the way to rainy mountain essay

The Way to Rainy Mountain

N. scott momaday, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The Way to Rainy Mountain: Analysis of the Text Essay

In 1969, N. Scott Momaday created a story about the journey of Momaday’s Kiowa ancestors and called it The Way to Rainy Mountain. The author traces his roots, starting from the Kiowa Indians. In order to present a really informative and educative picture of his own past, Momaday chooses an unusual way for his story and tells about his grandmother’s death, his desire to visit her grave and add more information about grandmother’s life.

From the very first sentences, it turns out to be rather clear that Kiowa tribes respect the land and nature they live in. He underlines that it is not enough to take the earth and its gifts for granted, because it is crucially important to care about it and conserve it.

The work under consideration presents several Kiowa legends through the story about the narrator’s grandmother, her life and death, and introduces some Kiowa myths. This information cannot but captivate the reader and opens for everyone a new world, full of hope, belief, and trust. People have to believe in something in order to get a sense of life and enjoy it.

“My grandmother had a reverence for the sun, a holy regard that now is all but gone out of mankind. There was a wariness in her, and an ancient awe. She was a Christian in her later years, but she had come a long way about, and she never forgot her birthright.” (Momaday)

This very quote helps to recognize the major trends, which were inherent to the Kiowa Indians. The life of Momaday’s grandmother was not simple; she faced certain problems, and wanted to choose the best ways to live her life properly. However, she never forgot her roots and respected her history, her ancestry, and her past in general. The Kiowa tribes respected lots of things; and sun was one of them. With the help of this citation, the reader can learn that Kiowa people not only respected the sun, but also were afraid of its power and energy.

The way to Rainy Mountain is not a simple description of how the Kiowa people developed, learnt, and protected their knowledge. This way is a description of their culture, their preferences, and beliefs. The author concentrates on three different visions: historical, personal, and cultural. In the above-mentioned citation, Momaday unites all these three visions and creates a clear picture of how people treated the nature and what was so special about it.

People could change their faith, they could find some other places to live, they could meet new people and choose the other preferences; but still, their history, their memories, and their rights remained the same. They got one simple right to live and be the people of Kiowa. Nothing can change this truth and no one can forget it.

The story created by Scott Momaday is unique indeed; it helps the reader to comprehend that our history should be respected and studied thoroughly. People of Kiowa demonstrated how powerful the belief could be and how it is easy to forget about it and even lose the faith. The chosen quote and the text in general open eyes to numerous details, which people should take into consideration in order to be free, have sense of living, and respect the world they live in.

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IvyPanda. (2018, May 8). The Way to Rainy Mountain: Analysis of the Text. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-way-to-rainy-mountain-analysis-of-the-text/

"The Way to Rainy Mountain: Analysis of the Text." IvyPanda , 8 May 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/the-way-to-rainy-mountain-analysis-of-the-text/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'The Way to Rainy Mountain: Analysis of the Text'. 8 May.

IvyPanda . 2018. "The Way to Rainy Mountain: Analysis of the Text." May 8, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-way-to-rainy-mountain-analysis-of-the-text/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Way to Rainy Mountain: Analysis of the Text." May 8, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-way-to-rainy-mountain-analysis-of-the-text/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Way to Rainy Mountain: Analysis of the Text." May 8, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-way-to-rainy-mountain-analysis-of-the-text/.

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The Way to Rainy Mountain

40 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface, Prologue, and Introduction

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

The Way to Rainy Mountain by Navarre Scott Momaday was first published in 1969. Momaday is a member of the Kiowa nation, a PhD-holding literary scholar, and a prominent American writer largely credited with initiating the Native American Literary Renaissance. On his father’s side, Momaday traces his family to Guipahgo (Lone Wolf), the last Principal Chief of the Kiowas, and this lineage features prominently in the book’s storytelling. The book is a work of creative nonfiction that tells the story of the Kiowa nation from its emergence into the world in the Rocky Mountains to its migration onto the northern and later the central Great Plains, and then, eventually, the 1875 surrender at Fort Sill in Oklahoma and submission to reservation life. The work mourns the way of life that was lost when the Kiowas were defeated, but it also speaks to the enduring connection of the Kiowa people to the lands of their history. In this way, the book is both a testimony and a contribution to the Kiowa culture, whose storytelling tradition persists into the present day. This study guide uses the 1994 paperback edition from the University of New Mexico Press, which includes a 25th-anniversary preface by the author.

