Political Satire in Midge

         The second half of Tiffany Midge’s book Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s moves slightly away from personal humor and into the realm of political satire. Midge uses her Native background as a launching pad for insightful pointed satirical jabs. In her short essay, Hey America, I’m Taking Back Thanksgiving, Midge takes (what many would consider) a radical stance on the relationship between Native Americans and people who have settled on their land. 

In the form of a breakup message, she tells America “I’m taking back Thanksgiving. It was mine to begin with; you were just appropriating it to satisfy your need for some happy-go-lucky fairy tale in the midst of your crimes against humanity” (Midge 156). While Midge is writing this with humor, she is not joking. This idea that she is going to take back Thanksgiving is a tangible result of the ultimate desire to regain sovereignty over what has been stolen from Native Americans geographically and economically as well as socially and psychologically. 

Our previous reading of Freud can help us understand Midge’s desire to write humorously about topics that have roots in trauma and exploitation. Freud’s release theory would suggest that Midge has a few options. She could internalize her anger and continue the cycle of suppression and trauma or she could take this idea from her ego and deal wrestle with it. The “wrestling mat” that she uses is humor. This essay is as much for the reader as it is for Midge. She is able to produce something that contains pain and anger in a healthy restorative way. 

I am working to become a professional in the political world and reading Midge’s short essays is not only a nice break from political jargon and elite form of debate, but it is often more persuasive, more engaging, and has the capacity to reach more people than a thesis by an international economist at Oxford. She doesn’t water down the issues or spoon-feed them to her readers. Instead, she forces her readers to think critically while chuckling at her high-level wordplay. The counterstories that Midge tells are crucial to creating a human connection where there is little reason for them to naturally happen. A white millennial in New York City has no direct connection and possibly no understanding of how someone in Midge’s shoes has dealt with the past five hundred years of exploitation and will likely never devote extensive research into that field. However, reading stories like Midge’s creates more human connection and understanding more effectively than a decolonial sociology paper would be able to.