Wichita Mountains

The Wichita Mountains are more than a remembered landscape in Johanna Leonberger’s story: they hold the vivid particulars of a life with her Kiowa mother, Three Spotted, and remain present in the Kiowa song Johanna sings after she has been taken back to her German relatives. The mountains’ significance emerges through memory and song, set against the painful distance between the life Johanna recalls and the life others expect her to resume.

A remembered homeland

Johanna’s recollection gathers around the clear water of Cache Creek in the Wichita Mountains. She remembers swimming there with Three Spotted and other girls: they dunked one another, splashed through the current, and fell backward into the water. Young men drummed far up the mountainside while the girls, four or five of them, wore strings of vermilion beads in their hair. The memory is active and communal, full of water, movement, music, and shared laughter.

The recollection returns when Johanna is confronted with demands that she conform to the modesty expected of her German relatives. Rather than accepting their account of her as someone who must be corrected, she covers her eyes and thinks of Three Spotted and the girls at Cache Creek. She weeps with her hands open and her head bowed, mourning not an abstract past but the people and place whose loss has suddenly come back to her with painful force.

Landscape and displacement

The Wichita Mountains belong to Johanna’s remembered Kiowa life, not to the landscape of the family’s return journey. On that journey, she and Jefferson Kyle Kidd pass through the red and pink granite country north of Llano, where flowering plants cover the valleys and a ringtail cat cautiously takes spilled corn by the fire. Johanna whispers to the animal in Kiowa. The scene places her living language and attentiveness within a present landscape, while the Wichita Mountains remain the specifically recalled home of her earlier life.

The mountains in song

After Johanna has been brought back to Wilhelm and Anna Leonberger, the others look toward her as she sings slowly and very quietly in Kiowa, nodding her head to the beat. The song’s meaning is not established: it might be a curse against the enemies of the Coi-gu, a plea to the sun, praise for the Wichita Mountains, or a call for help. The uncertainty matters; the scene does not translate Johanna’s song into a single explanation for her relatives. But the mountains are named within the range of meanings the song may carry, linking the returned girl’s present voice to the homeland and losses that her relatives’ plans for her do not erase.