The Journey is the Story: The Role of Mythos, Anthropos and the Guide in The Way to Rainy Mountain

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The Journey is the Story:

The Role of Mythos, Anthropos and the Guide

in The Way to Rainy Mountain

by

Gabrielle Rose

Adjunct Faculty

Hamline University Department of English

October 30, 2010


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For N. Scott Momaday, the word, indeed language, is sacred. In his spiritual memoir, The

Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday harnesses the power of story to re-imagine both the physical

and spiritual journey of his paternal ancestral Native American tribe, the Kiowa, who made their

way down from the northern climes to their final resettlement at the base of Rainy Mountain, in

Oklahoma. Weaving together tribal myths and legends, historical perspective, drawings by his

Kiowa father, Al Momaday, and Momadays own remembrance of his fathers stories, Momaday

virtually enlivens what has become a nearly extinct culture, assuring its continuance in modern

memory by recreating, for his readers, a sense of what it is to be a Kiowa, a people for whom the

journey is their story. As Momaday explains, the way to Rainy Mountain is preeminently the

history of an idea, mans idea of himself, and it has old and essential being in language

(Momaday 4).


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Dividing his memoir into three sections, The Setting Out, The Going On, and The

Closing In, Momaday draws us into the Kiowa journey by layering a braided path upon this

foundational landscape of the beginning, the middle and the end of the migration. Each chapter

within the three sections is itself divided into three parts, which I would define as the mythos, the

anthropos, and the guide. Mythos encompasses stories and legends that give a people a sense of

themselves as a tribe or group; the anthropos governs the existent perspective, positioning

humanity within the context of its myth and its historicity; and the guide is the storyteller whose

narrative pulls us into the story in order that we may imaginatively experience the events of

another time, another culture.

Momaday is the guide. His ancestral ties and his remembrances of the stories his father

and grandmother passed along to him give Momaday his authority as a guide; he knows the

myths and the history of his people, and in Momadays case, he has even physically made the

journey the Kiowas made. Momadays fathers remembered stories form the mythos segment of

each chapter, which include a creation story, legends about the Kiowas prime deity, the sun, and

stories that link the Kiowas with nature. The anthropos in each chapter annotates the historical

events involving and surrounding the Kiowas as they made their journey eastward, towards

Rainy Mountain. Momaday explains:

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. (ix)


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Just as a journey implies motion and change over time, the readers journey through The Way to

Rainy Mountain shifts as she follows the contours of the narrative landscape. The first section,

The Setting Out, is organized to present the legends and myths first, followed by historical

observations, which are in turn followed by Momadays own memories. In the second section,

The Going On, we readers begin to experience a melding of the myth, history and personal

narrative, thus immersing us more deeply into Kiowa culture. Each of us lives in our own

complex narrative structure of myth, memory and historical context, but these states conjoin and

separate in a continuous flux, and are re-imagined with each new thought, with each act of

memory. By mixing the historical, or anthropos, into the mythos, the mythos into the storytellers

narrative, Momaday in effect initiates us into Kiowa culture, better allowing us to imagine

ourselves as a member of the tribe. By the time we reach the last section, The Closing In, we,

through the movement of the story as it weaves between myth, history and personal

reminiscence, have made congruent motion and have now a living memory of these stories, their

historical context, and Momadays own location in these stories and events. We now co-identify

with Momaday and with the Kiowa. We, through the phenomenon of language, have each our

own particular experience of the Kiowa.

Momaday prefaces The Way to Rainy Mountain with a poem, Headwaters, which is

mysterious, yet inviting, as he asks What moves? / What moves on this archaic force/Was wild

and welling at the source. Our curiosity is beckoned; we follow the storyteller to discover what

does move, what is this archaic force? And despite the plaited narrative which entwines us, we

proceed on a chronological journey, from beginning to end. In this way, we creatively participate

in the development of the Kiowa tribe. We emerge from the log as we learn the Kiowa creation

myth. We are told the story of the birth of the Kiowa tribe, as they came one by one into the


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world through a hollow log. . . . They looked all around and saw the world. . . . They called

themselves Kwuda, coming out (16). Immediately as they begin their journey, the Kiowas

mythologize themselves as the people who come out from darkness. As they continue in their

history and migrate eastward, towards the plains and the warmer temperatures, the brighter days,

they evolve a story of a primary deity, the sun. Momadays exquisite details show how the

Kiowa transform themselves from slaves to the simple necessity of survival; who had

emerged from a sunless world (7). Now, in the sun, where Sweet clover takes hold of the hills

and bends upon itself to cover and seal the soil, the Kiowas discover their god. Momaday writes

The sun is at home on the plains. Precisely there does it have the certain character of a god (7).

We can feel the earth, warmed by the sun, which beams its deific rays on the Kiowa. And

although its not clear that the sun and its attendant Sun Dance, which personifies the suns spirit,

are holy to Momaday, through his devotion to language, he carefully and respectfully evokes the

dignity of what is sacred to the Kiowa.

The Kiowas collide, inevitably, with the history of another people. The buffalo they

sacrifice in the Sun Dance have all but disappeared and at last, the tribe encounters U. S. soldiers

who force the tribe to scatter. Momaday writes, Forbidden without cause the essential act of

their faith . . . the Kiowas backed away forever . . . . My grandmother was there. Without

bitterness, and for as long as she lived, she bore a vision of deicide (10). Towards the end of the

memoir, in Chapter XXIV, the story of the Kiowa tribe comes to an inexorable end, which is told

through remembered story and fact: East of my grandmothers house, south of the pecan grove,

there is buried a woman in a beautiful dress. Mammedaty used to know where she is buried, but

now no one knows. . . . [H]er grave is unmarked . . . . That dress is still there, under the ground.

The earth, the darkness, have once again absorbed the colors, the artifacts and the bodies that


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were the Kiowa tribe. But not, however, the story, and herein lives the sacred spirit: through the

word, the language and the story, the spirit and identity of the Kiowa people endures. Just as he

prefaces the memoir with poetry, he ends the story with a poem, Rainy Mountain Cemetery.

In spite of the haunting silence that surrounds the mountain, Momaday confers on us the

understanding that perhaps death does not have the final word for the Kiowa, at least as long as

there is a story and people who will listen: The wake of nothing audible he hears/Who listens

here and now to hear your name (89).

The risks that Momaday, or any storyteller or guide, for that matter, takes, are that there

may be no one to listen to the story, no one to lure into a past mythos and identity of a lost

culture. For Momaday, for whom language is sacred, the story is the spiritual practice, and most

certainly he has evolved a ritual that accesses the spiritual through the careful craft of his

narrative. Language gives voice to what is otherwise ineffable: the mystical, sacred idea of who

we are as individuals and as a people. Almost like a conjurer, Momaday has revived the idea of

the Kiowa tribe to a different era, one in which without story, the Kiowas would no longer exist.

By writingthe story, Momaday decreases the risk of the story being lost forever. He writes, The

verbal tradition by which it has been preserved has suffered deterioration in time. What remains

is fragmentary: mythology, legend, lore, and hearsay and of course the idea itself, as crucial

and complete as it ever was. That is the miracle (4). Language becomes sacred because of its

unique ability to transcend time, to survive history, to define and record humanitys idea of itself.

Story, or narrative, has a hierophantic task: to make evident the numinous and to connect it with

ourselves, to locate our selves within the greater context of the cosmos. Momaday has

resurrected the idea of the Kiowa tribe for contemporary readers and thus perpetuates their living

memory in us for as long as there are readers for his memoir.


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The Journey is the Story: The Role of Mythos, Anthropos and the Guide in The Way to Rainy Mountain

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