A Note on *The Way to Rainy Mountain,* “The Setting Out”

Composing this book in the Native American autobiographical form automatically produces a unique, American Indian tone. We learn of the Kiowa, just as they learned of their people themselves, through telling of stories, history, and personal reflection. This form creates an illusion of acceptance into a Kiowa tipi, listening to elders at a fire. The stories become personal, allowing a greater affectation and understanding of the Kiowa people.

Momaday juxtaposes myth, factual Kiowa history, and his own personal reflection in each section. Each component is related through a word, animal, inanimate component of nature, or an idea. The three parts draw from one another, yet also enhance each other; an influence and compliment.

These components represent the identity of the Kiowa people. As we have learned from Brumble and reading the introduction to The Way to Rainy Mountain, the Native Americans constantly told tales of personal accomplishment and mythology. Momaday recounts how the landscape the Kiowa’s crossed and their experiences, which occurred before his grandmother’s birth, still “lay like memory in her blood.” Their mythology, history, and personal events were incorporated within, interwoven into the flesh, rather than written upon external materials. In order to assert their connection to one another and keep their culture alive, stories were repeated enough to become part of each person and thus live on within them. Identity as a member of any tribe means that one carries the tribe’s mythology and history entwined with their own personal history.

~E.D.