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INDIGENOUS HUMOR AND TRANSCULTURAL IDENTITY SHIFTS AND MIX-UPS...
on contemporary themes set within the Rez-milieu. The article will view in
depth four popular plays by D. H. Taylor: The Bootlegger Blues (1991), The Baby
Blues (1999), Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock (1990), Education is our Right (1990).
These works will be discussed in two subsections in this article. The first
explores the “Blues” theme in popular culture and its interconnectedness
with Native humor that shifts and blends within the timeframe of past and
present. The second investigates the Gothic theme in its classical (Dickensian)
understanding, blended with Native humor and spiritual symbolism with its
shifts and mix-ups between past and present. Both themes seek to investigate
Indigenous transcultural identities, the way in which they move and
interconnect between cultures, hence taking or appropriating words, phrases,
behavioral attitudes in order to probe the depths to which Native heritage
(language and culture) can adapt itself to the English language within our
globalized environment. Or vice versa? In brief, and to quote the humorist
Victor Borge: “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.””!
TRANSCULTURAL BLUES?
Humor isa “cross-cultural language,” which, according to Hirch, functions as
a weapon that is able to “bridge two worlds on one stage.”” This transcultural
connectedness is the basis of most Native plays. And “whether confronting
annihilation in the physical or in the spiritual sense, the comic tenacity
of Native playwrights suggests that the most deeply liberating function of
humor is to free others to hope for the impossible.” These plays are written
not only for Native audiences, but also for non-Natives. As Tomson Highway
explains: “I like to write in such a way that it moves all people, moves rocks.
Then I think my job has been done."
In the following, two plays will be examined which will illustrate to what
extent Native playwrights like to experiment with diverse genres, such as the
blues. The blues is not necessarily a genre one would obviously associate with
Native cultural values as it is historically closely linked with Afro-American
cultural history. Is this cultural appropriation? Evidently not, it is rather a genre
experiment in which everyday situations and happenings that involve the Native
peoples are presented through the blues theme. The concept of deconstructing
authenticity is described by Dawes in her article: “[nJative theater provides
powerful alternatives to conventional politics of identity. [...] Identity (in its
prominent sense of signifying ontological substance) is exposed as the site
2 Mala, Very Good Medicine, 5.
2 Hirch, Subversive Humour, 116.
23 Ibid., 114.
24 Tbid., 115.
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