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Advanced English. 《 高 级 英 语 》 （第三版） 第一册 主编：张汉熙 外语教学与研究出版社. Lesson 11 The Way to Rainy Mountain. by N. Scott Momaday. Teaching Points. I. Background information II. Introduction to the text III. Language points IV. Text analysis V. Questions for discussion VI: Writing assignments.
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Advanced English 《 高 级 英 语 》 （第三版） 第一册 主编：张汉熙 外语教学与研究出版社
Lesson 11 The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday
Teaching Points • I. Background information • II. Introduction to the text • III. Language points • IV. Text analysis • V. Questions for discussion • VI: Writing assignments
I. Background Information • 1. N. Scott Momaday • 2. Historical background • 3. The Kiowas (para. 1) • 4. the Plains (para. 3) • 5. the U.S. Cavalry (para. 3)
Navarre Scott Momaday (born February 27, 1934) is a Kiowa-Cherokee Pulitzer Prize-winning writer from Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Momaday’s father Al Momaday was educated at Bacon College and the Universities of New Mexico and California. Scott Momaday was a well-known artist, deeply committed to his Kiowa heritage. His mother, whose great-grandmother was Cherokee, grew up in a middle-class family and was educated at Haskell Institute, Crescent Girls Collage, and the University of New Mexico. She studied art and journalism and became a well-known painter and writer. He inherited both his father’s and mother’s talents. He started out as a writer, but since 1974 painting and sketching have become important forms of creative expression for Momaday.
Momaday belongs to a generation of American Indians born when most tribal communities had long ceased to exist as vital social organizations. His Kiowa ancestors shared with other Plains Indians the horrors of disease, military defeat, and cultural and religious deprivation in the 19th century. Their only chance of survival was to adapt themselves to new circumstance.
His parents’ academic background and their integration into Anglo-American culture did not sever their ties to their Kiowa and Cherokee ancestors. Momaday identifies himself more as Kiowa than as Cherokee. Mamaday grew up on various reservations in northern New Mexico. Between 1936 and 1943, Momaday and his parents lived on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico and Arizona.
During this time, Momaday became familiar with Navajo culture and learned some of their language. After the family moved to Jemez Pueblo in 1946, Momaday became closely acquainted with Pueblo Indian culture and the unique landscape of the Rio Grande Valley. Momaday witnessed the fundamental changes which took place at Jemez and the cultural and personal disintegration among his Jemez neighbors. This is the theme of his novel House Made of Dawn (1968), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969.
From 1952 to 1956 Momaday attended the University of New Mexico, majoring in political science with minors in English and speech. At this point he began to be interested in writing. Then he went to study law at the University of Virginia for some time. There he met William Faulkner, who was teaching at the university, and the great writer had a deep influence on him He graduated in 1958 with a B.A. in political science. Between 1959 and 1963 he did doctoral studies in English at Stanford. In 1962 Momaday received an Academy of American Poets prize for his poem “The Bear.”
From 1963 to 1969 Momaday was an assistant and later associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There he taught American Indian studies and was very much concerned with the Indian oral tradition. In 1967 he published The Journey of Tai-me, an exploration of Kiowa folklores, which he enlarge into his best-known book, The Way to rainy Mountain (1969).
The book is Momaday’s inquiry into his Indian past in an attempt to determine the extent to which it has shaped him and the degree to which he has become detached from the mythical worldview of his ancestors. The book is divided into three chapters entitled “The Setting Out,” “The Going On” and “The Closing In” with 24 sections, each told by three different narratives: mythical, historical and personal.
In his book Momaday explores his ethnic identity and the history and culture of his people. He says “None but an Indian, I think, knows so much what it is like to have existence in two worlds and security in neither.” His other work includes two volumes of poetry, Angle of Geese and Other Poems (1974) and The Gourd Dancer (1976); The Names: A Memoir (1976); an autobiographical novel The Ancient Child (1989);
two collections of prose and poetry In the Presence of the Sun (1992) and The Man Made of Words (1997); and an interweaving of poetry and painting In the Bear’s House (1999). In 1992, Momaday received the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. He also won the 2007 National Medal of Arts awarded by former President George W. Bush.
N. Scott Momaday (left) receiving the National Medal of Arts from George W. Bush in 2007.
In the past years, Momaday has taught English and given lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, University of Arizona, Princeton, and Columbia. Some of his books have been translated into Chinese, Russian, Polish, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Japanese.
The publication of Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) and The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) is usually regarded as sparking the beginning of Native American Renaissance, a controversial term, but one which acknowledges the richness and variety of Native American publications produced since the 1970s in all genres.
2. Historical background The Trans-Mississippi West was far from empty of human habitation when the newcomers arrived during the period of westward expansion. An estimated 360,000 Indians lived in this region in the mid-19th century. Among the Indians dwelling on the Great Plains, the introduction of horses by the Spanish at the end of the 16th century, and of firearms by British traders in the 18th century, had created the armed and mounted warrior tribes encountered by 19th century westward migrants. Commercial and other contacts with the non-Indian world continued to be important to the Plains Indians as new settlers moved in.
