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Delahoyde & Hughes
Orpheus
THE KIOWA
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N. Scott Momaday's account of the Kiowan creation, an
account he inherited from his grandmother and which obviously has an
ancient oral history beforehand, starts like this:
The tribe emerges into the world through a hollow log. Ah, but where was
the other end of that hollow log? we ask, congratulating ourselves for
destroying the logic of the story. Is this less illogical on that level
than Genesis, about which one could ask equally difficult and probably
irrelevant questions?
This is a quite affirming creation myth, and the opening two words lend
the material an additional casual and reassuring quality. You're told you
have connections on "the other side," and you can celebrate being out
through the log without it implying any superiority on your part for
being so. Creation is a collective experience instead of a competition as
to who's first. There's no "Adam" here; instead, there's a whole people.
And the name they give themselves is a verb! They conceive of themselves
as a verb instead of a noun, a wave instead of a particle, a doing
instead of a being, a process instead of a stasis. This has to signify a
completely different sense of identity from that of traditional Western
culture and its predilection for nouns and even "nounification" of verbs
to the extent that overuse of the "to be" verb is the most widespread
stylistic writing weakness among Anglos. You know?
N. Scott Momaday. The Way to Rainy Mountain. University of New
Mexico Press, 1969. 16.
Honors Literature Students' Web
Page #1
Honors Literature
Students' Web Page #2: Chris Davidson and Amanda Piland.
You know, everything had to begin, and this is how it was: the Kiowas
came one by one into the world through a hollow log.
Note the differences between a creation story that launches with "IN THE
BEGINNING, GOD" with one that begins, "You know...." What does this
reflect? How are such cultures going to differ in their general
attitudes?
There were many more than now, but not all of them got out.
Note that the ones who do emerge from the log do not receive this as a
reward for any vague moral superiority. It was just chance; and the nice
aspect of this is that you can know you have relatives on the other side
who just happened not to finish the journey through the log.
There was a woman whose body was swollen up with child, and she got stuck
in the log. After that, no one could get through, and that is why the
Kiowas are a small tribe in number.
As with "The Fall" in Genesis, we can blame a woman again for messing up
the idyll, but there doesn't necessarily seem to be that judgmental
aspect in this story. In a mythological sense, there is a wisdom to this
mini-crisis: it does seem that you shouldn't be ready to give birth when
you're being born yourself. The woman being stuck stops traffic,
etiologically an explanation as to why "the Kiowas are a small tribe in
number."
They looked all around and saw the world. It made them glad to see so
many things.
What is absent from this creation story (in contrast to Genesis, for
example)? This absence places emphasis on what instead? What does that
shift in emphasis suggest about the respective cultures?
They called themselves Kwuda, "coming out."
This is a very unusual name for a people. When you played kickball
in 4th grade, what
did you name your team? What kinds of names do sports teams and schools
adopt? How is this one vastly different, even in a basic grammatical way,
and what might that indicate about the respective cultures?