There’s one thing award-winning comedy writer Joey Clift (Cowlitz) wants people to know about the rez: “If you hang out on a rez with other Native folks, you’re going to hear a lot of laughter. You’re going to hear a lot of joy.”
Clift brings that joy into his literary debut as he examines the untold history of America’s first people. We’ve Been Here The Whole Time! A Not-So-Sacred Guide to All Things Native America
which hit shelves last month, dives into iconically misunderstood figures like Pocahontas, the forgotten Indigenous iron workers that built NYC, Native American sports mascots, the Land Back movement, Lily Gladstone, and more.
Native News Online’s Elyse Wild talked to Clift about Native humor, using satire to learn about hard truths, and which historical figures are invited to the powwow.
Tell me where you grew up and what you really loved about it.
I’m an enrolled member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe in Washington state, and I grew up on the Tulalip Reservation, about 45 minutes from Seattle.
I think what I loved about the Tulalip Reservation was how beautiful it was to be surrounded by Coastal Salish culture throughout much of my upbringing. Going to school on the reservation and having assemblies that included things like dance performances was so cool.
Other than that, one thing I really loved about the reservation was the easy access to illegal fireworks. The Tulalip Reservation had an entire city called Boom City that’s just a sea of fireworks stands. That truly made every Fourth of July and New Year’s the most fun. I probably still have scars from third-degree burns.
One thing that really caught my attention about the book was the title, We’ve Been Here the Whole Time. We often hear the message, “We’re still here.” That’s a sobering, serious message that speaks to how marginalized Native communities have been and calls up the attempts at erasure. But “We’ve Been Here the Whole Time” seems to have a little edge of humor. Am I reading too much into that, or can you tell me a little bit about the title and whether that aligns with your thought process?Thanks so much for asking. I think the book title does a great job of capturing the book’s tone. That was something I talked with the publisher, Andrews McMeel Publishing, about a lot as we figured out how to package it.
I think the original title for the book was going to be Your School Never Taught You About Native People. That was one option, but we thought we needed something a little shorter and punchier. The title was actually a suggestion from the publisher: We’ve Been Here the Whole Time.
I really love it. I feel like it nails the truthful but comedy-forward approach I wanted the book to have.
Tell me how your Nativeness and the culture you grew up in influenced your work as a comedian.
I think the Native sense of humor influenced my career and how I approach comedy in a couple of different ways. Most of them are pretty indirect. I don’t wake up every morning trying to write Native jokes specifically. I write what’s funny to me.
Growing up on a reservation and having a lot of super funny family members influenced me. My uncle is very funny, and my mom was constantly making poop and fart jokes when I was a kid, which I didn’t appreciate at the time. Now I’m like, “Oh, my mom had jokes and still has jokes.” She’s very funny.
I’ve grown to really appreciate the comedic rhythm of Native jokes as I’ve become a professional comedy writer. I feel like there are two types of delivery for Native jokes. One is saying the meanest thing you’ve ever heard anybody say, followed by the most vicious burst of laughter. Or somebody will say the driest, most serious, intense-sounding thing you’ve ever heard, followed by, “Just kidding.”
I catch it whenever I’m hanging out with other Native folks or watching anything where Native folks are in conversation. I’ll hear somebody from a reservation across the country from where I grew up tell a joke the way I tell one. I’m like, “Oh, that feels like something I never really thought about influencing even how I deliver jokes.” But it definitely does.
Tell me about researching the book and using your skills as a comedy writer to write about these really difficult things in a way that’s also funny and easier to read.
My friends and I often joke that if you hang out with a group of Native folks, you’re always three seconds away from the conversation shifting to genocide. It’s such total whiplash for people who aren’t used to it.
I think if you hang out on a reservation with other Native folks, you’re going to hear a lot of laughter and joy. A lot of that is probably a coping mechanism for what we’ve gone through as a community and are still going through.
For this book, I view it as a comedic look at Native history, people, and contemporary Native culture. But it felt like if I wanted to write a book called A Not-So-Sacred Guide to All Things Native America, it would be disingenuous not to cover the darker stuff, like boarding schools, genocide, and the MMIW epidemic.
When I covered those topics in the book, I tried to honor the experiences people went through and write from a really sensitive place. But this is also a comedy. The primary goal was for people to learn, but also to laugh while doing it.
The way I approached that specifically in the boarding school chapter is something I’m really proud of. The chapter immediately after that is called, “Because the Past Two Chapters Were Pretty Heavy, Here’s a Picture of Cherokee Activist and Leader Wilma Mankiller Kicking the Founder of Indian Boarding Schools, General Pratt, in the Nuts.”
