猫换牙
The Way to Rainy Mountain
而或长烟一空的或
N. Scott Momaday
( Guide to Reading )
谆谆教诲的近义词 N. Scott Momaday is one of the foremost American Indian writers and the first American Indian writer to receive a Pulitzer Prize for literature.”阿拉蕾崔雅涵 The Way to Rainy Mountain” first appeared in Reporter, 26 January 1967. With few modifications this piece is ud as the introduction to his book 交换律和结合律The Way to Rainy Mountain, published in 1969.
Our first and foremost reason for studying this essay is not the author's special racial identity, nor the history of his Kiowa people, though the American Indian elements depicted in this piece are undoubtedly interesting, thought-provoking and capable of widening our knowledge of the Native Americans. We are reading and examining this essay mainly becau it is an excellent piece of pro. One of its strik
ing features is the skillful weaving of an individual's life with the story of a people. Here Momaday not only tells the story of his grandmother, but also explores the history of his Kiowas ancestors and thus his own racial and cultural heritage. In tracing the three stages of his people's history—emergence, evolution, and decline—the author conveys complicated feelings of nostalgia, belonging, and pride, mixed with a n of loss and a light touch of sadness. Our cultural or ethnic heritage may differ, yet eking one's roots is a common human experience.
Momaday also blends a moving narrative of the stories of the Kiowas with a lyrical and pictorial description of the landscape where his ancestors once ranged in their golden age and where he has returned in order to know where he came from and who he is. In his pictures of his ancestral home, the land, the sun, the moon, the hills, the trees and everything el there are all portrayed with both visual precision and powerful imagination. One cannot fail to be impresd by the author's clo involvement with the land. Momaday says: "Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to g
ive himlf up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every ason and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk." This essay allows us to share with Momaday when he concentrates his mind upon his remembered earth.
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1 A single knoll ris out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Wichita Range. For my people, the Kiowas, it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. The hardest weather in the world is there. Winter brings blizzards, hot tornadic winds ari in the spring, and in summer the prairie is an anvil’s edge. The grass turns brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your feet. There are green belts along the rivers and creeks, linear groves of hickory and pecan, willow and wi
tch hazel. At a distance in July or August the steaming foliage ems almost to writhe in fire. Great green-and-yellow grasshoppers are everywhere in the tall grass, popping up like corn to sting the flesh, and tortois crawl about on the red earth, going nowhere in the plenty of time. Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lo the n of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.
2 I returned to Rainy Mountain in July. M grandmother had died in the spring, and I wanted to be at her grave. She had lived to be very old and at last infirm. Her only living daughter was with her when she died, and I was told that in death her face was that of a child.
竹梯3 I like to think of her as a child. When she was born, the Kiowas were living that last great moment of their history. For more than a hundred years they had controll
ed the open range from the Smoky Hill River to the Red, from the headwaters of the Canadian to the fork of the Arkansas and Cimarron. In alliance with the Comanches, they had ruled the whole of the southern Plains. War was their sacred business, and they were among the finest hormen the world has ever known. But warfare for the Kiowas was preeminently a matter of disposition rather than of survival, and they never understood the grim血糯米的做法, unrelenting advance of the U.S. Cavalry. When at last,糯米汤圆 divided and ill-provisioned, they were driven onto the Staked Plains in the cold rains of autumn, they fell into panic. In Palo Duro Canyon they abandoned their crucial stores to pillage and had nothing then but their lives. In order to save themlves, they surrendered to the soldiers at Fort Sill and were imprisoned in the old stone corral that now stands as a military muum. My grandmother was spared the humiliation of tho high gray walls by eight or ten years, but she must have known from birth the affliction of defeat, the dark brooding of old warriors.
4 Her name was Aho, and she belonged to the last culture to evolve in North Am
erica. Her forebears came down from the high country in western Montana nearly three centuries ago. They were a mountain people, a mysterious tribe of hunters who language has never been positively classified in any major group. In the late venteenth century they began a long migration to the south and east. It was a long journey toward the dawn, and it led to a golden age. Along the way the Kiowas were befriended by the Crows, who gave them the culture and religion of the Plains. They acquired hors, and their ancient nomadic spirit was suddenly free of the ground. They acquired Tai-me, the sacred Sun Dance doll, from that moment the object and symbol of their worship, and so shared in the divinity of the sun. Not least, they acquired the n of destiny, therefore courage and pride. When they entered upon the southern Plains, they had been transformed. No longer were they slaves to the simple necessity of survival; they were a lordly and dangerous society of fighters and thieves, hunters and priests of the sun. According to their origin myth, they entered the world through a hollow log. From one point of view, their migration was the fruit of an old prophecy, for indeed they emerged from a sunless world.
