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what she understands the Pueblo, especially the Taos Pueblo, identity to be. She sees New Mexico as a new Eden in which she, along with other self-aware Euro-Americans, may start anew. Thus, she too writes within a colonialist discourse. Luhan has already contained the Pueblos by knowing them as one homogeneous community. She thereby takes on what she defines as their “natural” characteristics so that she may “become” Pueblo by appropriating her myth of them. Luhan ignores native histories of conflict both between the West and the Other and among complicated native social structures. She, like Latour, performs colonial transmission in her travel to New Mexico.
In chapter 4, I show how Kate Horsley's Crazy Woman embraces the complexities of native contact in New Mexico. Sara, Horsley's protagonist, demonstrates both a failure of colonial transmission and a successful integration of native and Western claims to knowledge. Unlike Latour and Luhan, Sara represents the power of identity existing between two disparate cultures. Sara, like Latour, sees New Mexico as an unregenerate wilderness at first, and such knowledge claims place her within colonialist discourse. She later understands New Mexico as a place of origins—a new starting point for a fulfilling life not offered in America's industrial east. However, Horsley's narrative differs from Cather's and Luhan's in that Horsley refutes the myth of Anglo superiority in which the West claims to know the Other and acts accordingly. Horsley focuses on local native conflicts and underscores the heterogeneity of native communities.
I offer a postcolonial reading of Silko's Ceremony in chapter 5. I claim that Ceremony talks back to colonial stereotypes through native self-representation. Silko's protagonist, Tayo, recovers a fractured or lost identity by moving through his native geographical space, informed by native and Western claims to knowledge, to encounter different spirits of place and to ceremonially enact (and thereby add to) native stories that his people had abandoned. The purpose of his ceremony is to survive and to adapt his and his native community's identities to New Mexico's changing colonial landscape. Silko focuses on existing social structures rather than on the binary construction of homogeneous Anglo and homogeneous Other.