Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Humor in Native North American Literature and Culture: Survey
- 2 Reimagining Nativeness through Humor: Concepts and Terms
- 3 Expressing Humor in Contemporary Native Writing: Forms
- 4 Humor at Work in Contemporary Native Writing: Issues and Effects
- Conclusion
- Appendix: The State of Research on Humor in Native Writing
- Works Cited
- Index
1 - Humor in Native North American Literature and Culture: Survey
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Humor in Native North American Literature and Culture: Survey
- 2 Reimagining Nativeness through Humor: Concepts and Terms
- 3 Expressing Humor in Contemporary Native Writing: Forms
- 4 Humor at Work in Contemporary Native Writing: Issues and Effects
- Conclusion
- Appendix: The State of Research on Humor in Native Writing
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
FROM FIRST CONTACT UP tO THE PRESENT, Native people in North America have been represented and perceived in Euro-American accounts in terms that, even today, make the expression “Native humor” appear almost an oxymoron. Indians were either fierce, brutish savages or noble, tragic victims — but certainly not funny. This lack of general, and to a large extent also scholarly, recognition of Native humor constitutes a precarious falsification, especially when considering the prevalence of humor in virtually every aspect of Native life. As Vine Deloria observes:
It has always been a great disappointment to Indian people that the humorous side of Indian life has not been mentioned by professed experts of Indian Affairs. Rather the image of the granite-faced grunting redskin has been perpetuated by American mythology.… The Indian people are exactly the opposite of the popular stereotype. I sometimes wonder how anything is accomplished by Indians because of the apparent overemphasis on humor within the Indian world. (1977, 146–47)
Of course these vastly discrepant assessments of the place of humor in Native cultures — the distinct stress on its centrality by Native people (see also P. Allen 2001, xii) versus the image of the stoic Indian perpetuated by non-Natives — raise the question of why “the picture of the humorless Indian [has] been so common in so much of the literature, in so many of the film and television depictions of Native Americans?” (Bruchac 1987b, 22).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Humor in Contemporary Native North American LiteratureReimagining Nativeness, pp. 7 - 18Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008