John Paul

Excerpts from “Indian Humor Series”

“You can always go head on at something and try to wrestle it to the ground and choke it to death as opposed to setting a trap for it, opening it up and catching it off guard” -- Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun.

In Native frameworks of verbal and visual discourse, humor is often a normalized practice of interpersonal communication that redefines “historically inaccurate, monolithic, and negative approaches to viewing Native America” (Bates, 1995:1). Beyond this however, Indian Humor also tackles personal relationships and contemporary living broadly (Allen, 1999). In this context then, I use the intersections of historical narrative, Native voice, art, and satire to explore the broader realities of the Native American social experience. In the end, I craft a series of drawings and paintings that are informed by (or inspired by) Indian perspectives of humor and social reality. These images reflect historical events, activities of the trickster, social identities, and humor found in domestic settings and communal life in general.

1) Trickster Theme:
Tricksters are often mischievous or roguish figures who disobey conventional norms of behavior in order to bring awareness to social issues and act as an equalizer. The following works “play” within the trickster motif (in title, or in subject matter) to highlight particular Native social concerns.

Title: Fields O’ Plenty
By 1900, disease, genocidal warfare, massive relocations and removals of American Indians from their homelands reduced the American Indian population to a low of about 250,000 from an estimated 18 million people pre-Columbus.

Title: Indian Art
In this painting I play the role of a trickster in that I depict no “traditional” Indian image. Often Indian art is conceptualized within static forms of the romantic and cliché Indian. This might include an array of “feathered persons,” buffalo motifs, and tipi dotted landscapes. In reality however, Native people are free to paint and explore all mediums of artistic practice. Contemporary Indian art should be defined only by the exceptional freedom to embody (or create) any art style or movement.

2) Collective Memory Theme:
Collective memories refer to the shared histories and stories that facilitate a collective, Pan-Indian consciousness for tribal persons. In reality (and somewhat tragically) most of these shared stories identify histories of conquest (e.g., stories or war, removal, allotment). Despite this, these tales still contain jokes. Sorrowful stories can also be celebrations: They remind Indian people that they have survived and that they are still here. Thus, the “joke” is on those who urged conquest, death, and destruction—as their actions inspired strength of existence and resistance in those they sought to extinguish.

3) Identity Theme:
In general, identities are the names we give (or are given) regarding the multiple roles and relationships we play in society. As Alcoff (2003:3) writes: "Identities are produced through the interplay of names and social roles foisted on us by dominant narratives together with the particular choices families, communities and individuals make over how to interpret, embed, and or resist those narratives.”

Title: Identity
For many, family histories have been lost to time and/or stolen through the implementation of particular U.S. social policies (i.e., allotment, assimilation). Hence the contemplation of an empty chair—“What have I lost. There’s nobody on my mind.”

4) Sources of Humor Theme:
As a survival mechanism, humor has long fulfilled an important role in tribal life. Truly, among the many ways Indians learned to cope with the reality of war, alienation, and isolation was the development of a social-cultural sense of humor—a socializing practice used to eliminate stress with levity (Thomas, et a1., 2001). Indeed, humor may be viewed as a form of cultural adaptation used to combat change and trauma. As Freud (1960) argued, humor was a coping mechanism that allowed society to reduce tension by expressing hostile or obscene impulses in a socially acceptable manner. From this perspective then, it is quite common for American Indians to have a sense of the relationship between survival, humor, and the arts—they are mediums through which pain can be communicated and eliminated.

  
"Indian Opera" (Triptych)

Title: Indian Opera (Triptych)
“What happens to a guy in an Opera when he gets stabbed?...Instead of bleeding, he sings.” Indian Opera interprets this joke and may be understood to mean: When we bleed (when pain has been inflicted upon us) the only way people will know is if we sing it to them (communicate it through art).

Conclusion:
Traditionally, humor is defined as a mode of jovial interaction that ends in laughter. However, as evidenced here, humor may also be a form that exists apart from laughter. This “hard” humor, by contrast, is less concerned with amusing others, than amusing one’s self through the release of emotions that concern, bother, and mystify. Indeed, this type of humor is often dark, bold, and reserved for message making. Nonetheless, humor is also social in that it is commonly shared. Indeed, in the broad perspective of Indian humor, I find a normalized practice of interpersonal communication that forces the other to contemplate the “reality” of Indian life. At this level, humor becomes a vehicle of targeted protest to turn history and society “on its ear,” offering perspectives from American Indian logics. In the end, Indian humor is like the world it mimics: full of play and protest, cohesion and derision, clarity and contradiction. Its use can be both personal and social and the examination of it tells us much about the nature of the society in which its creators and distributors live. Please consider all of this in one final joke:? Most people measure and divide history into time marked with a BC (Before Christ) or an AD (Anno Domini-“In the Year of our Lord”). Indian people however, only use BC - Before Christ, Before Columbus, Before Custer, Before Commodities, Before Cleveland Indians, Before Costner...

References:
Alcoff, L.M. 2003. “Identities: Modern and Postmodern.” Pp. 1-8 in Linda Alcoff and
Eduardo Medieta, eds., Identities: Race, Class, Gender, and Nationality. Malden,
MA: Blackwell.

Allen, R. 1999. The Trickster Shift: Humor and Irony in Contemporary Art. Vancouver; UBC Press.

Bates, S. 1995. “Curator Statement.” Indian Humor NMAI Exhibit. Online:
http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/indian_humor/notes.htm

Freud, S. (1960). Jokes and the Unconscious. New York: W. W. Norton.

Thomas D., Jay Miller, Richard White, Peter Nabokov, Jr. Alvin M. Josephy (eds.). 1993.
The Native Americans: An Illustrated History. Turner Publications.