Tatsey and the Enemy-Friend

Abstract

The Native American Renaissance has generated a number of excellent discussions of tribal humor, including Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins. In the book’s pivotal chapter, “Indian Humor,” Deloria reminds readers that humor is often simultaneously entertaining and an essential aspect of survival: “When a people can laugh at themselves and laugh at others and hold all aspects of life together without letting anybody drive them to extremes, then it seems to me that that people can survive.”1 These discussions of tribal humor are varied, ranging from analyses by and about American Indians such as Deloria; mainstream scholars attempting to locate Indians within the larger genre of humor; and postmodern texts such as movies, stand-up comedy, and television shows. Although many of them are yet to be reported, there are also important local and specific strands of tribal humor that serve to illustrate the rich diversity among various tribes. I am particularly interested in lesser-known aspects such as the Gros Ventre concept of “enemy-friend” and humorists such as John Tatsey, a Blackfeet man who was not only a tribal policeman in the Blackfeet community for many years but also wrote a regular column for the Glacier County Reporter, a newspaper serving the Browning, Montana, community. Custer Died for Your Sins is specifically Native and a near-mandatory source for discussions of American Indian humor. It is also interesting to note that Custer Died for Your Sins was, for practical purposes, Deloria’s opening salvo in a subsequent career that was caustic in its criticism of mainstream authority and Indians alike. Not unlike Arthur Penn’s use of the humorous Old Lodge Skins character in order to deflect Hollywood censors’ attention from his