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INDIGENOUS HUMOR AND TRANSCULTURAL IDENTITY SHIFTS AND MIX-UPS...
colonization."? Therefore, maintaining their sense of humor has helped the
Indigenous people to survive their hardships. And as Lakota scholar Vine
Deloria Jr. explains, “when a people can laugh at themselves and laugh at
others and hold all aspects of life together without letting anyone drive them
to extremes, then it would seem to me that the people can survive.”" It is
specifically through the use of humor that Native comedians and writers can
awaken their people to the still existing stereotypes and the major social¬
political issues prevailing within their own communities. Humor, thereby,
strengthens the community, heals, and is ultimately a form of survival.
Another unique feature of Native humor is teasing, also referred to as
“ribbing” or “razzing.”!° This is put into practice when “someone who gets a
little too ‘tall’ may help shrink them back to the right height. [...] if you are
being teased, you are ‘in’ and part of the family and community. Sometimes
non-Natives have difficulty understanding this concept. Laughing at ourselves
is good medicine."
Native humor, therefore, is inherent in Native culture, and has basically
been present since time immemorial. Laughter is a form of cultural
survival, a means of coping with life, which has also helped the Natives as
a people to survive colonization, strengthen togetherness, and belonging
within their communities. Ihus, "contemporary Native writers rely on this
mediating and didactic capacity of humor, on its transcendence of the purely
rational, to renegotiate images of Nativeness that are located in the readers’
imaginations.”!’
However, one should keep in mind that Native humor was originally
embedded in Native oral culture which was transmitted orally from generation
to generation for centuries. And within this oral culture, humor uses specific
gestures, mimicry and body language, which does not necessarily come
across in written form. Nonetheless, Native culture is still an oral culture
and the written form is not a result of the former. Though the prose form
and especially the short story has become very popular within the sphere of
Native literature, according to Tomson Highway,
But why not write novels? Why not short stories? Why the stage? For me, the
reason is that this oral tradition translates most easily and most effectively into a
three dimensional medium. In a sense, it’s like taking the ‘stage’ that lives inside
8 Cynthia Lindquist Mala, Very Good Medicine: Indigenous Humor and Laughter, Tribal
College Journal, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer 2016), 3, https://tribalcollegejournal.org/very-good¬
medicine-indigenous-humor-and-laughter/ (accessed 19 March 2020).
14 Mala, Very Good Medicine, 3.
5 Eva Gruber, Humor in Contemporary Native North American Literature: Reimagining
Nativeness, New York, Camden House, 2008, 11.
16 Mala, Very Good Medicine, 4.
Eva Gruber, Humor in Contemporary, 10.
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