Julie's Essay

Julie Philippe
Mr. H. Salsich
English 9
November 12th, 2008

A Journey
-an essay base on N. Scott Momaday’s “The Way To Rainy Mountain”

We often refer to our grandmothers as good cooks, wonderful quilt makers, and cheerful people, without ever thinking about the past they have held on to all their lives. As kids, some grandmothers might have come home to a loving family with food on the table every night, while some have much history to tell, like Aho in N. Scott Momaday’s essay “ The Way to Rainy Mountain”. Throughout his essay, Momaday speaks about his grandmother’s culture and how painful it was for her to have everything taken away. Aho could get through anything, “however much they had suffered and would suffer again, they had found a way out of the wilderness” (Momaday, 316).

Aho, the grandmother, went through everything from migrating to “a sunless world”, to attending the last Sun Dance in 1890, to struggling to keep her culture alive, and to dying into the silence and “endless wake of some final word”. SD Coming from a cabalistic(FAST) tribe, Aho believed in the sun and Tai-Me, the Sun Dance Doll who was thought of a symbol of their tribe. CM Once they had crossed the Southern Plains of the endless desert, “they had been transformed.” CM The fact that they were no longer captive to a demand for survival, but rather “lordly and dangerous society of fighters and thieves, hunters and priests of the sun”, transformed them into people living in a “sunless” world. SD When the Kiowas got to the land of the Crows, they realized they had no choice but to change their lives. CM They walked through the yellow plains and high mountains and at the base of a rock, invented a legend. CM From that moment on, whatever they were and wherever they were, stuck in the never lasting plains and mountains, “they could be no more”. SD It is perceived that the Kiowas lost all their freedom to live a simple life. CM Their most precious ritual called the Sun Dance to which they danced together was being taken away from them by the soldiers known as the killers of god. CM Aho’s circuitous(FAST) prayers were filled with words of hope, so that they would agonize(FAST) no more.

Grandmothers may like to bake brownies for their grandkids and change the bed sheets for visitors, but everyone has a past, and so do they. Maybe no one tells you anything about it, but a history like Aho surely made a difference. Aho suffered to keep herself alive, prayed countless times with such powerful words, and died in a world of deep silence (3 ACTIONS). Aho may have died, but her journey through these “great billowing clouds that sail upon [the] shadows [of] water, dividing light”, will never be forgotten.