Lesson9TheWaytoRainyMountain现代大学英语精读课件.ppt

About the author My father was a great storyteller and he knew many stories from the Kiowa oral tradition, says N. Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and Regents Professor of English at the University of Arizona. He told me many of these stories over and over because I loved them. But it was only after I became an adult that I understood how fragile they are, because they exist only by word of mouth, always just one generation away from extinction. That’s why I began to write down the tales my father and others had told me. About the author As a writer, teacher, artist and storyteller, Momaday has devoted much of his life to safeguarding oral tradition and other aspects of Indian culture. They organized themselves by age. This is called age grade social organization. The boys and young mens organizations were the most important. The men hunted and the women did the gathering. Para9 1.... she never forgot her birthright. 1) Although she became a Christian she never forgot her cultural heritage as a Kiowa. 2) birthright: a right or rights that a person has because of nation, etc. 2. As a child she had been to the Sun Dances, she had taken part in---.., in the presence of Tai-me. The restoration of her people in the presence of Tai-me: As the most powerful medicine the Kiowas possessed, Tai-me was hung from a tree and worshiped as the bringer of good luck during a Sun Dance ceremony. In the presence of Tai-me, the Kiowas were revived, healed and energized. After the ceremony, an important member of the Kiowa tribe was responsible for keeping Tai-me. Only this keeper had the right to open it. Para14 2. My line of vision was such that the creature filled the moon like a fossil: I happened to glance in that direction and there the cricket was perfectly framed by the full moon as if it were a fossil in it. 我当时的视线正好使我看到那只蟋蟀像块化石镶嵌在满月之中. Para14 3. It had gone there, I thought, to live and die.., its small definition made whole and eternal.我猜想,那