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INDIGENOUS HUMOR AND TRANSCULTURAL IDENTITY SHIFTS AND MIX-UPS...
authors’ work is the English language, but if their voice is to be heard at all,
these authors and playwrights must learn to adapt. As Tomson Highway adds,
“we are very conscious of the fact that we are working with a language that
we must reshape to our own particular purpose.”** This then is not a one-way
development but a reciprocal one since these native voices also have a say
in the shaping of the language. Through dramatic performances and humor
these works are effective in opening those channels that universally connect
and interconnect peoples of all nationalities.
Humor, then has no limits and as Taylor said in an interview with Robert
Nunn and Brigit Dawes, “I was always taught humor should amuse, not
abuse”* The Bootlegger Blues follows this maxim entirely: the blues theme
further deepens and heightens the pure and unselfish enjoyment of life
portrayed by the characters, which the work communicates well towards its
readers and audiences.
The blues theme continues in Drew Hayden Taylor’s next play, The Baby
Blues. As in the previous work, the setting is the “campground and food court”
of any typical powwow on a summer day in a reserve in Central Ontario."
Of the six characters who comprise the cast, only one is familiar from
The Bootlegger Blues: Noble, the “aging fancy dancer who refuses to grow up,
thirty-eight years old.” The other protagonists belong to three generations,
as previously: Pashik (17), a teenager who is intent on seeing the world, and
Skunk (20), an attractive young fancy dancer, like Noble once was; Noble (38)
and Jenny (37), Pashik’s mother, a strong-willed independent woman; Amos
(60), “a Mohawk elder who travels the powwow trail dispensing food and
wisdom”.* Again three generations are present in which the elders, whether
in their thirties or sixties, serve as examples and function as the storytellers
for the younger generations like Pashik and Skunk. The story illustrates the
saying that life repeats itself to such an extent that this could justifiably be
said to be the play’s motto. Pashik and Skunk are the mirror image of what
Jenny and Noble were two decades ago, while Noble is the image of the kind
of person that Amos had been thirty odd years ago. No wonder, since Pashik
turns out to be Noble’s child, and as a final touch at the end we learn that
Noble is in fact Amos’ son. C’est la vie, one may say.
Ihe fun and the blues continue, and, as in the Bootlegger Blues, we are
confronted with humorous moments that present clashes between Native and
white cultures. This, however, is dramatized further with the introduction of
a white character called Summer. She is the typical wannabee who has all the
38 Tomson Highway: On Native Mythology, 405.
® Dawes — Nunn: Interview with Drew Hayden Taylor, 221.
10 Drew Hayden Taylor, The Baby Blues, Vancouver, Talonbooks, 1999, 10.
* Taylor, The Baby Blues, 10.
12 Tbid., 10.
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