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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. + 299 +
