In describing what sounds like the perfect symbiotic relationship: "The words we had were the right ones; we were easy and right with each other, as it happened, natural, full of love and trust. 'Look,' one of us would say to the other, 'here is something new, something that we have not seen together'" (154). This last sentence is especially important -- it is not only the ability to converse and share ideas with another that makes language such a defining feature of humanity and consciousness, but it is the coupling of this ability with the ability to imagine that other -- and thus oneself -- without another, in an entirely separate context, that makes language spectacular in this instance. The idea of shared experience necessarily implies the concept of solitary experiences, and it is imagination and language's ability to bridge the gap of separate self-hoods and create an awareness of self and other that makes humanity what it is. The truly far-reaching implications of Momaday's thoughts on the creative aspect of language and imagination become clear in his book The Way to Rainy Mountain (1976). In this book, the author visits the story of the Kiowa people, the people of his own heritage if not of his language. Throughout the story of their travels, imagination and language take on highly creative roles, organizing the world into intelligible units and forces that can be manipulated only after they are understood. Language does not just allow for a sense of self, but also for an understanding of reality.

This is made especially clear in the prologue, in which Momaday reflect on the stories of the Kiowa's origin and their migration from their original homeland in this manner: "the way to Rainy Mountain is...

That is, the experience of the Kiowas' journey to Rainy Mountain is not really real until it has been expressed, either formulated in a pattern of language within one's own mind, shared through language with another, or imagined -- again, in a pattern of repeatable and communicable language -- in the mind of another. Not only do these acts lead to the creation of the reality of this journey, at least in terms of reality as it is experienced by a human consciousness, but each time the journey is so realized it is again made real. Language and imagination thus have the singular ability, and even the responsibility, to both create and perpetuate reality in the human context. This is something that no other features of humanity are able to accomplish, and something that requires both language and imagination working in tandem in order for this function to truly operate.
Momaday's philosophy is deceptively complex; it seems simple to assert that language creates the framework of reality, but the implications of this assertion are quite far-reaching and profound. In each of the works touched upon above, Momaday demonstrates the power that language has in creating the human experience. His expression of it in each work is an extension of this creation.

Works Cited

Momaday, N. Scott. (1997). The Man Made of Words. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Momaday, N. Scott. (1996). The Names. University of Arizona Press.

Momaday, N. Scott. (1969). The Way to Rainy Mountain. University of New Mexico Press.