Answer fast what monumental life occurrence caused n. scott momaday to being his journey exploring the history of his people to find out more about himself?

Imagination is Momaday’s “divine blindness” : the invisibility of words transmitted orally and conveyed by the communal work of memory and imagination. These words are so deeply rooted in the origins of mankind; they are so sacred that they inspire awe in the artist whose task is to protect them. They generate a paradoxical feeling of admiration ― because they are immemorial ― and fear ― because they must be decoded to play their role and could remain out of intellectual reach if they were not. In the same essay, Momaday mentions Alastair Reid who identified in Borges’s work the presence of this “sagrada horror” (sacred awe) towards words, towards what cannot be mastered by the artist because it belongs to the divine. Momaday shares the same viewpoint and insists on the perplexing character of ancestral oral tradition, this archaic “minor” language running at the deepest level of tribal narratives written in English. This embedded language is the imaginary reconstruction of a “non-reality” ― as remembrance is just an image of what was real once ― and as such, it is clearly postmodern. Apparently absurd, interior and fleeting when undecoded, oral tradition offers another vision of the world or the vision of another world. The Way to Rainy Mountain is Momaday’s most postmodern creation as it is mainly built on oral tradition, but it is also a magnificent demonstration of how Native American literatures can actually bypass the postmodern substratum when the gaps and fragments of memory are bridged by imagination.