American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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.