Indi'n Humor Bicultural Play in Native America [Hardcover]

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 Humordocuments 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.

An impressive work that covers an area long neglected by scholars....It will, without doubt, become the defining treatise on the subject for many decades to come....This study will take its place among the major works in cultural and humor studies. --Choice

Lincoln has covered the waterfront--several waterfronts--in putting together this comprehensive and exhaustive study of Indian humor. Far beyond a joke book or cultural exposition, this is a fine work to be read carefully--and many times-for its insightful display of the various kinds of Indian humor and satire. --Vine Deloria, Jr., author ofCuster Died for Your Sins

Indi'n Humoris a major contribution both to contemporary cultural studies and to our understanding of Native American cultures and their peoples. A pioneering study,Indi'n Humoranalyzes for the first time the five hundred year-old tradition of the intercultural genres of comedy peculiarly Indian. This germinal study challenges American stereotypes of the Native American as passive, vanquished, sadlC*