Indi'n Humor

Book excerpt: Drawing upon history, psychology, folklore, linguistics, anthropology, and the arts, this book challenges "wooden Indian" stereotypes to redefine negative attitudes and humorless approaches to Native American peoples. Moving from tribal culture to interethnic literature, Lincoln covers the traditional Trickster of origin myths, historical ironies, Euroamericans "playing Indian," feminist Indian humor at home, contemporary painters and playwrights reinventing Coyote, popular mixed-blood music and Red English, and three Native American novelists, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, and N. Scott Momaday. Indi'n Humor documents and interprets the contexts of laughter among Native Americans, as they see and are seen by the rest of the world. The study comes to focus comically on the poets, visual artists, playwrights, and novelists who make up the cultural renaissance of the past twenty years.