The Way to Rainy Mountain

The Way to Rainy Mountain illuminates the role of story in creating and sustaining the Kiowas’ connection to the land they now inhabit, as well as ancestral lands. Because the stories are closely connected to a specific, physical landscape, they form a collective mnemonic device—imbuing the land with meaning and allowing it to exist in the memory even of tribal members who have never seen it. Aho’s stories of the Great Plains are detailed enough to provide the map for Momaday’s journey, though she never saw the plains herself. Though she never saw the rock formation known as Devil’s Tower, in Wyoming, she could tell of the incident with the seven sisters and their brother bear that made the tower tree grow. To know and retell the story constitutes a spiritual claim on this sacred landmark. After the Kiowas “made a legend at the base of the rock,” they had “kinsmen in the night sky. Whatever they were in the mountains, they could be no more” (8). The telling of the Devil’s Tower story, Momaday claims, is an act of performative speech that transforms the Kiowas from mountain people to Plains people, a heritage that