What This Book Actually Is
The Way to Rainy Mountain is part memoir, part anthropological fieldwork, and part Kichhili oral history collection. Scott Momaday published it in 1969, and it won the National Book Award for prose. The structure is triple-voiced: he layers traditional Kiowa narratives alongside his own memories and scholarly commentary from anthropologist John C. Ewers. That three-part arrangement isn't a gimmick. It's how the Kiowa actually preserve knowledge across generations. I first read this in college when someone expected me to analyze it like a conventional novel. You can't do that. The first time around, I treated it linearly, which made almost nothing land correctly. The second time, I stopped trying to force a plot onto it. Here's what I learned about actually getting something out of this book. Start with the geography. Momaday structures the entire book around the Kiowa migration route from the Yellowstone region down to the Southern Plains. Each section corresponds to a location on that journey. If you don't know where Rainy Mountain is — it's in southwestern Oklahoma, near the Wichita Mountains — you'll miss why the whole book circles back to that place at the end. The landscape isn't backdrop. It's the argument.
The triple narrative structure is the thing most people trip over. Each myth or legend appears in three layers. First comes the folk tale itself, told in the traditional voice. Then Ewers' anthropological notes, which are dry but useful as reference. Then Momaday's personal reflection, which ties the story back to his grandmother and her final days. When I was grading papers on this, the students who understood the structure could actually read the book. The ones who didn't kept asking where the plot went. There is no plot in that sense. It's a genealogy of meaning. His grandmother, Aho, is the emotional center of the book even though she dies before most of what he writes happens. She knew the old ways. She could speak Kiowa. She was one of the last people who remembered the world before everything collapsed. Momaday says he wrote this book partly because she was dying and partly because she had already died. That tension between presence and absence runs through every page. You feel it when he describes carrying her ashes to Rainy Mountain. It's not sentimental. It's factual grief. The language is another thing. Momaday writes in a style that sounds like speech, but it's controlled speech. He uses Kiowa words without always translating them immediately. "Tai-me" is the sacred bundle. "Kon-twe" means the sun. If you don't know these terms, you'll skip over them. Don't. Write them down. The untranslated words are deliberate choices. He wants the reader to sit with the unfamiliar.
One practical issue I ran into: this book is not a quick read. The sections are short, yes, but they demand attention. My workaround was to read one three-part section per sitting and then stop. Trying to power through twelve or thirteen of them in one go just blurs everything together. Each section contains a complete myth, and each myth stands on its own before connecting to the larger migration arc. Treat them that way. Another thing beginners consistently miss: the Kiowa calendar. Momaday references months by their Kiowa names throughout the text. The black bear month. The rabbit month. If you don't have a Kiowa calendar handy, you'll lose track of the seasonal movement that underpins the whole migration story. I keep a printed version next to my desk when I teach this. It takes two seconds to check and saves twenty minutes of confusion. The book also functions as an act of cultural preservation. The Kiowa oral tradition was being erased rapidly in Momaday's lifetime. The government banned Native ceremonies. Children were sent to boarding schools where speaking their language was punished. Momaday knew this. The book is an archive as much as a literary work. That's why the Ewers excerpts matter — they show the scholarly framework that documented Kiowa culture before it disappeared completely.
Get the Full Details
If you're approaching this for a class, don't waste time looking for symbolism in the conventional sense. The buffalo hunt isn't a metaphor. It's a memory. The sunrise isn't symbolic. It's liturgical. Momaday is writing about a culture that understood the world differently than Western academia does, and he's giving you access to that understanding directly. The job is to receive it, not decode it. The ending brings everything back to Rainy Mountain and to Aho. Momaday deposits her ashes there. The final image is quiet. No grand statement. Just the land holding what was given to it. That's the whole book in one paragraph. Everything before that leads to that moment. Everything after that moment is just you sitting with it. I recommend reading it once straight through before you try to analyze anything. You'll catch more on the second pass, but the first pass is about letting the structure do its work. Momaday built this book to be experienced, not dissected. It's one of the few works in American literature where that distinction actually matters for the reading to work.
