Nature, Landscape, and Animals Theme Analysis

Nature, landscape, and animals are just as important to Kiowa history and culture as people. This shows the Kiowa veneration of the non-human world and suggests that the Kiowas did not consider humans, animals, and nature to be entirely distinct.

The stories that Momaday narrates include many instances of a blurred line between human and animal. In one story, a man turns into a water beast, and in another a boy becomes a bear. Spiders can be grandmothers and redbirds can be husbands and fathers to humans. Animals’ actions in Kiowa stories are often just as conscious as the actions of people—therefore, animals have as big a role in shaping Kiowa history and culture as humans do. Similarly, in Kiowa history, people and the landscape affect one another profoundly. Humans shape the landscape and nature (for example, by killing all the buffalo, or by clawing the sides of Devil’s Tower) and the landscape shapes humans in return (the Kiowas are carnivores and hunters as opposed to farmers because they come from a landscape filled with animals that they can hunt).

More than any other natural force, horses shaped Kiowa history and culture. Momaday is up front about the difficulty of Kiowa life before horses: hunting was arduous and travel was impossible. Horses rescued the Kiowas from the difficult landscape of the northern plains and “set their nomadic soul free.” Momaday suggests that it was horses that enabled Kiowas to find their destiny and dignity and to settle in their natural landscape of the southern plains. In other words, without the horse Momaday believes that the Kiowas would not have been able to fulfill their nature as a tribe. Because of this, horses were revered.

The landscape itself is also a central character of Rainy Mountain. Momaday’s poetic evocations of the landscape reflect the ways that the Kiowas venerated nature and defined themselves through place. When Momaday writes that “to look upon that landscape [makes you think that this] is where Creation was begun” or that “the landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood” he is communicating that it is the landscape as much as anything else that has made the Kiowas who they are.

This focus on nature, landscape, and animals is part of the unconventionality of the history that Momaday is telling. In most western histories, humans are the central characters. They are distinct from nature, and they act upon the non-human world, not the other way around. The centrality of nature and animals is telling of the Kiowa relationship to the environment—the Kiowas see their history as inextricable from the history of the natural world, and, as such, their stories show Kiowa people to be blended with natural forces.