Charlie Hill is the most well-known Native American stand-up comedian that you’ve never heard of because his mainstream appearances on The Tonight Show and Richard Pryor’s TV show happened back in the 70s and 80s. He was a ground-breaking comic, the first American Indian on The Tonight Show, and considered by many contemporary Native comics to be the “godfather” of Native stand-up. On and Off the Res w/Charlie Hill (1999) is a one-hour documentary that uses humor to challenge the racism about Native peoples that is so pervasive in America, while also sharing the biography and story of Hill’s life and rise as a stand-up comic.
Normally, I would now insert a trailer, but this small independent documentary from Upstream Productions has no trailer or clips to share. It has an IMDB listing, but there is barely any information on it. To find anything out about Oneida Nation member Charlie Hill or this documentary, you have to search. Not only that, you have to know in advance what you are searching for. That puts you, kind reader, at a serious disadvantage if you didn’t even know Native Americans still exist, much less participate in the stand-up comedy circuit. This absence of information, the silence about real, living, Native peoples perpetuated by the American entertainment industry is indicative not only of American mainstream racism, but also of our shared ignorance. We don’t know, so when we are confronted by such a comic as Charlie Hill, we don’t know how to react. Surely, not with laughter?
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Hill’s accessible humor is on display in On and Off the Res, as well as his more serious commentary about stereotypical representations of Native Americans in mainstream American venues. The film includes interviews with his family, Dennis Banks, and Vine Deloria, who says early in the film, “Charlie’s valuable to the Indian community as a person out there on the edge, acting as a bridge between cultures.”
One moment included in this documentary is Hill’s presentation to the National Indian Education Convention in Tacoma, Wash. (1997) where he says,
“But America, it’s not really America, it’s Europe Junior when you really think about it. You know, when they start honoring the treaties and respecting the ladies in this nation, we get rid of sexism and racism, maybe we can call it America. But when you think about the history of this country, it never started ‘til 1492. We were here like billions of years like we was all on hold, like in freeze-frame or somethin’, like we weren’t movin’ (Hill freezes in place on stage), hup, it’s October 12, the white man’s here we better move (Hill starts a powwow chant).”
When Hill talks about his time in Catholic schools and being beaten by nuns, as he says they all were, he says, “We’re all reverberating from that. I learned to convert that into humor. I try to turn poison into medicine.”
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As the film shows, many of HIll’s televised appearances were on Canadian TV, which is sad. Here we had this wonderful comic in our midst making us laugh at our own racist tendencies and he wasn’t a fixture on American television. Think about that.
One clip from a Hill set includes one of my favorite Hill jokes that turns racist assumption on its own head. He relates the story of a man who yells out, “I don’t want to hear that crap, Injun, I’m an Amuurican, why don’t you go back where you came from!” Hill pauses for a second and then says, “So I camped in his backyard.”
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Vine Deloria explains, “What you do is a quick reverse of whatever the person says to you. You can find that in treaty records. Red Cloud at one point says, why don’t you put us on wheels? Then every time we make a treaty you can wheel us around. You get reports by treaty commissioners, you know these Indians know exactly what we’re after, we can’t deal with them. Gotta have someone else come in because they turned that thing quick. That’s a universal trait that you found all over the continent. Those people negotiating treaties had a sense of humor, a greater sense of irony, like some of the stand-ups, Rickles and others, just slice all day long. So you had that kind of humor Indian chiefs and diplomats used when they were negotiating.”
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Negotiating with the American government or the American people about Native peoples and their sovereignty and right to a non-stereotyped identity has been a challenge for these Nations since Europeans first arrived on these shores, and the challenge continues today. Unfortunately, Charlie Hill’s presence and voice exists now only in the record, for he walked on in Dec. 2013, a great loss to the comedy community and to us. Fortunately, we still have access to Hill’s sharp wit and comedic stylings through this documentary, on the American Indian Comedy Slam DVD, and on YouTube.
Deloria states toward the end of the documentary, “What I’ve tried to do, what Floyd and Charlie have tried to do, is kind of get the flavor of being an Indian in an Indian community out to a larger audience.”
For anyone interested in exploring other Native American stand-up comics, I encourage you to check out the following comedians and challenge your own assumptions through laughter.
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Dr. Amanda Morris is an Assistant Professor of Multiethnic Rhetorics at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania with a specialty in Indigenous Rhetorics.