American%20Indian%20Humor

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American Indian Humor

• by Don L. F. Nilsen
• and Alleen Pace Nilsen

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American Indian Comedy SlamVaughn Eaglebear,
Charlie Hill, Howie Miller, Larry Omaha, Jr.
Redwater, Jim Ruell Mark Yaffee

• American Indian Comedy Slam
• http//www.bing.com/videos/search?qyoutubenative
  americanhumorviewdetailmidE29AA4A31DCA585D50
  B4E29AA4A31DCA585D50B4FORMVIRE

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Sherman Alexie
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• James Many Horses signs his letters as James
  Many Horses III.
• Hes the only James Many Horses on the
  reservation, but there is a certain dignity to
  any kind of artificial tradition.

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Sherman Alexie Again
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Vine Deloria
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• 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.

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(No Transcript)
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Seinfeld Native-American Episode

• Seinfeld Native-American Episode
• http//www.bing.com/videos/search?qyoutubeameric
  anindianhumorviewdetailmidDBC87FF99595F4EA9
  1C7DBC87FF99595F4EA91C7rvsmid351839FAAE27F20B351
  9351839FAAE27F20B3519fsscr0FORMVDFSRV

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Kachina Dancers
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APACHE HUMOR

• Apaches are fond of mocking white speech with
  high-pitched English exclamations like I dont
  like it, my friend. You dont look good to me.
  Maybe youre 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.

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ARAPAHO CONTRARIES

• Arapaho contraries groan loudly when they lift
  light objects and pretend not to notice when
  lifting truly heavy objects.

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CLOWNS

• John Lowe writes about ritual clowns.
• 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.

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CONTRARIES

• Thomas Bergers Little Big Man is based on
  Flaming Rainbows autobiographical Black Elk
  Speaks. Flaming Rainbows 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,
  Im glad I did it! for Im sorry. He cleans
  himself with sand, and then exits by walking
  through the river.

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Thomas Berger
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• 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.

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CORRECTIVE HUMOR

• In the tribal community, humor is used to help
  people correct inappropriate behavior.
• Indians often refer to their Indian brothers and
  sisters as being apples.
• This is extending a long parade of ethnic
  capitulations with Whites by referring to blacks
  as Oreos, Asians as Bananas and Hispanics as
  Coconuts.

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COWBOYS AND INDIANS

• Sherman Alexie says that Indians make the best
  Cowboys in the game of Cowboys and Indians.
• In Smoke Signals, Victors father tells Victor,
  I remember the first time your mother and I
  danced. We were in this cowboy bar. We were the
  only real cowboys there despite the fact that
  were indians.

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Indian Stereotypes
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• Talking about Coyote stories, Yellowman said that
  they are not funny stories. The people laugh at
  the way Coyote does things, and at the way the
  story is told, but the story is not funny.
• The stories are told because, If the children
  dont hear the stories, they will grow up to be
  bad.

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CREEK MUSKOGEE HUMOR

• 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.

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DAKOTA CLOWNS

• In Dakota cultures, clowning and exaggerating are
  deemed to be therapeutic.

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ENIT

• Throughout Sherman Alexies The Lone Ranger and
  Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and the movie version,
  Smoke Signals, a very common Indian expression is
  enit? (a contraction for isnt it.).
• Want to get something to eat?
• Yeah.
• How about a hamburger at Dicks?
• Sounds good, enit?

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HOPI HUMOR

• 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.

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KOSHARI CONTRARIES

• Koshari contraries talk backwards and know how to
  babble total nonsense.

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MAYAN CONTRARIES

• Mayan contraries pretend to be afraid of
  inconsequential events and fall to the ground
  when confronted by small obstacles.

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NAVAJO HUMOR

• 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.

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Ojibway Humor Drew Hayden Taylor

• Drew Hayden Taylor is Ojibway (First Nations of
  Canada), and he gives talks on the place of humor
  as a coping mechanism for Native Americans
• https//www.youtube.com/watch?vbGJss7uGcyQ

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OPPRESSED PEOPLES

• 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.

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PAN INDIAN HUMOR

• 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.

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Louise Erdrich
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• 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.

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(No Transcript)
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• Kenneth Lincoln explains that Indians revitalize
  old stories, scapegoat others and survive through
  laughter.
• By doing this, they draw on millenia-old
  traditions of Trickster gods and holy fools,
  comic romances and epic boasts.

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PARODY

• In Sherman Alexies Smoke Signals there is a
  T-shirt advertising Fry Bread Power.
• This celebrates the time when Victors mother
  magically fed a crowd that was twice as big as
  she had expected by raising her arms heavenward
  and solemnly ripping each piece of fry bread in
  half
• In Victors tribe, this became known as The
  Miracle of the Fry Bread.

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• In Smoke Signals, The KREZ radio station has a
  traffic reporter who reports on the two or three
  cars he sees each day from the top of his
  broken-down Volkswagen van.
• The enthusiastic announcer on KREZ shouts out,
  Its a great day to be indigenous!
• Meanwhile, back at home, Victor tells Thomas to
  shut off the TV, saying, Theres only one thing
  more pathetic than Indians on TV and thats
  Indians watching Indians on TV.