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The Way to Rainy Mountain is innovatively structured in 24 two-page “stories,” each of which is told in three typographically distinguished voices: that of ancestral story, historiography, and personal memoir . The stories are further divided into three chapters or sections, “The Setting Out,” “The Going On,” and “The Closing In.” The Introduction prior to the chapters focuses largely on Momaday’s grandmother, Aho , whose stories of the Kiowa migration inspired Momaday to go see those places for himself and then to write this book. He recounts Aho’s story of the origin of Devil’s Tower, recounts that she watched in 1890 as troops from Fort Sill disrupted the last Sun Dance , and describes watching her as she prays in the Kiowa language. As the book opens, Momaday has been called home for Aho’s funeral.

“The Setting Out” contains the first 11 stories, beginning with the story of the Kiowas’ entrance into the world through a hollow log and tracing their emergence onto the Great Plains and their acquisition of Tai-me , the sacred Sun Dance doll. Other ancestral stories trace the adventures of the twin sons of the Sun. This section’s historical notes and memoir paragraphs also introduce Momaday’s grandfather, Mammedaty—a farmer, horseman, and peyote man.

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In “The Going On,” the next seven stories focus on the glorious decades on the Great Plains and explore the Kiowas’ relationship with the horse more fully. The section includes the story of how the horse was created from clay by the Kiowas and born amidst lightning and storm. Other stories detail exploits in hunting and warfare that the horse enabled. The last of these describes how some youths rode their horses into the south to find out where the sun went during the winter. They rode so far that they saw monkeys.

In “The Closing In,” the final six stories deal with the suffering of the Kiowas as they were hard pressed by the advancing forces of settler colonialism. The stories in this section narrate such miserable events as a smallpox epidemic, the famine that followed the extermination of the buffalo, and the eventual surrender at Fort Sill. This section also begins to interweave stories of Mammedaty’s and Aho’s lives into the ancestral stories.

The work concludes with an epilogue that describes how the Kiowas began keeping calendars around 1833, three years past the end of what Momaday calls the “golden age” of Kiowa culture. He next introduces a final new character: a 100-year-old woman named Ko-sahn who came to Aho’s house after her passing. Ko-sahn had seen a sun dance, and Momaday shares her recollection of it. The work then concludes with Momaday at Rainy Mountain Cemetery, addressing a poem to a relative whose name is carved upon a headstone there and reflecting on the finality of death.

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Some Conservative Christians Are Stepping Away From the Gender Wars

Far from the shouting, Christian therapists, writers, parents and their trans children are trying to create a space within conservative circles to acknowledge differences in how people experience gender.

By Ruth Graham

Ruth Graham writes about religion and belief. She spent several months speaking with conservative Christians, transgender people and their families in Colorado, New York and Texas.

Andrew and Debbie James are evangelical Christians. Born in England, the couple moved to Denver years ago and raised their children there. Mrs. James had a profound religious conversion experience early in parenthood, and their large nondenominational church quickly became the focal point of their lives. They used to say that if the doors were open, they were there.

“We always joked that we had this perfect little scenario,” Mrs. James said. “We had our boy, then we had our girl, and they were two years apart and they were just perfect.” They were strict parents — too strict, they say in hindsight, with the goal to “shield them from absolutely everything.”

When the couple’s older child was 19, living at home as a college student, Mrs. James got a call from the pharmacy informing her that her child’s prescription for estradiol, or estrogen, was ready. In a panic, she searched the teenager’s room, confronting her that evening.

It went badly. They initially refused to use their daughter’s chosen name, Lilia, and Mrs. James could barely be in the same room with her when she was wearing a skirt. Then a pastor at the church encouraged them to kick their daughter out of their home.

“This must be biblical advice,” she recalled thinking. “This must be what we’re supposed to do.”

‘A space of curiosity’

Many progressive and Mainline Christian congregations have moved to affirm transgender and nonbinary members. But for many conservative Christians, the rise of transgender identities in both visibility and in sheer numbers, particularly among young people, has been a profoundly destabilizing shift. Almost 90 percent of white evangelicals believe gender is determined by sex at birth, according to the Pew Research Center, compared with 60 percent of the population as a whole.

