04 Dr Twyla Baker We Laugh So We Don't Cry

Okay I think probably sense of humor is like one of my favorite ones the fact that and it’s tied very closely to learning and storytelling because you’re you’re you hear traditional stories and I grew up listening to them for my mother as some of my favorite times is just sitting and listening to her talk about all of these legends and these legendary people legendary entities creatures that exists within like our Hidatsa lore there was it’s sometimes some stories you know they don’t necessarily always have to have a moral or anything like that sometimes they were just for fun sometimes they were they were they were definitely ones that were intended to teach a lesson but they might have been kind of flipped on their head teach a lesson backwards so to speak how not to be you know that type of thing so it and we natives I don’t know why we end up being these cigar-store natives or the portrayals of us are like of this stoic thing standing with our arms crossed because natives are some of the funniest people you will ever meet I remember just in my professional life and I hate to call it anybody but in some of the places that I’ve worked that my colleagues thought I was the funniest person they had ever run into and I’m just I just felt like you know what I am only mediocre I’m not even that funny you know it but it’s so you got to see this oh my relatives are crazy but I mean we use humor as a means of teaching those lessons we also used humor as a mean of self-preservation - because there’s a lot of difficult very difficult things that people have had to live through of course that we know about and humor was a means of kind of relieving that stress and being able to if you eat like they say if you if you uh I laugh because so I don’t cry that type of thing you know it’s if there’s a lot of difficult things that people deal with in even in our you know in our modern societies and communities i think about some of my colleagues and my friends professionals who have to deal with a death or a loss or any other type of hardship from one moment to the next moment they’re having to deal with budgets and they’re having to deal with you know strategic plans or they’re having to deal with all this other stuff you know they’re trying to do they’re just trying to live life while they’re carrying this burden of grief so we like to joke we like to laugh we like to tease and we’ll try to lift some that burden and carry it carry it help carry it for each other so and I think about my some of my other relatives who are incredibly funny and who have taken it to the next level they’ve they’ve put it onto social media they start using Native humor as a means to tell our story and to teach lessons of course still and to just express themselves artistically - I mean that’s completely valid the the sense of humor is to me it’s second to none I mean we have a lot of inside jokes too and I think there’s this sense sometimes and I don’t want to get too terribly pan-indian replay that but we’ve I’ve heard it heard people say for an outsider coming into the Indian community if people are being terribly polite to you then they probably don’t like you but if they’re teasing you then you’ve been accepted and they like you so cuz they know you can take it and you can you know probably tease back and things like that so that you want them to be teasing you and to be kind of you know giving you a hard time sometimes it’s tough because it’s all in good fun and it’s it’s a it’s a sign of acceptance so and really kind of like kinship things so I love that part of our culture