But beyond these generally positive exchanges, contact with advancing non-Indians massively disrupted Indian life everywhere. Disease, which had devastated Native American since the earlier European contact, continued its ravages among the 19th century western Indians. All tribes suffered severely from smallpox, measles, and diphtheria, as well as other diseases contracted from traders and settlers. The non-Indian who descended on the Plains after 1850 had no understanding of traditional Indian culture and little inclination to respect or preserve the “savages” ways.
Military defeat, occupational massacres, forced removal to reservations, and devastation by disease, alcohol and impoverishment all bewildered and demoralized the Plains Indian peoples. By the 1890s relocation to distant, often inferior, and generally inadequate lands had become the fate of almost every Indian nation of the Great Plains. (Based on Chapter 17 “The Frontier West” from the book The Enduring Vision edited by Boyer and others)
As the frontier pressed in from east and west, the relentless greed of non-Indian settlers drove the Indian into what was supposed to be their last refuge. Mounted on horses, perhaps 250,000 Indians in the Great Plains and mountain regions lived mainly off the herds of buffalo which provided food and, from their hides, clothing and shelter. No sooner was the Jacksonian removal policy complete than the onrush of migration in the 1840s began to crowd the Indians’ land. Emigrants crossing to Oregon, California, Utah, and Santa Fe came into contact and often into conflict with the Native Indians.
In 1851 the chiefs of the principal plains tribes were gathered at Fort Laramie, where they agreed to accept more or less definite tribal borders and to leave the emigrants unmolested on their trails. The new arrivals soon found it easier to force one tribes to cede its lands without arousing the others, for the Indian could never realize the old dream of a unified resistance.
From the early 1860s until the late 1870s the frontiers was ablaze with Indian wars, and intermittent outbreaks continued through the 1880s. In 1867, a conference was held in Kansas, and ended with an agreement that the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapahoe, and Cheyenne would accept lands in western Oklahoma. But Indian resistance in the southern Plains continued until the Red River War of 1874 – 1875. (Based on Chapter 19 “New Frontiers” of the book America: A Narrative History by George Brown Tindall)
The Kiowa ( /‘kaiəuwɑ:/ ) are a nation of American Indians and indigenous people of the Great Plains. They migrated from the northern plains to the southern plains in the late 17th century. In 1867, the Kiowa moved to a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma. Today, they are a federally recognized tribe, the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, with 12,000 members.
Total population: 12,000 (2011) • Regions with significant populations: United States, Oklahoma • Languages: English, Kiowa • Religion: Christianity and Native American Church
Name • Kiowa call themselves Kaui-gu. Ancient names were Kwu-da and Tep-da, relating to the myth pulling or coming out of a hollow log until a pregnant woman got stuck. Later, they called themselves Kom-pa-bianta for "people with large tipi flaps", before they met Southern Plains tribes or before they met white men. Another explanation of their name "Kiowa" originated after their migration through what the Kiowa refer to as "The Mountains of the Kiowa" (Kaui-kope) in the present eastern edge of Glacier National Park, Montana, just south of the border with Canada.
The mountain pass they came through was populated heavily by grizzly bear Kgyi-yo and Blackfoot people. Other tribes who encountered the Kiowa used sign language to describe them by holding two straight fingers near the lower outside edge of the eye and moving these fingers back past the ear. This corresponded to the ancient Kiowa hairstyle cut horizontally from the lower outside edge of the eyes to the back of their ears. This was a functional practice to keep their hair from getting tangled as an arrow was let loose from a bow string. George Catlin painted Kiowa warriors with this hairstyle.
Language • Kiowa language is a member of the Kiowa-Tanoan language family. The relationship was first proposed by Smithsonian linguist John P. Harrington in 1910, and was definitively established in 1967. Parker McKenzie, born 1897, was a noted authority on the Kiowa language, learned English when he began school. He worked with John P. Harrington on the Kiowa language. He went on to
discuss the etymology of words and insights of how the Kiowa language changed to incorporate new items of material culture. McKenzie's letters are in the National Anthropological Archives on pronunciation and grammar of the Kiowa language.
Government The Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma is headquartered in Carnegie, Oklahoma. Their tribal jurisdictional area includes Caddo, Comanche, Cotton, Grady, Kiowa, Tillman, and Washita Counties. Enrollment in the tribe requires a minimum blood quantum of 1/4 Kiowa descent.
J.T. Goombi, former Kiowa tribal chairman and first vice-president of the National Congress of American Indians
Donna Standing Steinberg, Kiowa-Wichita and Josephine Parker, Kiowa, with their beadwork
4.the Plains (para. 3) • The Great Plains are a broad expanse of flat land, much of it covered in prairie, steppe and grassland, which lies west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada. This area covers parts of the U.S. states of Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
The Canadian portion of the Plains is known as the Prairies. Some geographers include some territory of Mexico in the Plains, but many stop at the Rio Grande. The region is known for supporting extensive ranching and agriculture.
Countries： United States, Canada, Mexico • Coordinates：37°N 97°W • Length： 3,200 km (1,988 mi) • Width： 800 km (497 mi) • Area：1,300,000 km2 (501,933 sq mi)
