In this article I investigate Navajo poet Laura Tohe's uses of metapragmatic terms in three literary works found in her bookNo Parole Today. Tohe's book focuses on the boarding school experience and is especially concerned with issues of language use. I argue that Tohe uses metadiscourses that both dramatize language use but also create affectively potent relations between speakers and the languages they use. These metadiscourses are implicit metadiscourses. Rather than explicitly stating that Navajo should be the language of social intimacy for Navajos, Tohe dramatizes such relationships. Such implicit metadiscourses gain added import when understood within the larger social fields of the Navajo Nation and current ideologies about the Navajo language. [Navajo, poetry, metapragmatics, affectivity, metadiscourses, language ideologies]
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