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Mexican Native American voices are representing themselves for their own communities and to other communities. Native voices are truer representations of their own past, present, and future realities because it is the natives who best understand their own experiences. Dominant historical accounts of New Mexico imagine Native Americans as abject, conquered nations. Because history has been told by the victors of history, much of New Mexico's history has been mute. However, David W. Price points out in History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and the Past that “novelists can give eyes and voice to the victims of history… [T]hey can reimagine the past by reconstructing it, just as historians do, in order to speculate on the conditions of what those of us in the present accept as ‘what really happened’ in that particular past” (qtd. in Hebebrand 29). Native American authors offer voices for colonized Native Americans who, Hebebrand reminds us, are “the victims of history” (29). Native American narratives “‘reimagine’ and ‘reconfigure’ their historical past in order to envision ways to cope with the future” (29). Because stories create reality, stories of a people, by a people, must be taken into account for an informed understanding of each community. The most reliable authority is that which represents itself.
Native representation is essential for New Mexican natives. They must speak their own stories to construct their own plots and destinies. Native representation is also necessary for a clearer understanding of New Mexico's native populations. Native response to the Western discourse that imagines Native Americans as subhuman, or as one-dimensional foils for Anglos, is necessary to show that stereotypes of Native Americans essentialize Native Americans and thereby contain them within Western discourse. Native Americans do not truly exist within Western discourse; rather, Native Americans exist within their own discourses.
In order to responsibly address Native American discourse, it is necessary to touch upon some New Mexican native epistemologies, as told by Native American voices. A complete overview of Native American epistemologies, however, is not within the scope of this discussion. Louis Owens notes that Native Americans belong to “radically diverse cultural groups speaking more than 250 distinct languages” (10). The following