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KRISZTINA Kopó preconceptions of whites seeking the “authentic Indian." In other words, the vanishing imaginary Indian that Summer — a white (blond) twenty-five-year-old university student doing Native Studies — is trying with too much enthusiasm to capture as proof of her understanding of Native culture and her “one sixtyfourth Native” heritage. As she declares with somewhat childish excitement: “I found evidence that my great-great-grandmother, Donna Seymour... was one quarter Native. [...] I am proud to say one-sixty-fourth. And proud of every aboriginal cell in my body. Can you see it in my features?”** Summer’s continual search for authentic native spirituality highlights typical non-native blunders in which she believes any story told by a Native to represent deep spiritual meanings. Similarly, she is unable to differentiate between the various tribal languages, therefore she comes prepared with a few sentences of Ojibway, Mohawk and even Cree. However, in her failure to be understood she experiences a moment of apologetic realization: “Oh my...I’m so sorry. That was just my white concept of pan-Indianism coming through.” However, Amos and Noble continue to tease and make fun of Summer with popular quotations from French and Latin. This results in total confusion on the part of Summer, and she exclaims: “Wait a minute. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!” Noble’s responds: “oops, kind of ruins the image, don’t it?”2° The play, then, is a mockery of the romanticized stereotypical image of the Indian, encouraging the audience to laugh at Summer’s overenthusiastic and silly behavior. In fact, this is the so called “comic shock recognition””’ whereby the native and non-native audience laughs at themselves, because these situations reflect their views of themselves. The comic illustration of transcultural shifts and mix-ups in The Bootlegger Blues and The Baby Blues is the underlying force of the plays in which humor is directed at two distinct cultures. The incidents in the plays show how certain cultural markers have been appropriated and embedded into the everyday usage of the language and individual identities. To illustrate this, it is worth quoting the stage directions from the beginning of Scene Two: “Amos is getting his food stand together. It is a trailer-like structure with signs on it saying things like ‘Nish Chalet,’ ‘Fortune Scones,’ ‘Nee-Cheese Burgers,’ ‘Corn soup from the (ab)original recipe.’””® The signs with the food names are clear transcultural identifications with multicultural labels. “Nish Chalet” refers to the well-known Canadian menu of grilled fish chalet, where chalet, an obvious French word, recalls the wooden cabins or houses used by holidaymakers in the Swiss Alps. “Fortune scones” isa 13 Hirch, Subversive Humour, 112. 4 Taylor, The Baby Blues, 14. 45 Ibid., 37. 416 Ibid., 38. # Hirch, Subversive Humour, 114. 18 Taylor, The Baby Blues, 26-27. + 300 "
