|
|
that assume Western hegemony and grant representational authority to the West.
Edward Said, in Orientalism, argues that Western travel accounts have influenced the ways in which history views both the places to which the West has traveled and the Western/Other encounters that have taken place, and still take place, at those sites. Though Orientalism focuses mostly on the opposing cultural dynamics of the occidental West and the oriental East, Said's argument may be equally applied to the conflicts between Western and Native American constructions of reality because, in either case, the West has imagined Others and has spoken for them. It is important to examine these hegemonic claims to knowledge in a postcolonial framework that critiques the essentialization and Orientalization of New Mexico and its people because Western claims to knowledge often fall apart when countered by Native American experiences. As different claims to knowledge collide, a truer representation of New Mexico and its people is uncovered.
New Mexican natives do not know New Mexico through the Western discourse of official history. Although they are well aware of the West's story of contact in New Mexico, they know New Mexico through native oral histories. Oral traditions are a way to subvert official written histories by illuminating the gaps which Western history has left out. Oral storytelling is an active form of postcolonial resistance in that it causes us to rethink the nature of stories and of reality itself. Such historical revision is a re-envisioning of the past and present. Historical revision considers who is representing a place or a people, and what the representing body might have for an agenda. History is not a linear sequence of events that can be contained. It is a story, and a story's truth depends on the expectations and assumptions of the discursive community in which it is created.
Fortunately, with the rise in publication of Native American literature since 1968, which many critics, such as Kenneth Lincoln (Native American Renaissance) and Christina M. Hebebrand (Native American and Chicano/a Literature of the American Southwest: Intersections of Indigenous Literature), attribute to the Native American literary renaissance, starting with N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn in 1968, New