"For a subject worked and reworked so often in novels, motion pictures, and television, American Indians remain probably the least understood and most misunderstood Americans of us all."
-John F. Kennedy in the introduction to The American Heritage Book of Indians
I hope everyone has an awesome Indigenous Peoples Day. It only seems like yesterday that our pioneer ancestors landed on the shores of BabaKiueria and learned to peacefully coexist with the local pale-skinned population.
Question: How does an Indian tell which way is south?
Answer: He looks at his satellite dish.
Question: When do Indians know it is safe to go out on the ice.
Answer: When the white guys quit falling through.
Question: Why is America called the land of the free?
Answer: Because they never paid the original inhabitants for it.
-Jim Northrup
On Wednesday, September 29th I had the great pleasure to meet the award-winning Ojibwe author and poet Jim Northrup. He is the man behind the works Walking the Rez Roadand Rez Road Follies. He also writes the long-running syndicated column Fond du Lac Follies.
Jim is best known for his dry wit, warm humor, and hilarious insights into life on the Rez. His writing pokes fun at both Indians and American society at large. Jim also speaks openly about his experience fighting in Vietnam and his struggles to overcome post traumatic stress disorder. No matter the topic however, a evening with Jim Northrup is sure to be two things: hilarious and insightful.
Jim reciting his poem "weegwas"
While listening to Jim speak, I was reminded of my own experience with Native humor. It was the summer of 2008 and I was working at Grand Portage National Monument tucked away in the far northeast corner of Minnesota. I both lived and worked on the Grand Portage Chippewa Reservation giving me a crash course in life on the Rez.
It was maybe my third week on the job. I was fresh and new, still learning my way around the site. I was stationed in the historic kitchen inside the trading post. I had dressed in my usual period outfit of baggy front-flap pants, loose fitting shirt, sash, and moccasins. Visitors would walk in the back door, I'd explain how the kitchen worked, and they would depart through the front door. Standard operating procedure.
Kitchen (left) & Great Hall (right)
A few visitors had just left the kitchen when all of a sudden this young tall skinny Native guy comes strolling in the back door like he owns the place. He gives me a little flick of the head and with a big smirk on his face he asks me "Hey man, got any firewater?"
I freeze. My mind immediately fills with, "You're not supposed to say that." I check to see if there are any visitors around. There aren't any. The guy walks up to me. We're now face to face. I'm standing motionless. He exclaims, "Hey man, you gotta loosen up. Geez look at you!" He laughs.
Ha ha ha, I get it. It's pick on the new guy day. He was just having his fun and I don't blame him. We actually get to talking and he tells me he's on leave from the army. He was fighting in Afghanistan. He's spending his time off with the family on the Rez. Now I know why he's such a kidder. With a life like his, I don't blame him for laughing a little.
Every time I see this guy the whole rest of the summer, the same question comes out of his mouth. "Hey man, you loosened up yet?" He will never let me live it down.
So I learned my lesson that day. Sometimes you just gotta laugh. It's like what another one of my co-workers once told me, "you're laughin' to keep from cryin'." Humor is a very powerful force and if you can't laugh about life then life ain't truly worth living.
For more tales from Grand Portage check out my previous post:
The satirical magazine The Onion, which bills itself as "America's Finest News Source," has just come out with a new article about the "lousiest civilization ever." Here is a brief snippet:
Archaeologists working in a remote section of the Amazon Rainforest announced Tuesday that they have discovered the ancient remnants of what they claimed may be the lousiest civilization in human history.
According to Dr. Ronald Farber, a professor from the University of Minnesota who is leading the excavation, the "half-assed" culture existed from about 450 B.C. until 220 B.C., when it abruptly disappeared—an event he said was "honestly no big loss" for our understanding of human culture.
"From what we've unearthed so far, it appears this pre-Columbian civilization was pretty much just copying what other, more superior groups nearby were doing—albeit to a much shittier degree," Farber said. "They sucked. You should see the useless mess of a calendar these dumbasses came up with."
The article goes on to reference all manner of "half-assed" attempts at copying other Pre-Colombian civilizations. It references "inefficient" aqueduct systems, "piece of shit" pipes, "asinine" agricultural methods, and a massive sun temple whose alignment with the Summer solstice was off by two feet. Apparently, they all "went blind" from staring into the solar eclipses they predicted.
