The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art by Allan J. Ryan (review)

400 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 while Hudson thinks it leads Alexis to further a >powerfully dehumanizing racism.= Neither considers that Alexis=s focus is on philosophy and playful allusiveness, and precisely not >everyday Canadian life,= including white racism. Despite serviceable entries from Almonte, Mannette, Sealy, Ibrahim, Sooknanan, Chakkalakal, and Hudson, Rude betrays its >principals.= They cannot achieve insubordination because their editor will not subordinate himself to scholarly principles. (GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE) Allan J. Ryan. The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art University of British Columbia Press/University of Washington Press 1999. xvi, 304. $65.00 The Trickster Shift is a study that embraces much more than a conventional commentary on Native art. Allan Ryan cites curators who consider the art postmodernist, which indeed could be argued. Yet, more significantly in my view, this study illustrates the cutting edge of more recently recognized epistemological investigations, namely, transformative learning and artsinformed research. The reasons reside in what is trickster discourse. The study unpacks the intentionality for, process in doing, and content of, the art. The format mirrors Ryan=s appreciation of the trickster at work. He explains the Native comic world-view as >characterized by frequent teasing, outrageous punning, constant wordplay, surprising association, extreme subtlety, layered and serious reference, and considerable compassion.= The book=s 159 images, mostly full colour, are beautiful. Indeed, you immediately become seduced or, alternatively, shocked, which is the trickster already luring you into a journey that will take you to unexpected places. The presentation of material evokes the trickster discourse in its non-linear, layered knowledge evident in visual images; fifteen Canadian artists= interviews; citations from and references to more than sixty North American Native visual artists, authors, and performers; and the author as witness and trickster himself. Even the footnotes are more than footnotes, instead presented as another layer of text. Indeed, everything written and depicted shows, more than talks about, multiple layers of meaning implicit in trickster humour. The book=s content, its approach interdisciplinary, spans four subject areas: self-identity, representation, political control, and global presence. What is exciting is how the academy is catching up to the timeless wisdom of the trickster in interdisciplinary programs that understand processes of learning as shifts in consciousness. Transformative learning, for example, is non-linear and experiential, not preaching, not eliciting guilt, not dictating what to think, but instead enabling learners to make meaning HUMANITIES 401 for themselves. In arts-informed research, the purpose is intellectual and moral, the methodology is heuristic, the form is aesthetic, the impact is holistic, and the research is infused with the transformative possibility of multiple interpretations in accordance with the learner=s openness to deepen and expand his/her consciousness. The academy thus is moving beyond the limitations of linear intellectual analysis. Thereby a door opens to recognize more fully what Native knowledge always embodied and communicated in the ceremonial way of life. Historically, there was no word for >art= in Native languages because the creative forms of expression were understood to be tools for teaching and healing. That is why the work presented in The Trickster Shift is on the cutting edge of the wider spectrum of ways of knowing acknowledged in recent years by the academy, yet, even so, only in some discourses. Ryan points out, however, quoting Lakota author Vine Deloria, Jr: >Irony and satire, provide much keener insights into a group=s collective psyche and values than do years of [conventional] research.= The distinguishing ingredient foregrounded in this book, of course, is this humour. Through a trickster discourse, the narratives and art in this study deconstruct stereotypes and misrepresentations recycled through the past five centuries. Indeed, art through the ages, including the Western canon, has been socially constructed. In the academy these productions of knowledge now are being examined and interrogated to challenge metanarratives , and to understand why and how respective cultures made meaning of reality through time and circumstance. Western depictions of Native people today are >being reclaimed, redeemed and reinvested with new meaning,= writes Ryan, to replace >demeaning clichés and romantic idealizations.= Native artists are manifesting their own cultural legacy and correcting the misperception, as Sauteaux artist/curator Robert Houle names...