TheWay to Rainy Mountain

N.Scott Momaday

 

教学目的、要求：

To understand famousAfrican writers, their masterpieces and the prevailing themes in their works;

To analyze the writingstyle, structure and the theme;

To interpret modernman’s quest for self-identity;

To understand the symbols in the article.

To grasp the author’ssearch for his Kiowa identity through his description of the landscape and thenarration of the history and culture of the Kiowas ;to appreciate two strikingwriting features of the prose: the skillful weaving of an individual’s lifewith the story of a people and blending of a moving narrative of the stores ofthe Kiowas with a lyrical and pictorial description of the landscape; to masterthe use of alliteration; To conduct a discussion about the survival ofnon-mainstream cultures in the trend of globalization.

教学重点及难点：

The dilemma of modernman;

African Americans’ identity in the white-dominatedsociety.

Additional Background Information

N.Scott Momaday

https://ais.arizona.edu/users/n-scott-momaday

https://m.imdb.com/video/vi2113256217?playlistId=nm0597333&ref_=m_nm_ov_vi

  N. Scott Momaday was born in Lawton, Oklahoma in 1934. When he was born,most American Indian tribal communities had long ceased to exist. His Kiowaancestors shared with other Plains Indians the horrors of disease, militarydefeat, and cultural and religious deprivation in the 19th century. The onlyway for them to survive was to adapt themselves to new circumstances. Momaday’sgrandfather had to take up farming, a decision pressed upon him by the GeneralAllotment Act of 1887.

  Momaday’s father Al Momaday was educated at Bacon College and theUniversities of New Mexico and California. He was a well-known artist, deeplycommitted to his Kiowa heritage. His mother, one-eighth Cherokee andseven-eighths Euro-American, grew up in a middle-class family and was educatedat Haskell Institute, Crescent Girls College, and the University of New Mexico.She studied art and journalism and became a well-known painter and writer.

  Given his parents’ academic backgrounds and their integration into Anglo-Americanculture, which did not sever their ties to their Kiowa and Cherokee ancestors,Momaday received a truly bicultural education. Between 1936 and 1943, Momadayand his parents lived on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico and Arizona.During this time, Momaday became familiar with Navajo culture and learned someof their language. After the family moved to Jemez Pueblo in 1946, Momadaybecame closely acquainted with Pueblo Indian culture and the unique landscapeof the Rio Grande valley. Momaday witnessed the fundamental changes which tookplace at Jemez and the cultural and personal disintegration among his Jemezneighbors.

  From 1952 to 1956 Momaday attended the University of New Mexico,majoring in political science with minors in English and speech. At this pointhe began to be interested in writing. Then he went to study law at the Universityof Virginia, graduating instead with a B.A. in political science.Between 1959 and 1963 he did his doctoral studies in English at Stanford. In1962 Momaday received an Academy of American Poets prize for his poem “TheBear”.

  From 1963 to 1969 Momaday was an assistant and later associate professorof English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There he taughtAmerican Indian studies and was very much concerned with the Indian oraltradition. In 1968 he published his first novel House Made of Dawn. In thisnovel, the author explores the problem of marginalization thatAmerican Indians suffered, along with their attempts to mediate their internalstruggles by reconnecting with their tribal heritage. The novel introduced anew technique in American Indian narrative style, quickly elevated Momaday to aprominent position in American letters and won him the Pulitzer Prize forFiction in 1969, making Momaday the first Native American writer to be grantedthis prize. In 1969 he published The Wayto Rainy Mountain. The book, which is Momaday’s inquiry into his Indianpast, is divided into three chapters with 24 triads consisting of mythical,historical and personal narratives.

  His essay "The American Land Ethic" (1971) drew publicattention to the tradition of respect for nature practiced by the nativepeoples and its significance to modern American society in an era ofenvironmental degradation.Momaday wrote many poems, his poetryreflecting his interest in Indian cultures. In particular, theworks Angle of Geese and Other Poems (1974), The Gourd Dancer(1976), In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991 (1992),and In the Bear's House (1999), reflect his continuing concern for Kiowaculture, history, song, ceremony, and myth and also reveal the post-symbolisttechnique that he learned from his Stanford mentor, Ivor Winters.

Since1974 painting and sketching have become important forms of creative expressionfor Momaday. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States. Hisnewer books are frequently illustrated with his own paintings and etchings.

In thepast years, Momaday has taught English and given lectures at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, Stanford University, the University of Arizona,Princeton, and Columbia. His work has been translated into Russian, Polish,German, Italian, Norwegian, and Japanese.

In 2007Momaday was awarded the National Medal of Arts “for his writings and his work thatcelebrate and preserve Native American art and oral tradition.”

 

 

About Native American History

1. The Trans-Mississippi West was farfrom empty of human habitation when the newcomers arrived during the period ofwestward expansion. An estimated 360,000 Indians lived in this region in themid-19th century. Among the Indians dwelling on the Great Plains, theintroduction of horses by the Spanish at the end of the 16th century, and offirearms by British traders in the 18th century, had created the armed andmounted warrior tribes encountered by 19th century westward migrants.Commercial and other contacts with the non-Indian world continued to beimportant to the Plains Indians as new settlers moved in.

 But beyond these generally positive exchanges, contact with advancingnon-Indians massively disrupted Indian life everywhere. Disease, which haddevastated Native Americans since the earliest European contact, continued itsravages among 19th century western Indians. All tribes suffered severely fromsmallpox, measles, and diphtheria, as well as other diseases contracted fromtraders and settlers. The non-Indians who descended on the Plains after 1850had no understanding of traditional Indian culture and little inclination torespect or preserve the “savages” ways. Military defeat, massacres, forcedremoval to reservations, and devastation by disease, alcohol and impoverishmentall bewildered and demoralized the Plains Indian peoples. By the 1890srelocation to distant, often inferior, and generally inadequate lands hadbecome 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)

2. As the frontier pressed in from eastand west, the relentless greed of non-Indian settlers drove the Indians intowhat was supposed to be their last refuge. Mounted on horses, perhaps 250,000Indians in the Great Plains and mountain regions lived mainly off the herds ofbuffalo which provided food and, from their hides, clothing and shelter. Nosooner was the Jacksonian removal policy complete than the onrush of migrationin the 1840s began to crowd the Indians’ land. Emigrants crossing to Oregon,California, Utah, and Santa Fe came into contact and often into conflict withthe Native Indians. In 1851 the chiefs of the principal plains tribes weregathered at Fort Laramie, where they agreed to accept more or less definitetribal borders and to leave the emigrants unmolested on their trails. The newarrivals soon found it easier to force one tribe to cede its lands withoutarousing the others, for the Indians could never realize the old dream of aunified resistance.

  From the early 1860s until the late 1870s the frontier was ablaze withIndian wars, and intermittent outbreaks continued through the 1880s. In 1867, aconference was held in Kansas, and ended with an agreement that the Kiowa,Commanche, Arapahoes, and Cheyennes would accept lands in western Oklahoma. ButIndian resistance in the southern Plains continued until the Red River War of1874—1875. (Based on “Chapter 19 New Frontiers” of the book America: A Narrative History by GeorgeBrown Tindall)