Because the Kiowa always were a small tribe, the stories which Momaday tells about them often emphasize a preoccupation with their numbers, and particularly with the danger of tribal disunion. One of the earliest tribal memories is of a quarrel between two chiefs over a slain antelope, which causes one of the chiefs to lead his people away into the darkness of prehistory, never to be seen again. This story is accompanied by that of an antelope drive which succeeds because all the people unite in a common effort.

Yet balanced against the threat of disunion are the grandmothers who appear again and again in the book. The death of Momaday’s grandmother Aho brings him back to Rainy Mountain. Spider Grandmother assures the survival of the twin sons of the Sun. The Talyi-da-i is associated with Spider Grandmother and with Keahdinekeah, Momaday’s father’s grandmother. Momaday’s grandfather’s grandmother Kau-au-ointy and the ancient Ko-sahn, who describes one of the last Sun Dances, are other examples. The grandmothers maintain tribal traditions, and they stand for harmony and tribal unity in the face of all the forces which threaten it.

At the same time, the element which provides Momaday with the means for uniting his own present with the Kiowa past, once Aho is dead, is language. The stories he tells imply, and his own commentaries say explicitly, that the book’s ultimate subject is language, which, in his view, is the one miracle-making power available to humanity. His grandmother’s strange word zei-dl-bei (meaning “frightful”) was her way of confronting evil, “a warding off, an exertion of language upon ignorance and disorder.” Again and again in the book language is seen in this way: Kiowa are saved from their enemies by the power of language, the god Tai-me gives himself to the Kiowa with a promise, an arrow maker saves himself and his family by using the Kiowa language, the storm god does not attack the Kiowa because he knows their language.

Eventually, however, language loses this redemptive power for the Kiowa, and, not coincidentally, this is the time when the traditional religion of the tribe also can no longer save them. Momaday’s juxtaposition of these two events with the general decline of the Kiowa as an independent tribe is related to his conception of language itself. Just as the Kiowa emerge from myth and legend to enter the historical record, so words lose their original metaphoric power and lapse into mere denotation. From that stage the Kiowa language would fall into cliche and die, were it not for the power of the poet, who saves it by making poetry out of stale language, that is, by breathing new metaphorical life into it. Momaday, therefore, may be said to have taken the fragments of Kiowa experience which he remembered from his grandmother’s stories or discovered in his reading of history and ethnography and put them into a new artistic whole. The three movements of the book, therefore, suggest a structure of beginning, middle, and end, the birth, life, and death of the Kiowa tribe, but it is the artist’s task to create a fourth stage of their journey, beyond the cemetery at Rainy Mountain, in the work of art that is Momaday’s book. Language evolves from metaphor through denotation (history and science) to death (cliche), but just as language is rejuvenated in the new metaphors of the poet, so the three movements in the Kiowa journey (“The Setting Out,” “The Going On,” and “The Closing In”) lead inevitably to a fourth stage, which is the book itself.

Furthermore, to understand Momaday’s vision of the Kiowa, one must take account of the Kiowa religion as Momaday defines it. That religion is understood in relation to two objects of veneration: the ten bundles of the Talyi-da-i (“Boy Medicine”) and the Tai-me bundle. The Talyi-da-i originates in the myth of the boy who was the result of a Kiowa woman’s encounter with the Sun and who was reared by Spider Grandmother and miraculously split in two. When one of the twins disappeared into the waters of a lake—that is, became part of the natural world— the other converted himself into the ten bundles of the Talyi-da-i as a kind of eucharistic gift to the Kiowa.

The other myth that produced the Kiowa’s religious vision is of the advent of Tai-me, the strange creature who became the god of the Sun Dance. In a sense, Tai-me remained with the Kiowa in the form of a stone effigy which was kept concealed in a bundle and only exposed to the people once a year, when it was suspended from a pole in the Sun Dance lodge. In this effigy form Tai-me is a spiritual presence of the Sun itself, just as the buffalo bull, which is sacrificed for the occasion, is the embodiment of the Sun’s physical presence. In other words, the relation of the Sun to the buffalo and to Tai-me is a kind of trinity which, in a sense, corresponds to the God, Son, and Holy Spirit of the Christian Trinity.

Yet it should be noted that the American Indian religious vision is based upon quaternity rather than trinity. Again and again in American Indian cultures there is, for example, an emphasis on four directions, four reasons, four stages of life, or four symbolic colors, quaternities which are often seen to be images of one another. The Kiowa hunters could not be certain of success in the hunt if they did not prove themselves worthy in the Sun Dance; the Sun Dance is based upon a quaternity composed of the Sun, Tai-me, the sacrificed buffalo, and the buffalo herd itself.

At the same time, the relationship of the Tai-me effigy to the sacrificed buffalo of the Sun Dance resembles that of the ten bundles of the Talyi-da-i to the twin who returned to nature by entering the lake, just as the Sun—the spiritual father of the twins—is related to the maternal Spider Grandmother, who in their lives is associated with the natural world.