THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN [SOLD]

THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN

N. Scott Momaday (1934 - )

Illustrated by Al Momaday

The University of New Mexico Press, 1969

Hardcover with slip jacket, first edition, 89 pages, illustrated

Autographed by N. Scott Momaday and Al Momaday

From the Jacket

“The Way to Rainy Mountain is a reflection in native art and literature of a particular historical migration.  Three hundred years ago, the Kiowa Indians began a journey from the headwaters of the Yellowstone River in what is now western Montana to their present home in the southern Plains.  In the course of that migration a cultural and psychological revolution occurred.

“The Kiowas began their journey as a divided and oppressed people; they ended it with honor and glory.  Very early they acquired Tai-me, the sacred Sun Dance doll, which became at once their most powerful medicine and the symbol of their spiritual well-being.  They acquired horses as well and the knowledge of how to live in the great open heart of the continent.  They acquired the cold, hard disposition of warriors.  When they entered upon the southern Plains, they were prepared to stand to their full stature as a people, to take hold of their destiny.  For a hundred years, they were lords of the land.

“This book recalls the journey of Tai-me—and of Tai-me’s people—in three unique voices: the legendary, the historical, and the contemporary.  It is also the personal journey of N. Scott Momaday. who on pilgrimage to the grave of his Kiowa grandmother traversed the same route taken by his forebears, and in so doing confronted his Kiowa heritage.  It is an evocation of three things in particular: a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit, which endures.”

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

N Scott Momaday (1934 - ) Kiowa Indian

Momaday received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1963. Momaday's doctoral thesis, The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, was published in 1965.

His novel House Made of Dawn led to the breakthrough of Native American literature into the American mainstream after the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.

House Made of Dawn was the first novel of the Native American Renaissance, a term coined by literary critic Kenneth Lincoln in the Native American Renaissance.

The work remains a classic of Native American literature.