On Native American Clowns

November is Native American History Month; next year (2025) will mark the 350th anniversary of King Phillip’s War, the beginning of the end for the native people as the dominant polity on this continent. I’m marking the occasion with a series of daily posts related to the history of the Native Americans and their interactions with encroaching Europeans. Some will have to do with pop culture; others will be weightier. This series is dedicated to Sterling and Samantha.

This particular post is additionally prompted by the just-closed inaugural session of the Coney Island Clown Skool, and the news I heard there on opening night, that John Towsen’s upstate clown retreat was nearly destroyed in the recent wildfires.

Towsen wrote the book Clowns, which devotes a few pages to the clown (or clown-like) traditions among various Native American tribes, among them the Hopi, Pueblo, Zuni, Yaqui, Cheyenne, Crow, Ojibwa, and others. Appropriately, this section abuts his one on the Christian Feast of Fools tradition. The Native Americans have their own “Sacred Clowns”. (My friend David Jenness liked this concept so much he named his improv comedy band after it back in the day).

Each tribe has different traditions, of course, but most (as in the Feast of Fools) feature some element of turning sacred ceremonies on their head, often within the same context as the ceremonies themselves. Follies and wrongdoing are ridiculed, important people are lampooned and burlesqued. Related to these ceremonial clowns are the so-called “Contrary Societies” whose participants do and say everything wrong and backwards. For example, they say “no” when they mean “yes”. The person who performs this function among the Lakota Sioux and the Santee are known as heyoka: jesters and satirists.

The gentlemen depicted in the photo above are Pueblo clowns. I find it fascinating how universal the impulse is, that it has evolved in just about every human society, often quite independent of one another. People find the same things funny. And they often ascribe the same social role to the comedian.