oklahoma the Kiowa mastered the horse and became among the best of hunters on the Great Plains. Brave in spirit, sharing in heart, they became a proud people. But European civilization closed in and all but crushed them by killing off the buffalo, killing herds of horses and turning hunters into farmers. Yet the Kiowa people held their vital contact with the land in today's hectic world: "Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe," writes Momaday. "He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it." Momaday helps the reader do just that--gain an appreciation for the multi-dimensional land of North America

Summary of The Way to Rainy Mountain

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

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