Survey Courses, Indian Literature, and the Way to Rainy Mountain

TEACHING NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE to non-Indian students involves as much unlearning as learning. Before students can even begin to appreciate the diversity of the many different Indian cultures and the richness of traditional oral or modern written Indian literature, they have to reevaluate old stereotypes and beware of new ones: misconceptions such as the Plains Warrior as Universal Indian, Indians as kid stuff, and Indians as "vanishing relics" of "dead" cultures; and new stereotypes such as the Indian as ecological Saint, Patriot Chief, or the counter image to the wooden Indian-the assumption that every Indian breast houses an epic poem. These and other related problems have attracted quite a bit of attention during the last few years-convention seminars, new anthologies, and bibliographic resumes of Indian studies attest to that. But panelists, editors, and scholars often assume that an instructor will be offered the luxury of an entire course on Indians or at least enough time to survey a 300-page anthology. In reality most high school and college teachers only have a limited time to discuss Indians, possibly as part of a "minorities" section in an introduction to American literature. The teacher thus faces a very difficult question: how do you introduce over a millennium of diversified Indian literatures with one short, "representative" book? Given this ridiculous situation, one option (there are really no solutions) is to assign The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), a lyric combination of Kiowa legends, historical and anthropological fact, and personal reminiscence written by N. Scott Momaday, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of House Made of Darwn (1968). Of course there are bound to be disadvantages to using one book. The Way to Rainy Mountain focuses on only one tribe, at one time the lifestyle of that tribe resembled the stereotyped lifestyle of the Plains Warrior, and N. Scott Momaday is certainly not a "typical" Indian. But handled correctly, these apparent disadvantages can be advantages in the classroom. Because Momaday limits himself to his own tribe, he has the time to provide the cultural and historical background