Humour is important to any culture -- and to native culture perhaps more than most. Last Saturday night, Canada's biggest aboriginal festival included a night of comedy featuring four of North America's leading native comedians at the Metro Convention Centre in Toronto. A year ago, I performed with two of them -- Charlie Hill and Don Burnstick -- at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., as part of the official opening celebration for the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.
What makes the native funny bone so special? I've spent the better part of two years exploring that question while putting together a collection of essays entitled Me Funny. I've found that humour almost always comes at somebody else's expense, but native humour takes no prisoners. What we find funny can be racist, sexist, nationalist and exceedingly self-deprecatory. It reflects attitudes outsiders have toward us and, as a result, we have toward ourselves.
Contributors to the book look at various aspects of the topic, such as what's intrinsically funny about such things as traditional storytelling and the Cree language.
My own contribution examine how often native humour comes into conflict with that multiheaded beast: political correctness.
How ironic. Had I only known that when Me Funny was almost finished, my editor, who is talented and well respected in her business, would announce she had issues with some of the material.
An avowed feminist (not that there's anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say), she felt jokes I had gathered were sexist. Some she urged me to remove; others, such as this oldie but goodie, she suggested changing the central character from male to female for the sake of sexual parity.
A missionary was out walking with a native man one day, attempting to teach him English. They spent the afternoon wandering the countryside and every once in a while, the missionary would point to something and say its name in English. The native man would repeat what he'd said.
This went on all afternoon until the two walked around a bush and found a native couple having sex.
Highly embarrassed, the missionary hemmed and hawed, trying to find a way to deal with this sudden and unreligious appearance.
"Um . . . man riding a bike," he finally managed to say.
The native man whipped out his bow and arrow and shot the couple. This shocked the missionary.
"Why did you do that?" he asked.
"My bike," the native replied.
Unless changed, my editor insisted, jokes like this would offend many of her "sisters." As a member of the Ojibwa nation, part of another oppressed sector of society, I was sympathetic. But I also blanched at having an authentic examination of native humour whitewashed -- filtered through the consciousness of an educated middle-class white woman.
Now, some of my best friends are white; I've even dated a few (as the old Ojibway saying goes, we all look alike in the dark). Caucasians are imaginative people with a wonderful culture, and I've always held their cuisine and their literature in high esteem. (I own books by Stephen King and Pierre Berton.)
But was I being anti-feminist? To test that possibility, I invited 10 well-educated people, seven of them women, over for a barbecue (traditional aboriginal burgers and tandoori chicken). When I read some of the jokes, nobody was offended. In fact, they laughed and urged me to fight for them.
Even more important, any first-year university student can tell you that context is critical. What's the point of studying something if it isn't real? During the early 1900s, photographer Edward S. Curtis captured compelling scenes of West Coast cultures, but he often told his subjects how to behave. In one famous photo, a Kwakiutl man holds up the arm of another man who appears to be dead and bites the skin. No wonder there are rumours the Kwakiutl were cannibals. At least the outfit he was wearing appears to be be genuine.
The same goes for aboriginal humour. See it as "a scar from colonialism," says Janine Willie, a doctoral student in native literature, and "it would seem ridiculous to prioritize removing the scar over healing the whole person. Making cosmetic changes to the humour is not useful in understanding underlying causes and oppressions. In fact, it actually blurs the cause of the humour . . . and actively works against an engaging, critical, feminist understanding of the humour.
"I think, ultimately, it could be counterproductive to a vital feminist, anti-oppression analysis of the subject matter."
Sounds good to me. I realize that being male and expressing an opinion on a feminist issue amounts to powwow dancing through a minefield. But is it any less questionable to have a non-native woman do the same about the native sense of humour?
On my last trip home to my reserve, I raised the subject with Alice Williams, who is politically active and an amazing quilter. She could not believe my story.
"This is Indian humour. If you change it to what is acceptable to her and her class, then you have taken away the Indian humour," she said. "What it has changed to is no longer Indian humour . . . even if it is politically correct."
Or, as Anosh Irani, noted author of The Cripple and His Talismans, told me at a B.C. authors' festival: "Sometimes you have to be politically incorrect to make your point."
So, what happened in the end? We wound up following that grand Canadian tradition: compromise.
After some terrific phone battles and blood-soaked e-mail messages, I managed to maintain the integrity of the book by keeping in most of the sexually explicit, but authentic jokes.
However, because of my editor's perseverance (and don't get me wrong; she's excellent on all other counts), Me Funny is also fit for educated, middle-class white women -- who are, after all, my major audience base.
Drew Hayden Taylor is a playwright, humourist and filmmaker from Curve Lake First Nation, near Peterborough, Ont. Me Funny will be published in January by Douglas & McIntyre.