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in the dynamics of the story's creation” (13). The traditional listener already knows the stories being told, and she often interrupts the stories to ask for clarification or to add insight to what is being told. Thus, the Native American approach to storytelling depends, at least in part, on a privileged audience that has a clear understanding of Native American traditions. Native American language usage resists Western discourse as it subverts Western authority. If the Western reader does not know the Native American traditions that the Native American writer expects her reader to know, the Western reader will find herself to be an “Other” in relation to Native American discourse.
Of course, the Native American writer who wants to be published must also write for the “uninformed” reader. Ironically, most modern and contemporary stories written by Native Americans are written in English, the language of the colonizer. However, the Native American epistemological traces within these stories resist the Western discourse in which they are communicated. Paul Beekman Taylor suggests that the Native American writer appropriates Eurocentric discourse in order to “[r]eshape it in his own style” (24). Owens explains that the effect of this approach is a “richly hybridized dialogue aimed at those few with privileged knowledge—the traditionally educated Indian reader—as well as those with claims to a privileged discourse—the Eurocentric reader” (14). While the Native American reader reads her own and other discourses in Native American literature, the Eurocentric reader's expectations of hegemony are redirected toward a discourse of deconstruction. Rather than an articulation of the native as a knowable Western counter-self, this discourse complicates native identities as it appropriates other voices. In such dialogical appropriation, native discourse is similar to Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of dialogical rhetoric, which James P. Zappen describes as “an act of (and an active) listening to each voice from the perspective of the others, a ‘dialogized heteroglossia.’ Its purpose is to test our own and others' ideas and ourselves and thus to determine together what we should think and how we should live” (9). Native discourse listens to, evaluates, and adapts Western narratives by either writing over them—as in a palimpsest—or appropriating them.