Original scientific paper
Relational Topography of N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain
Sanja Runtić
; Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek
Abstract
This paper discusses N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) in light of several American Indian Studies critical concepts and methodologies – Daniel Heath Justice’s paradigms of kinship and relational identity, Tom Holm, Diane Pearson, and Ben Chavis’s Peoplehood Matrix, and Jace Weaver’s concept of communitism. It argues that Momaday’s narrative and imaginative reconstruction of Kiowa generational memory affirms the spiritual and holistic nucleus of peoplehood as well as a close correlation of language, sacred history, ceremony, and place to cultural identity and survival. It also maintains that Momaday’s distinctive narrative technique and its dialogic design – a strategic traversing and manipulation of discursive, epistemological, and generic boundaries – accentuates the continuity of Kiowa oral tradition as well as the relational intention and configuration of his text.
Keywords
The Way to Rainy Mountain, Peoplehood Matrix, kinship, relational identity, communitism, dialogism
Hrčak ID:
317812
URI
Publication date:
12.6.2024.
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