Memory and History Theme Analysis

The Way to Rainy Mountain is a history of the Kiowa people, but it’s a nontraditional history; it takes the kind of written “factual” history to which Euro-American culture is accustomed and blends it with tribal lore and personal recollection. This is a surprising and radical choice in the context of most works of written history that value objectivity and evidence while discounting the ideas found in storytelling and myth. However, Momaday writes that, “The imaginative experience and the historical express equally the traditions of man’s reality.” By this he means that memory and myth are just as important as traditional history to how a person understands reality, and therefore must also be addressed when attempting to write an account of the past.

Momaday’s principal tool for giving equal weight to memory and history is his choice to narrate the book through three alternating voices: the voices of tribal lore, traditional history, and personal memory. These voices are always responding to one another, which shows that their perspectives on the past are related and even intertwined. For example, Momaday’s juxtaposition of the Kiowa creation myth (emerging into the world from a hollow log) with the historical narrative of the Kiowas moving southward from a harsh northern landscape shows the parallels between the two foundational stories of the Kiowa people. While to Westerners the story of the log is seen as metaphor and the story of the migration is seen as literally true, both tell of moving from a world of darkness into one of sunlight, or of moving from a life of hardship into one of relative ease. Momaday insists that both of these stories essentially tell the same story, and thus both have a valid relationship to truth. This undercuts the Eurocentric primacy of traditional historical scholarship, and shows the importance of other modes of understanding the past, particularly when writing the history of a people like the Kiowa whose history has always been transmitted orally instead of through writing.

Momaday’s focus on older people is also important to his ideas about memory and history. Much of The Way to Rainy Mountain is devoted to Momaday’s personal memories of his grandparents, as well as his recounting of their memories and stories. In a sense, he treats older generations as a proxy for history: it is in their memories and stories that the Kiowa live on. Because older people carry this sacred history within them, they are seen as worthy of veneration. This can be specific and practical (the best arrowmakers are old men who have honed their skill and patience), or more abstract (he writes of Aho that, “the immense landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood,” implying that she contains within her the whole of the tribe’s memory of their ancestral migration). Either way, the wisdom and memory that old people have mean that they are afforded the highest honor in the book, which emphasizes that culture and history cannot be abstracted from the people that carry them forward.

Momaday’s insistence on combining memory and myth with traditional history, and his focus on the importance of older generations as embodiments of history, are a direct challenge to the limitations of traditional history. Though memory and myth may not come with “proof” that a story is true, they are essential components to understanding the way the Kiowas understand themselves and their history. In other words, memory and myth are ways to place cultural truths alongside events that “actually happened.” Momaday’s focus on memory also emphasizes that the past must be actively transmitted in order to preserve Kiowa culture and identity. History is not an abstract time that is relegated only to the past; it is a set of stories, values, and ideas that live on through people who make the effort to remember. Without their memories and myths, then, the Kiowas would cease to be Kiowas as they move into the future.