In the Prologue to the 1998 edition of his individual and communal journey into the imagination and verbal traditions of his people – the Kiowas, titled ‘The Way to Rainy Mountain” (1969), N. Scott Momaday writes: ‘In one sense, then, the way to Rainy mountain is preeminently the history of an idea, man’s idea of himself, and its old and essential being in language. The verbal tradition by which it has been preserved has suffered the 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.”
As I was reading Momaday’s masterfully woven triptych of his people’s mythical origins, followed both by historically rendered perceptions and personal mementos of these life-shaping legends, I kept in mind the miracle that ties them in.
Scholar J. Frank Papovich has traced the very same miracle in the pedagogical value of Momaday’s narrative. Namely, Papovich plays with the notions of a none-native versus a native observation of the American landscape, juxtaposing Thoreau’s 19th century romantic reaction to the Wilderness and Momaday’s 20th century invocation of his people’s timeless relatedness to the natural world of the ‘American frontier’.
Teacher Robert L. Berner furthers the pedagogical reach of Momaday’s text, engaging with it at a structuralist level while studying this text for a classroom setting.
And then there is the referential piece by critic H. David Brumble III, which opens up Momday’s narrative to a wider conceptualization of the self (as given). That is to say, by trying to draw the audience closer to the ‘consummate being’ of Momaday’s text, Brumble approaches the narrative indirectly, likening it to ‘similar’ stories of/by Native Americans.
Yet, all three respective thinkers take a detour on the journey of discovering Momaday’s text. The result: an academic distancing of the very words which bring the Kiowas to life, the miracle of it all.
The question then, how are we to approach such a simplistically intricate narrative? How do we teach culture in all of its traditions? How do we teach such a life narrative?
Especially when: The miracle of Momaday’s narrative lies in its existence, in its language and its structure, speaking to different readers, differently. Like the epic forms of the oral traditions of other indigenous peoples across time and space, the miracle of this cultural narrative is found in its words and their meanings, textually rather than contextually, in its vocality and outspokenness while trapped by the graphics of a printed page. In its endurance.
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