It features the most cartoonish drawing of Wilma Mankiller kicking this colonizer right in the dick. After that, there’s a chapter about how great that casino is.
I really tried to use my comedy writer hat as much as possible and make sure I was taking care of the audience comedically and tonally while people were reading the book. Whenever I’ve covered the darker stuff, I’ve always tried to find moments of levity to give the audience permission to experience a range of emotions while reading.
I see comedy as a fantastic tool for narrative change and education. Jokes are like the candy coating you put around cough medicine. Or, if you have a dog, it’s like the big gallon of peanut butter you put the pill into to get the dog to eat it.
There’s a lot of great research from organizations showing that comedy is a great tool for helping people take in and retain information in a way they might not from a two-hour college lecture or a 500-page history book.
What did you learn while researching the book that surprised you?
I grew up on a reservation, and many of the basics in the book were things I’ve known my entire life, or at least most of it.
But as I was researching the book, I traveled to many different tribal communities. I talked to Native folks from other communities about their experiences and the things they’re going through.
Something so interesting is that there are more than 570 federally recognized tribes and hundreds more at the state level. Our experiences are vastly different in terms of our relationships with the U.S. government, tribal enrollment, and how our tribal governments work.
It was really interesting to talk to other tribes about their specific situations regarding treaty rights and the issues facing their communities. It really underlined for me that my tribe is from Washington State and has its own specific challenges. Still, the issues facing even another tribe in Washington are probably going to be vastly different from those of my own tribe.
The way I think about it is that colonization fucked all of us a little bit differently, but it did fuck all of us. This really underlined that for me.
Another thing I should say is that I have a series of chapters in the book explaining why different historical figures are not invited to the powwow. There are chapters about why Christopher Columbus isn’t great, why Andrew Jackson sucks, etc.
In a lot of those chapters, like the Columbus chapter, I went in knowing, as a lot of Native folks do, that Christopher Columbus wasn’t a good dude. But when I actually looked into him, I had no idea how dumb he was.
He thought the Earth was shaped like a pear, with a nickel on top.
He was the governor of a country after he “discovered” the Americas, and he was so bad at his job that he was fired and arrested for being incompetent. I describe him in the book as a genocidal Mr. Bean, and that’s not inaccurate.
What do you hope Native readers take away from the book, and what do you hope non-Native readers take away from it?
I hope Native readers take away a lot of levity from knowing that somebody is cracking jokes about all this stuff that we’ve been talking about as communities for a long time.
Something I really love about Native readers reading this book is that many of them read it and then tell me there’s a lot they learned. We’re not a monolith. We don’t all have encyclopedia-level knowledge of every aspect of Native identity, culture, and history, just as I don’t.
It’s so cool to see Native folks reading this book, learning from it, and appreciating all the jokes and fun illustrations.
For non-Native people, I hope the main takeaway is that we’re still here. Native people represent many different cultures, and we’re all flourishing and living in 2026 in our own ways.
I hope people learn a basic understanding of Native history and culture. Something I’m very proud of in the book is that one of the last pages is an Indian 101 diploma with space for the reader to sign. After reading the book, you officially graduated from Indian 101.
Something I talk about a lot in the book that I hope non-Native readers take away is just how good my tribe’s casino is. It’s 20 minutes north of Portland, so it’s a short drive. There’s a hand-drawn map in the book showing how to get to my tribe’s casino.
I’d say the takeaways are that Native people are still here, readers will get a basic education on many different Native topics, and they’ll learn just how great the Cowlitz Casino is.
Joey, thank you so much for talking with me. Is there anything you want to add, or anything you were expecting me to ask that I didn’t?
One thing I should probably add is that, up until now, most ways to learn about this stuff in the book world have been really long, in-depth academic history textbooks or books that are ultra-focused on our trauma.
My goal with this book was to create an accessible way for non-Native people to learn about this stuff while also making something fun and funny for Native folks to read.
Especially now, when any history that runs counter to the American exceptionalism narrative is being removed from institutions and schools, I think it’s really important for our history to be accessible.
Something so cool, even in the months since this book came out, is that I’ve already heard from many middle schools, high schools, and colleges adopting it as part of their curricula.
We sold out our first two printings on the first day of its release.
Last week, we were the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction book in Oklahoma. Technically, it might have been two weeks ago, but recently we were the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction book in Oklahoma. I think we were the No. 7 or No. 8 best-selling nonfiction paperback book in Southern California.
It’s so cool and validating to see that people want to learn about Native history and culture, and to hear our stories.
I hope that this book’s success shows people there’s a desire for Native satire and Native comedy in literary spaces. I hope it shows people that they don’t just want to learn about Native people; they also want to laugh at funny jokes by Native writers. There’s a desire and a market for this.
