Making Each Other Laugh: Contemporary Arapaho Storytelling by Andrew Cowell

Native American oral storytelling traditions have been widely documented and appreciated, but they are often associated with the past, pre-contact times, and ancient legends. Less attention has been given to the way this tradition continues to exist in the present, with new stories being created to respond to the modern world. Making Each Other Laugh (University of Oklahoma Press, 2025) provides unique insight into contemporary Northern Arapaho stories, told in the Arapaho language, and into the social and cultural milieu of the stories.

These stories—from roughly the 1990s through the 2010s—are a rich source  of Arapaho wisdom and values, often imparted in a singularly comical fashion. Appearing here in both Arapaho and English, they are also a virtual dictionary of the Arapaho language, featuring many rare and complex words that can only be understood in the storytelling context. This volume presents these stories in sequences, as they were actually told in social interactions among Native speakers. Structured this way, the anthology maintains the true nature of the Arapaho story sequence as a single, collaborative artistic and social performance. In critical chapters, Andrew Cowell focuses on how the stories emerge, how narrators negotiate what comes next and who will tell it, and how the genres and themes of the stories relate to each other. He also explores the ways such modern stories employ genres that have evolved from traditional models while adapting new content and styles over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Andrew Cowell is Professor of Linguistics and Faculty Director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has written numerous books, including The Arapaho Language and Arapaho Stories, Songs, and Prayers: A Bilingual Anthology.