--- title: "The Remembered Earth" sousTitre: "Once in his life, wrote N. Scott Momaday, a man should focus his mind on the remembered earth—surrender to a single landscape, regard it from every angle, linger over it, inhabit it through memory." description: "The remembered earth, an expression from Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday: the land held by memory, speech, and imagination—not a backdrop to pass through, but a landscape to which one surrenders." date: 2026-06-10 lang: en tradition: kiowa auteurs: ["N. Scott Momaday"] --- # The Remembered Earth A solitary knoll rises from the plain in Oklahoma, northwest of the Wichita Mountains. *A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma*—so begins the introduction to *The Way to Rainy Mountain* (1969). For his people, the Kiowas, writes N. Scott Momaday, it is an ancient landmark: they named it Rainy Mountain. Momaday returns there one July, after the death of his grandmother Aho, born when the Kiowa culture of the plains was in its final years. From there, he retraces in thought and on the road the path his ancestors traveled in reverse three centuries earlier: descending from the highlands of Montana, from the headwaters of the Yellowstone to the southern plains, where they became, with the horse and the buffalo, the people who, as the prologue states, had "conceived a good idea of themselves"—*they had dared to imagine and determine who they were*. At the end of this slender book, woven from myth, history, and memory, comes the sentence that distills it all. Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk. Once in his life, a man should focus his mind on the remembered earth, I believe. He should surrender to a particular landscape of his experience, regard it from as many angles as he can, marvel at it, linger over it. He should imagine touching it with his hands in every season, and listen to the sounds that arise there. He should imagine the creatures that dwell within it, down to the slightest stirrings of the wind. He should recall the brilliance of noon and all the colors of dawn and dusk. Every word in this prescription carries weight. *Once in his life*: this is not a habit, but an act—something owed to a place as one owes a debt. *A particular landscape*: not nature in general, not the whole Earth; a precise hill, a precise river, the field behind a precise house. And then this sequence of verbs that resembles an exercise: to focus, to surrender, to regard, to marvel, to linger, to imagine, to listen, to recall. [The remembered earth](https://viasophia.org/lexique/remembered-earth/) is not the blurred backdrop lingering in memory: it is the work of labor, carried out season after season, angle after angle, through memory and imagination combined. It is not possessed by passing through. One surrenders to it—*give himself up*: the movement is one of yielding. *[Une voix de l'intérieur]* N. Scott Momaday (1934–2024), Kiowa, was the first Native American writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize (1969, for *House Made of Dawn*). *The Way to Rainy Mountain* is written in English, his language of composition: a Kiowa recounting his own people, without foreign mediation. The French provided here is a house rendering, marked as such. Why memory, and not merely sight? Because for Momaday, the land and the idea a people holds of itself are bound together by speech. The path to Rainy Mountain, he writes in the opening, is above all *the history of an idea, man’s idea of himself*—the history of an idea, the idea man holds of himself—and this idea "has its ancient and essential being in language." The journey he recounts was made, he says, *with the whole memory*—"that experience of the mind which is legendary as well as historical, personal as well as cultural." Three voices intertwine on every page: the myth told by the elders, the fact recorded by history, the grandson’s memory. None suffices alone. The remembered earth is what these three voices, together, uphold: *a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit, which endures*. This sentence carries a sharp edge for a Kiowa born in 1934. The culture of the plains—the horse, the buffalo, the Sun Dance—flourished for barely a century before being shattered: the herds exterminated, the last dance forbidden by soldiers. When Momaday writes, nearly everything has vanished; yet nearly everything, he notes, is *within the reach of memory still, though tenuously now*. In the epilogue, a hundred-year-old woman, Ko-sahn, sits beneath the arbor of Aho’s house and recounts a Sun Dance she witnessed as a child. The remembered earth is not, then, a writer’s reverie: it is what remains of a world when all that is left is speech—and proof that speech is enough to sustain it, provided one gathers it and makes it one’s own. Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun. Solitude is an aspect of this land. All things on the plain stand apart; no confusion of objects meets the eye—a hill, a tree, a man. To look upon this landscape at daybreak, the sun at your back, is to lose all sense of proportion. Your imagination quickens, and here, you think, Creation began. We, too, keep landscapes—by the thousands. But one must choose before comparing. Our images are captured to be stored outside ourselves: photography preserves the place in our stead, precisely sparing us the labor Momaday prescribes. It is consulted; it is not remade. The remembered earth, by contrast, is stored nowhere: it exists only as long as a mind retraces it—touches it in every season, listens to it, lingers over it—and it dies with the one who ceases to carry it, unless speech passes it on. And the relationship of possession is reversed: the archived landscape belongs to us, among a thousand others; to the remembered landscape, it is we who belong, because we have surrendered to it. What remains is the slender common ground: here as there, a place can become part of oneself. On the last page of the introduction, before his grandmother’s grave, Momaday writes only: *Looking back once, I saw the mountain and came away*. He could leave: the mountain was remembered. Once in his life, he says. Which landscape, for each of us, would deserve such labor? ## Sources - N. Scott Momaday, *The Way to Rainy Mountain* — University of New Mexico Press, 1969 (éd. de poche 1976), trans. texte original anglais ; rendu français maison Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/reenchanter/2026-06-10-remembered-earth/