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relation to a community. Native American identity, then, is inextricably bound with land and community. In order to represent Native American identity and epistemology, it is essential that the native speak her own experience before someone else fills in the gaps. The New Mexican native who speaks the native experience resists Western representation and discursive containment.
Native American writers resist Western discursive containment by incorporating “alternate strategies, indigenous perspectives, or language usages that, literally or figuratively, make its ‘English’ on the page a translation in which traces of the ‘foreign tongue,’ the ‘Indian,’ can be discerned” (Krupat 6). Alternative strategies include counter-discourse and oral traditions, both of which offer stories that compete with Western master narratives or metanarratives. Deborah L. Madsen explains that counter-discourse “refers to a style of expression whereby the colonized is ‘writing back’ to contest specific narratives that articulate the ideology of colonialism” (67). One type of counter-discourse is counterstory. Counterstory, as Lindemann Nelson explains in Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair, “positions itself against a number of master narratives: the stories found lying about in our culture that serve as summaries of socially shared understandings. Master narratives are often archetypal, consisting of stock plots and readily recognizable character types” (qtd. in Hebebrand 141). Metanarratives work in the same way as master narratives. Both assume the superiority of the West. Owens writes, “[t]he metanarrative of Euroamerican colonization, which…requires the American Indian to play a specific role in the drama of [Western] redemption, is very much a political discourse” that authorizes the West's political power over the Native American (120).
I have already touched upon Native American perspectives and how their articulation resists Western discourse. However, it is important to clarify how such articulation depends on native language usage. Owens argues that the traditional audience of Native American stories, told in the oral tradition, was an integral part of every story's form. He writes, “[t]raditionally, a [Native American] storyteller's audience consisted of tribe or clan members who could be counted on to contribute a wealth of intimate knowledge to the telling of any story, to thus actively participate