A pilgrimage is a spiritual quest, a journey to a place of that has moral or religious significance to the person who embarks on the journey. In The Way to a Rainy Mountain, Momaday embarks on a pilgrimage to his grandmother’s grave, a place he believes will bring him closer to his people and give him a fuller understanding of his place in the world. For a journey to be a pilgrimage, it has to have personal meaning to the journeyer, and it has to help him reach a different level of consciousness. For Momaday, traveling to his grandmother’s’ grave allowed him to return to his spiritual roots and absorb into his conscious memory the collective experience of his ancestors, the Kiowa people. Momaday’s quest is one of self-discovery, in other words. He travels to a place that has historical significance to him in order to feel more connected to his heritage and gain a fuller understanding of his identity.
A pilgrimage is usually a long journey one makes to a religious shrine or other location of deeply spiritual significance: Lourdes, the Wailing Wall, or Kedarnath, for example. Metaphorically, however, a pilgrimage may also be a period of intense inner reflection, wherein one examines values and beliefs, or even represent the progress of a social group over time.
Using paternal, historical, and authorial voices, Momaday constructs the history of the Kiowa Indians in his three-part narrative. Through his juxtaposition of folklore and history with personal memoir, Momaday discovers more about his own heritage and the Kiowa from an anthropological perspective. Even the titles of the book’s three sections evoke the stages of a pilgrimage: they are titled “The Setting Out,” “The Going On,” and “The Closing In,” respectively. The journey Momaday enjoins readers to take is one that will lead them to a new understanding and appreciation of how to perceive the history of an indigenous people. In this way, The Way to Rainy Mountain could be thought of as a pilgrimage.
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