Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America

Drawing on history, psychology, folklore, linguistics, anthropology, and the arts, this book challenges “wooden Indian” stereotypes to redefine negative attitudes and humorless approaches to Native American peoples. Moving from tribal culture to interethnic literature, Lincoln explores such topics as the traditional Trickster of origin myths, historical ironies, Euroamericans “playing Indian”, feminist Indian humor at home, contemporary painters and playwrights reinventing Coyote, popular mixed-blood music, and Red English. Lincoln turns to the texts of Native American authors including Louise Erdrich, James Welch, and N. Scott Momaday, to illustrate the rich tradition of Native American humor: a tradition that evolved as the result of and has survived in spite of a history of unconscionable suffering and sadness during the course of which ninety-seven percent of the native populations were destroyed. A study of the literary humor of poets like Paula Gunn Allen, Diane Burns, and Linda Hogan provides further evidence of the importance of the role of humor in Native American culture. Indi’n Humor documents and interprets the contexts of laughter among Native Americans, as they see and are seen by the rest of the world. The study comes to focus comically on the poets, visual artists, playwrights, and novelists who make up the cultural renaissance of the past twenty years. Focusing on ethnic humor, from jokes in bars and powwows, to intercultural politics, to literature, Indi’n Humor will enlighten and entertain readers interested in Native American culture, as well as scholars of Amen can and Ethnic Studies, and humor theorists.