Defying generic description, The Way to Rainy Mountain is an abbreviated history of the Kiowa people, a re-working of Kiowa folklore, a mixture of legend, historical fact, and autobiography. More precisely, it may be considered a kind of prose poem derived from traditional materials which are perceived personally, an exercise in self-definition made possible by a definition of the Kiowa experience. Ultimately the book 's subject must be understood as language itself- its origins, its power, its inevitable collapse, and finally, its re-birth as art. As Emerson says in Nature, every word was originally a poem, arising out of a need for some means of referring to a concrete phenomenon; for example, he says, supercilious means "the raising of the eyebrow" and spirit means "wind. " But the word, which begins as a metaphor, becomes, through common usage, a cliche and finally sinks into the common earth of denotation. Yet words are the only means by which the poet can give meaning to reality, achieve self-definition, and in the process restore vitality to the words. The structure which outlines the progress of language in The Way to Rainy Mountain is basically that of the relationship of the three main divisions of the book -"The Setting Out," "The Going On," and "The Closing In," a structure to be understood in the conventional terms of beginning, middle, and end, or perhaps, more precisely, of birth, life, and death - the origins, heyday, and final decline of the Kiowas as an independent people. Furthermore, the structure of each of the twenty -four sections which compose the three divisions must be understood as three visions of the Kiowas-that of Kiowa legend (the stories of Aho, the author's grandmother), of Kiowa history (usually facts found in the writings of James Mooney'), and of the author's own perception of himself as an inheritor of the Kiowa experience. These three elements-Kiowa myth, Kiowa reality, and personal vision-may perhaps be understood as Kiowa soul, Kiowa body, and Kiowa (that is, the author's) mind.

In “Robert L. Berner’s ‘Howlers’: A Reply” (in American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25:1) Bruce E. Johansen and Donald A. Grinde Jr., responding to my commentary in the same issue on their long campaign to claim for the Iroqouis League a significant influence on the writing of the United States Constitution, have written this sentence: “When Berner asserts that ‘No founding father knew what the Iroquois structure was,’ he commits a rather astounding ‘howler’ by writing out of the record Benjamin Franklin, who was probably the most influential founder of them all.” As any reader of my commentary should notice, I assumed that in Exemplar of Liberty (1991) Johansen and Grinde claimed John Adams as a Founding Father significant in the introduction of Iroquois elements into the Constitution. Not so, we now learn. Adams “did not endorse the Iroquois system of government.” On the other hand, because he knew about the Iroquois white-dog sacrifice his reference to fifty Greek families in his discussion of the ancient society of Argos “must apply to the Iroquois, not to the Greeks.” I can only refer those who might be mystified by this argument—or, as Johansen and Grinde put it, “[miss] many of the nuances of our presentation” —to my quotation of the pertinent passage from Adams in my commentary, reinforced by my endnote citation of its source.

In “Notes from the ‘Culture Wars’: More Annotations on the Debate Regarding the Iroquois and the Origins of Democracy” (American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23:1), Professor Bruce E. Johansen asserted the general proposition that the Iroquois influenced the development of American democracy and the particular claim that this development therefore must have included an Iroquois influence on the writing of the United States Constitution. When I replied to Johansen-in “Iroquois Influence: A Response to Bruce Johansen’s ‘Notes from the “Culture Wars”’ (Amm’canIndian Culture and Research Journal 24:2)-I neither denied nor affirmed the general proposition. My argument was only with the notion that the Iroquois example somehow served as a model for the Constitution, and I suggested that even if significant similarities could be found between the Constitution’s structuring of the federal government and the Iroquois model, particularly the way the League council formulated policy, those similarities would not mean much if no Founding Father knew what the Iroquois structure was. In his reply to my reply-“Data or Dogma? A Reply to Robert L. Berner” (American Indian Culture and Research Journal 242)-Johansen demands that I match his “data” with my own and suggests that I have ignored Exemplar of Liberty (1991), in which, he says, he and Donald Grinde Jr. have amassed “the historical evidence Berner complains we lack. . . .”

Surely we are not stating anything either easy or difficult to prove when we suggest that the first European settlers along the Eastern seaboard must have been powerfully affected by the example of Indian peoples and that in these Europeans and certainly in their immediate descendants the apparently free life they saw must have contributed to the development of the individualism that made American democracy inevitable. But the question of just how Indian societies in general and the Iroquois in particular affected the development of American political institutions ought to be a matter of historical evidence. If there are documents that will settle the matter it ought to be possible to find them. Unfortunately, in his “Notes from the ‘Culture Wars:’ More Annotations on the Debate Regarding the Iroquois and the Origins of Democracy,” published in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, volume 23, number 1, Professor Bruce Johansen has made the mistake that is usual in discussions of Iroquois influence by confusing two propositions: (1) that the Iroquois, generally speaking, contributed to the development of American democracy, and (2) that the political structure of the Iroquois League and, by implication, the structure and parliamentary procedures of its council specifically served as a model for the structure of government defined by the Constitution of the