Making Each Other Laugh

Native American oral storytelling traditions have been widely documented and appreciated, but they are often associated with the past, pre-contact times, and ancient legends. Less attention has been given to the way this tradition continues to exist in the present, with new stories being created to respond to the modern world. Making Each Other Laugh provides unique insight into contemporary Northern Arapaho stories, told in the Arapaho language, and into the social and cultural milieu of the stories. It also provides invaluable insight into the rich humor of modern Arapaho stories and life.

These stories - from roughly the 1990s through the 2010s - are a rich source of Arapaho wisdom and values, often imparted in a singularly comical fashion. Appearing here in both Arapaho and English, they are also a virtual dictionary of the Arapaho language, featuring many rare and complex words that can only be understood in the storytelling context. This volume presents these stories in sequences, as they were actually told in social interactions among Native speakers. Structured this way, the anthology maintains the true nature of the Arapaho story sequence as a single, collaborative artistic and social performance. In critical chapters, Andrew Cowell focuses on how the stories emerge, how narrators negotiate what comes next and who will tell it, and how the genres and themes of the stories relate to each other. He also explores the ways such modern stories employ genres that have evolved from traditional models while adapting new content and styles over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Largely humorous, sometimes hilarious, often centered on encounters with Euro-American society and technology, the stories in Making Each Other Laugh bear witness to the continuing vitality of Native American oral traditions.