Austen Hartke realized he was transgender in seminary, where he was studying the Hebrew Bible; he came out as soon as he graduated. It was 2014, the same year that Laverne Cox was on the cover of Time magazine, and it felt to Mr. Hartke that the culture around him was steadily improving, that awareness and acceptance would go hand in hand, including in conservative spaces.

That is not what happened. If trans people in conservative churches encountered clumsiness and ignorance around issues like pronouns back then, he said, now they face outright hostility.

“If you’re afraid of change, that’s what trans people now represent,” he said.

Some Christians have fought against expanding gender norms with vociferous opposition to everything from drag shows to hormone treatments. In churches and Christian schools, transgender people have been mocked, kicked out and denied communion . Transgender young people from conservative Christian families have shared stories of being banished from homes and relationships, often with devastating effects on their mental health. In many ways, conservative Christians have become the face of the American anti-trans movement.

But in the quieter spaces of church sanctuaries, counseling offices and living rooms, there are earnest searches for understanding. Churches are hosting panel discussions and film screenings, training their youth leaders, rewriting their statements of faith, and rethinking how they label bathrooms and arrange single-sex Bible studies. Even those that continue to draw a hard line against homosexuality are sorting through new questions raised by gender identity.

In the most intimate cases, Christians are steering through agonizing, unfamiliar conflicts between their families and their God, or as some put it, between love and truth.

It is a search that echoes uncomfortable conversations in secular realms, as Americans of all political and ideological persuasions grapple with changes to deeply ingrained notions of masculinity and femininity.

And in a landscape in which furious rhetoric blazes through statehouses and across social media, some are staking out a kind of middle ground. It is one that takes seriously the moral and theological concerns shared by many Christians, and refuses to set them aside. But it also guides them to accept the reality of gender dysphoria, or distress over one’s sex, and to remain open to a spectrum of outcomes.

Julia Sadusky, a psychologist in Colorado, is one of relatively few expert voices who has stepped into that fraught territory between anti-trans fear and zeal on the right, and what some see as a progressive orthodoxy on the left that leaves little space for parental doubts. Her degrees are from conservative Catholic and evangelical universities, and these days, she spends most of her time speaking with conservative Christians in intimate settings. In her private practice in a suburb of Denver, she sees bewildered and sometimes angry clients whose children have told them they are transgender or nonbinary.

When parents ask if she can steer their child away from a transgender identity, she declines and guides them to consider accompanying their child through a range of paths from there. She has clients who have transitioned socially, and who have pursued medical transition, although she acknowledges having concerns about potentially irreversible medical interventions on teen patients in particular.

She also addresses audiences of churchgoers attempting to process tectonic cultural shifts around them. Many of her listeners have received alarming and sometimes false messages about those shifts from conservative media and word of mouth.

On a rainy Sunday afternoon last summer, Dr. Sadusky was in New York City, onstage in a former Elks Lodge in Queens, leading a roomful of evangelical Christians through a slide show about gender identity.

“I’m inviting you into a space of curiosity as opposed to judgment,” she told the crowd of about 100 people at New Life Fellowship church. Some of them jotted down notes. Others snapped photos of her slides — with lists of terms like “demigender” and “agender,” and charts of rocketing rates of transgender identity among young people.

She encouraged attendees to use other people’s preferred pronouns, explained why she does not like loaded terms like “social contagion” and discouraged pat catchphrases like “God doesn’t make mistakes.”

“None of us are God here,” she said. “But we do need to answer to him.”

‘Is there no truth?’

The theological foundation of Christian opposition to the concept of transgender identities announces itself in the first chapter of Genesis. “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them,” the passage reads. “Male and female he created them.”

Christian advocates for transgender people point out that the Bible depicts a surprising range of gender diversity without apparent judgment. Jacob, a patriarch of the nation of Israel, is described as a “smooth” young man who stays in the family’s tent and is favored by God over his more traditionally masculine brother, the hunter Esau. Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew that some men are born eunuchs.

