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The Shame Game: Mischief Makers in Native American Trickster Tales (MODEL OF FIRST PARAGRAPH)

                Let’s get the honest and ugly truth out of the way: you can’t trust everybody in this world, and there hasn’t been a time in our history when you could. Yet, this really isn’t news. The somewhat startling notion of this reality is that not all people would like to live in a more trustworthy world. Rather, these shady individuals live for the thrill that deceit and trickery can offer.  That’s where this short collection of Native American trickster tales comes into play. The Shame Game: Mischief-Makers in Native American Trickster Tales delivers a solid variety of stories from this country’s native cultures that demonstrate the longstanding tradition of trickery that exists to this day. In other words, this collection explores the individual who disrupts the everyday lives of unsuspecting people for the sheer enjoyment it brings them, and nothing else. Yet, these stories, coming from three different Native American cultures, allow us to see something greater when they’re looked at together, side by side. Whereas these stories may have served as warnings or simply entertainment in their own individual cultures, today the troublemakers of these stories can be read as sort of a societal inevitability—that every community and every culture has these little chaos-causing jerks, and unfortunately, status, age, physical size, laws, or really anything else cannot protect you. Perhaps accep6ting this fact allows us to see that a great many have endured the shame that mischief-makers cause, and knowing that we’re not alone in dealing with these individuals helps us cope with being violated ourselves.