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(No Transcript)
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PUEBLO CLOWNS

• Clowns in Pueblo communities dress in rags and
  masks and mock the serious Kachina dancers by
  stumbling, falling down, throwing and sometimes
  miming the eating of excrement.
• They also pretend to worship fake gods in an
  exaggerated manner.

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Indian Stereotypes
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RESERVATION QUIET

• In Sherman Alexies Smoke Signals, Victors
  father left his mother. At night he would
  imagine his fathers motorcycle pulling up
  outside. He would rush around the house, pull on
  his shoes, socks, and coat and run outside to
  find an empty driveway.
• It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet,
  where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on
  the rocks three miles away.

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RESERVATION REALISM

• Alexie says that the stories he tells are not
  really true. They are the vision of one person
  looking at the lives of his family, and his
  entire tribe, so they are biased, incomplete,
  exaggerated, deluded, and often just plain
  wrong. He calls his stories reservation
  realism.
• Alexie says that every indian in his book is dark
  skinned with long black hair. He calls it the
  Stepford Tribe of Indians.

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• Alexie says that on a reservation, Indian men who
  abandon their children are treated worse than
  white fathers who do the same thing.
• Its because white men have been doing that
  forever and Indian men have just learned how.
  Thats how assimilation can work.

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RESERVATION TRAFFIC

• In Alexies book, Adrian asks, When did
  thattraffic signal quit working?
• Dont know.
• They better fix it. Might cause an accident.
• They both looked at each other, then looked at
  the traffic signal, and knew that only about one
  car passed by every hour.

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A SOBER INDIAN

• Alexie says that a sober Indian has infinite
  patience with a drunk Indian. There arent many
  who stay sober. Most spend time in Alcoholics
  Anonymous meetings and everybody gets to know the
  routines.
• Hi, my name is Junior.
• Hi, Junior, everybody shouts in ironic unison.
• Hi, my name is Lester Falls Apart, and Ive been
  drunk for twenty-seven straight years.

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• Victors father in Alexies novel says, even
  though the wreck was mostly my fault, he got the
  blame. I was sober and the cops couldnt believe
  it. They never heard of a sober Indian getting
  in a car wreck.
• Like Ripleys Believe It or Not.

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The First Thanksgiving
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THE STOIC INDIAN

• Washington Irving, after a trip to the prairies
  in 1832, said that Indians are not the stoics
  that they are thought to be.
• When the Indians are among themselves they are
  great gossips. They are also great mimics and
  buffoons, and entertain themselves excessively at
  the expense of the whites, reserving all comments
  until they are alone.
• Thus it is that they give full scope to
  criticism, satire, mimicry, and mirth.

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The Stoic Indian
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TOHONO OODHAM CLOWNS

• The Tohono OOdham Indians are also known as the
  Papago Indians.
• Tohono OOdham clowns use squeaks and signs to
  beg food from the audience.

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TRICKSTERS

• Karl Kroeber says that Trickster stories allow us
  to have fantasy indulgence in taboo behavior,
  release psychic tension, and simultaneously
  present a cautionary tale.
• But more important is the storytelling itself,
  which the audience participates in.

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• In Leslie Marmon Silkos Storyteller, Coyote
  rides a bus to the Hopi Second Mesa.
• Northwest Indians often show Trickster as a Raven
  with the ability to shoot arrows and carve out
  canoes.

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Leslie Marmon Silko
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• Eastern tribes favor Rabbit as a Trickster, while
  Southwestern and Plains tribes favor the Coyote.
  
• The Deer, the Hare, the Spider, the Jay, the
  Wolverine, and the Old Man Nanaboyho also play
  the Trickster role.

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Drew Hayden Taylor
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• Andrew Wiget outlines the qualities of the Indian
  trickster as follows
• They exhibit independence from temporal and
  spatial boundaries.
• They are creative, destructive, and amusing,
  often in scatalogical ways.
• They are heroes, but they are also villains.
• They are abnormal both mentally and physically.

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• They have enlarged sexual qualities and enormous
  libidos.
• They represent extremes (young-old, good-evil,
  life-death).
• They appear either as humans with animal
  qualities, or as animals with human qualities.
• They have an endearing relationship with their
  mothers or grandmothers.

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Most Indian languages are agglutinating so that a
complete sentence is found in a single wordfor
example

• Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg!
• NAME OF A LAKE IN MASACHUSSETTS
• TRANSLATION I fish on my side you fish on your
  side nobody fish in the middle!

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The First Illegal Immigrants
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The Other Kind of Indian Humor

• Indian Humor by way of Good Gracious, me
• https//www.youtube.com/watch?vhuSP7PtctC4index
  4listPL428DBF4F200E0FA9
• Indian Humor by way of Fawlty Towers
• https//www.youtube.com/watch?v0H_4sQdMa-U