But in the New Testament, mostly in the writings of the Apostle Paul, several passages lay out distinct roles for men and women. Women are to cover their heads in church and submit to their husbands; men are to lead their families and love their wives. Though they are debated by scholars and ordinary Christians, these texts have profoundly shaped the family structures, career paths and spiritual lives of billions of people around the world.

For some Christians, then, the rise of transgender identities poses a blunt danger, potentially undermining family stability, definitions of truth and authority structures they have built their lives around. As parents, conservative evangelicals tend to prioritize keeping children in the fold rather than encouraging them to push boundaries. Many evangelical parenting resources emphasize obedience and authority, with the goal of raising children not to “find themselves” but to carry on traditions.

“You can see something happening that’s shaping how we understand the nature of the human person,” said Mary Rice Hasson, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she directs a program whose aim is in part to help parents “counter gender ideology.”

Ms. Hasson, who is Catholic, described recent cultural shifts around gender as upending fundamental assumptions about the universe: “Can you trust your senses? When you see something, can you name it, does it have an objective reality? Or is there no truth?”

The gender issue has also thrown new fuel on smoldering debates over sexual orientation, which have divided multiple Christian denominations and institutions for decades. Those disputes had largely cooled in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which made same-sex marriage legal across the country. But the less-settled landscape on gender issues has prompted new confrontations and disagreements, and revived older debates about sexuality.

Some conservative evangelical churches have turned to a document called the Nashville Statement to help them navigate the theology of contemporary gender identity. The statement, crafted by leaders of the conservative Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood in 2017, initially made headlines as a document that articulated a sharp position against homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

But its writers also address gender identity, stating that God enables people to “forsake transgender self-conceptions” and to “accept the God-ordained link” between their biological sex and their gender.

Denny Burk, the president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, who helped write the statement, said that the most urgent matter for Christians in the public sphere now is bringing clarity to foundational questions about what it means to be human — questions that trace back at least to the sexual revolution, and were accelerated, as he sees it, by the Obergefell decision. “What does it mean to be a person, and in particular what does it mean to be male and what does it mean to be female?” he said. “You’re seeing Christians having to articulate what used to be assumed.”

Mark Yarhouse, a clinical psychologist who heads the Sexual and Gender Identity Institute at evangelical Wheaton College, has identified three broad frameworks through which Christians tend to see gender identity: On one end of the spectrum is the traditional conservative view that asserts that male and female are God-ordained categories to which people must conform. On the other is a celebratory embrace of new identities.

In the middle is a view that diversions between gender identity and biological sex are an unfortunate departure from the norm but not a moral failure.

Dr. Yarhouse said at least 80 percent of the speaking and consulting requests he gets now pertain to gender identity rather than sexuality, where his career began. “This is a wave that is going to crest over the evangelical church, and the church is not ready,” he said.

‘We have to allow for questions.’

Finding a foothold for compromise within such a stark landscape can feel impossible, and even the notion of “compromise” is offensive to many. That is why many Christians with nontraditional gender identities end up leaving their conservative churches.

“I never wanted to be away from God; it was just that God’s people scared me to death,” said Lesli Hudson-Reynolds, who is nonbinary and gay. Raised Southern Baptist in Texas, and active in ministry in college, they were essentially pushed out of the church when they came out as a lesbian. (Mx. Hudson-Reynolds uses they/them pronouns.)

Things began to change when their wife died in 2009, and a local evangelical pastor agreed to host and pay for her funeral without question. The church treated Mx. Hudson-Reynolds with respect, as a grieving spouse. “I hadn’t been treated like a human being by Christians in a very long time,” they recalled. That began their path back to the church.

Mx. Hudson-Reynolds’s own views on gender and sexuality have evolved. They have chosen to be celibate going forward, and consider themselves a “Side B” Christian, a term developed by gay Christians who believe the Christian life requires them to abstain from sexual behavior outside traditional, heterosexual marriage but reject the notion that all L.G.B.T.Q. people can or should become straight.

“A lot of Christians call you a heretic, and a lot of gay people call you a traitor,” said Mx. Hudson-Reynolds. They went on to work for Posture Shift, an organization that consults with pastors and parents with the goal of making churches and homes “safe for LGBT+ family and friends.”

Dr. Sadusky often recommends Posture Shift’s resources to her clients, including its guidebook for families, which added new material on gender in its latest edition.

