Humor and Resistance in Modern Native Nonfiction (Reprint‪)‬

This article reviews recent Native nonfiction to illustrate how modern Native essayists use humor as a mode of anti-colonial critique. It examines how anti-colonial politics find expression in the various types of rhetorical humor that are employed in Jim Northrup's Rez Road Follies: Canoes, Casinos, Computers and Birch Bark Baskets (1999), Thomas King's The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (2005), and Paul Chaat Smith's Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong (2009). In particular, the article explores the storytelling conventions and orality that define these nonfiction books and the broader tradition of comic techniques associated with Gerald Vizenor. These works participate in a literary tradition that contribute to what Robert Warrior describes as the "intellectual sovereignty" of Native self-representation. **********