Reclaiming Kiowa Heritage: N. Scott Momaday’s Cultural and Literary Journey

Abstract

N. Scott Momaday occupies a significant position in Native American literature for his sustained engagement with Indigenous history, cultural memory, ancestral traditions, and the relationship between people and place. His writings demonstrate how literature can become a means of recovering cultural knowledge and reaffirming an identity shaped by ancestral experience. This research paper examines Momaday’s literary engagement with Kiowa traditions and his efforts to preserve and reinterpret the cultural heritage of his ancestors. The study focuses particularly on The Way to Rainy Mountain, The Names: A Memoir, and selected poems and prose writings in which memory, storytelling, landscape, mythology, and ancestral voices become central to the recovery of cultural identity.
Momaday draws upon Kiowa oral traditions, tribal histories, sacred places, and familial memories to reconnect the contemporary self with a deeply rooted cultural past. His representation of Rainy Mountain, the journey of the Kiowas, the sacred figure of Tai-me, and other elements of Kiowa tradition illustrates the enduring relationship between cultural identity and ancestral memory. The study argues that Momaday’s literary journey represents an act of cultural reclamation through which memory, storytelling, and place contribute to the renewal of Kiowa identity and the preservation of Indigenous heritage.