The questions Dr. Sadusky said she hears from parents with transgender children in her private practice are immediate and personal: Does this mean I won’t have grandchildren? (“That’s the No. 1 thing they’re worried about.”) If they don’t immediately affirm the child’s identity, they worry their child will be told the parents are irredeemable bigots, cut off the relationship, or even that the child will take their own life.

Once a month, Dr. Sadusky leads a group discussion by video chat for other therapists to seek peer advice on challenging cases. On a Friday afternoon last spring, a group of six counselors from across the country, most of them Christians who work largely with Christian clients, had gathered. (The counselors allowed a reporter to sit in on the meeting on the condition that they would not be named and that no identifying details of their cases would be shared.)

A marriage and family therapist in the Mountain West presented the first case: a family in which the parents were strongly resisting their older teenage child’s desire to publicly present herself as female, refusing to use her new pronouns because they view it as “lying,” and thus a betrayal of their faith. The counselor felt stuck; the parents’ objection was a barrier to maintaining a relationship with their daughter, but it was so deeply rooted in their values that it was hard to see how they could set it aside.

The idea that using preferred pronouns might be “lying” is common for some Christians, Dr. Sadusky told the therapist. She suggested proposing to the parents that they think of using their daughter’s preferred pronouns not as a statement of belief but as a form of hospitality, a concept from Gregory Coles, the author of “Single, Gay, Christian.” Compare it to being a missionary in a Muslim country, Dr. Sadusky offered: You would probably use the term “Allah” for God in that context, for the sake of staying in conversation.

Over the course of Dr. Sadusky’s decade-long career, she has seen rapid shifts in the way her clients view their own gender identity. She now sees fewer people who report longstanding distress and more who say a version of, “It’s not distressing, it’s who I am and I want to make these modifications,” she said.

Most people, including conservatives, she said, are fairly comfortable with the idea of an adult who was raised male, say, and began to understand herself as female early in childhood with little relief over many years. Those people might have differing opinions about the proper responses to that kind of distress, but they are not as threatened by its existence as a phenomenon experienced by a small minority of individuals.

The larger threat to many conservatives, she said — and one she would like to challenge — is the notion that responding compassionately to such distress means disregarding all beliefs about differences between men and women.

This is not an altogether satisfying approach for many progressive Christians, who view Dr. Sadusky’s balancing act as not going far enough to fully embrace L.G.B.T.Q. people.

“I think of it as being a harm-reduction strategy,” said Mr. Hartke, who came out as trans after seminary and went on to found Transmission Ministry Collective, an organization that supports transgender and “gender-expansive” Christians. If Mr. Hartke is talking with parents who are dead set against their child’s transgender identity, he sees Dr. Sadusky’s work, in particular her books written with Dr. Yarhouse, as a resource that “moves them along from where they were to a place that can be less harmful.”

But Mr. Hartke, who is active in a Lutheran church, said he would prefer that Christians listen most intently to transgender doctors, scholars and psychiatrists, who combine experience and expertise.

The notion that the very categories of “man” and “woman” will someday be erased strikes Mr. Hartke as far-fetched. But he sees an analogy between explorations of gender and of faith.

“If we actually want people to feel solid in their identity,” he said, “we have to allow for questions in the same way that if we want people to feel solid in their faith, we have to allow for questions about their faith.”

‘We were good little soldiers.’

Andrew and Debbie James defied their pastor’s advice to kick their daughter out of their house.

But Lilia moved out anyway, frustrated by her restrictions in the home. Her parents began reading, including books by Dr. Yarhouse and by David Gushee, a Christian ethicist who has argued for rethinking traditional Christian approaches to inclusion. They prayed. And they participated in a support group through Embracing the Journey, a network of small groups intended to “build bridges” among L.G.B.T.Q. people, their families and the church.

The group’s founders, Greg and Lynn McDonald, live near Atlanta and have a son who is gay. Their first reaction when he came out, informed by groups like Focus on the Family, was that his sexuality was a sin, and one that had been caused by a failure in the home — an absent father or an overbearing mother. They changed their approach after reading the gospels together, paying attention to the Bible’s accounts of how Jesus actually treated people.

“I felt I needed to choose: Choose God or choose my son,” Mrs. McDonald recalled. “God told me, ‘No, you get to do both.’”

