NATIVE AMERICAN HUMOR
In Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Smoke Signals), James Many Horses signs his letters as “James Many Horses III.” He’s the only James Many Horses on the reservation, “but there is a certain dignity to any kind of artificial tradition.” In 1988, Vine Deloria named his book Custer Died for Your Sins after a bumper sticker on the Sioux reservation which was designed to tease missionaries. In Hopi, the word for “clowning” is the same word as that used for making a point. Hopi verbal humor relies heavily on puns, many of them sexual. In the Navajo culture, the first time an infant laughs, the family holds a celebration in which the child symbolically provides bread and salt to the family members and guests, signifying that he or she is now a part of the family. Alexander Posey created a fictional ethnic “reporter” named Fus Fixico (which means “fearless bird”) to comment on the wrongs done to the Creek people by the U.S. Government. Posey sometimes used the pen name “Chinnubbie Harjo,” who in Muskogee mythology was a trickster who could change his character.
John Lowe writes about ritual clowns in Native American cultures. Dressed outrageously, often in rags and masks, they mimic the serious Kachina dancers, stumbling, falling, throwing or even eating filth or excrement, setting up rival fake-Gods and “worshipping” them in an exaggerated fashion, only to beat them a few seconds later. Much of their humor is sexual, and some of the performers are permitted to grab spectators’ genitals.
Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man is based on Flaming Rainbow’s autobiographical Black Elk Speaks. Flaming Rainbow’s other name is John G. Neihardt. In Little Big Man, a contrary clown arrives riding backwards on a horse with his body painted in motley colors. He says “Goodbye” for “Hello,” “I’m glad I did it!” for “I’m sorry.” He cleans himself with sand, and then exits by walking through the river. In the summer, a contrary might pretend to feel cold and dress in buffalo robes. In the winter he pretends to be warm as he stands naked in the snow. Arapaho contraries groan loudly when they lift light objects and pretend not to notice when lifting truly heavy objects.
Apaches are fond of mocking white speech with high-pitched English exclamations like “I don’t like it, my friend. You don’t look good to me. Maybe you’re sick, need to eat some aspirins!.” Such language contains much verbal play, code-switching, stock phrases, specific lexical items, recurrent sentence types, and modifications in pitch, volume, tempo, and voice quality.
Vine Deloria says that Indians, like Jews, blacks, and other oppressed peoples, learn the rules and then invert them. Indians would say that Custer was well dressed at the Little Big Horn. When the Sioux found his body, he had on an Arrow shirt. He had boasted that he could ride through the entire Sioux nation. He was half right. He made it half-way through. Vine Deloria observed that when the missionaries first came to America, they had all of the Bibles, and the Indians had all the land. Now, the missionaries have all the land, and all the Indians have is the Bible. Deloria says that in Indian affairs very little is accomplished without humor. Humor is used not only for entertainment but also for education and for spurring people to action.
When Bill Moyers asked Louise Erdrich about the humor in her poems, in her short stories and in her Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks, Erdrich said that creating and enjoying ironic survival humor, often at the expense of the white oppressors, might be one of the few universal characteristics shared by all U.S. Indian tribes.
Don and Alleen Nilsen “Humor Across the Academic Disciplines” PowerPoints:
https://www.public.asu.edu/~dnilsen/
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