Here is another line that rips on the archaeologists:
An ancient ceremonial headdress, believed to belong to the ruler of the civilization, is reportedly the only artifact from the site that has captured the interest of the scientific community. However, the find was only deemed worthwhile after one of the archaeologists donned the feather diadem while prancing around and shouting, "Duh! Look at me, I'm King Fuckstick, Leader of the Numbskulls!"
The article is clearly meant to be parody. It satirizes the traditional stereotype that the Amazon was full of backwards savages and cannibals incapable of creating or sustaining any hint of civilization. The article references all the great achievements of the Pre-Columbian Americans such as advanced knowledge of astronomy, massive public works, written languages, and the fine arts.
I suspect this parody was written in direct response to this recent article in TheWashington Post about new discoveries of Amazon civilization:
To the untrained eye, all evidence here in the heart of the Amazon signals virgin forest, untouched by man for time immemorial - from the ubiquitous fruit palms to the cry of howler monkeys, from the air thick with mosquitoes to the unruly tangle of jungle vines.
Archaeologists, many of them Americans, say the opposite is true: This patch of forest, and many others across the Amazon, was instead home to an advanced, even spectacular civilization that managed the forest and enriched infertile soil to feed thousands.
The findings are discrediting a once-bedrock theory of archaeology that long held that the Amazon, unlike much of the Americas, was a historical black hole, its environment too hostile and its earth too poor to have ever sustained big, sedentary societies. Only small and primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, the assumption went, could ever have eked out a living in an unforgiving environment.
But scientists now believe that instead of stone-age tribes, like the groups that occasionally emerge from the forest today, the Indians who inhabited the Amazon centuries ago numbered as many as 20 million, far more people than live here today...
It is the following paragraph in particular that led me to believe the authors of The Onion article had read this one:
"I think we're humanizing the history of the Amazon," said Neves, 44, a professor at the University of Sao Paulo. "We're not looking at the Amazon anymore as a black box. We're seeing that these people were just like anywhere else in the world. We're giving them a sense of history."
Hence, The Onion article absurdly "de-humanizes" the indigenous Amazon people with its foul mouthed archaeologists, all while substantially reinforcing the very real advances of their civilization!
This certainly is one of the more humorous examples of "drawing on Indians" that I have encountered recently. Essentially, The Onion draws upon the advances of Native civilizations in order to point out the traditional prejudices of non-Native people against the so-called "primitive" Indians. It demonstrates the hypocrisy of continuing to think of Indians as backwards people when for thousands of years Native civilizations were just as advanced or even more advanced than those in Europe!
I was also keenly aware of the fact that the article did not once use the words Native, Indian, or indigenous. "Civilization" and "society" make much better satire anyway when paired with the archaeologist's scholarly choice of "half-assed".
What do you think? Effective satire or just not funny?
For another take on TheWashington Post article check out this write-up from the Newspaper Rock blog:
In case you missed last night's episode, Stephen Colbert took on Stephen Hawking's new television series Into the Universe, with Stephen Hawking. Stephen questioned Hawking's belief that aliens encountering humans would not turn out well. To quote Hawking from his show:
The outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans.
Stephen goes on to rip Hawking apart for his support of the "old liberal myth that colonization was bad for the Native Americans." The next section is priceless including a hilarious run down of the top "Indians" that owe their existence to Columbus and the colonizers. Let's just say it's comedy genius and the ending is perfect. He gives the Cleveland Indians a run for their money. Go Humans!!!
The best part about all this comedy, it points out the absolute absurdities of these Indian stereotypes. This is why I love satire and comedy so much, it is the perfect medium for discussing otherwise touchy issues such as cultural appropriation and the troubled history between indigenous peoples and colonizers in North America. Satire points out the nuances that too often are lost on most people. Thank you Stephen Colbert for reminding the millions of people who watch your show about this subject. Let's just hope they remember the history behind the humor.
I am a graduate student at the University of British Columbia where I study modern U.S. and Canadian social and cultural history. I specialize in issues of myth, memory, and representation concerning indigenous peoples and the North American fur trade. In an effort to bring attention to these topics and put my thoughts into writing, I have started blogging. I hope you appreciate the results.
You are free to distribute and reuse this work so long as full and clear credit is given to the blog's author and direct and clear direction is given to the original content.