The McDonalds said almost half of the families that participate in Embracing the Journey now come to them because they have children who are transgender or nonbinary, like the Jameses. Eventually the Jameses started leading groups for other parents; they have now led at least five groups, counseling more than 100 parents.

Lilia James is now 25 and lives in Wisconsin. She has a strong relationship with her parents. She got engaged in June before a trip to Colorado with her girlfriend, and they have contemplated getting married at the same courthouse where her parents married.

“It was a fight between loving their child unconditionally or believing and following what their religion was telling them,” she said on a video call last summer from her parents’ back porch. “For a long time it seemed like those two things were at odds and they would have to pick.”

She added: “I’m so proud of them.”

Like many conservative Christian families with children with gender distress, the Jameses eventually left their church. They sometimes stream services at a church they like in Atlanta, and occasionally try attending local congregations that affirm L.G.B.T.Q. relationships and identities. They remain strongly committed to their faith but do not consider themselves as having a “church home.” Their worries now are about the political climate hostile to their daughter, and the fact that both their children have walked away from Christianity.

For so long, “we were good little soldiers,” Mrs. James said. Now, “we live in the gray.”

Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times. More about Ruth Graham

The Way to Rainy Mountain Metaphors and Similes

By n. scott momaday.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by Timothy Sexton

“Houses are like sentinels in the plain”

The full context of this metaphor continues with the observation that houses on the plain are “old keepers of the weather watch.” The author is attributing a metaphorical historical record to homes standing unguarded on the Great Plains by virtue of a literal record of weathering climate. Coats of paint fade in the sun and are torn away by the wind while nail rust, wood warps, shingles are torn away and the long, long history of pioneer life is written in the damage.

“Loneliness is an aspect of the land.”

The author does not reference it, probably because it is a condition associated with white settlers rather than the indigenous populations, known as “prairie madness.” The name indicates the symptoms and it was engendered among some settlers as a result of the isolation of living on the prairie combined with its topographical features. Look off into a horizon seeming to stretch toward infinity and, as the author does observe, "there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man.”

The Devil’s Tower

Perhaps no geological feature so defines the land that the author discusses as the formation known as the Devil’s Tower, made famous to everyone not already familiar with it through the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Devil’s Tower. Its very majesty is overpowering and terrifying, suggestive of an origin that may not be entirely scientific and rational:

“At the top of a ridge I caught sight of Devil's Tower upthrust against the gray sky as if in the birth of time the core of the earth had broken through its crust and the motion of the world was begun.”

Kiowa Culture

The culture and legacy of the Kiowa presence on the plains is inextricably linked to the presence of buffalo. As long as the buffalo population was momentous, the fact that the plains itself was simply grass presented no limitations. Thus, grass becomes endowed with both literal and metaphorical meaning:

“The young Plains culture of the Kiowas withered and died like grass that is burned in the prairie wind.”

“The religion of the Plains”

Unlike in Europe where millions of people speaking different languages and with different histories were all united as a culture based upon a common spiritual belief, there was no unifying religious belief that united all tribes. What did eventually unite them was a metaphorical religion in the literal form of the introduction of the horse. The introduction of the horse becomes a liberating event that forever alters the fundamental lifestyle of tribes:

“Along the way they acquired horses, the religion of the Plains, a love and possession of the open land.”

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The Way to Rainy Mountain Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Way to Rainy Mountain is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Author's opinion of his grandmother?

Momaday loved his grandmother, and he held her in great regard. He loved the telling of the beautiful stories she shared, as well as her relationship to nature. In her honor, he decides to embark on a similar journey to his ancestor's great...

The way to rainy mountain was written by

N. Scott Momaday

The author refers to a time when the kiowa were living "their last great moment in history."what happened to end this period in kiowa history?

Study Guide for The Way to Rainy Mountain

The Way to Rainy Mountain study guide contains a biography of N. Scott Momaday, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Way to Rainy Mountain
• The Way to Rainy Mountain Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Way to Rainy Mountain

The Way to Rainy Mountain essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday.

• Kiowa Identity, Personal Identity: Form and Creation in N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain

Wikipedia Entries for The Way to Rainy Mountain

• Introduction
• History of the Kiowa