Tomson Highway’s Theology of Laughter

A peculiar, grey fatigue has settled over our current reading. To open a contemporary journal is to find oneself trapped in a dreary contract with apocalypse, where solemnity is mistaken for seriousness. A collective assumption has taken hold: to treat the world with seriousness, one must treat it with a flat, unyielding solemnity. We have come to view existential panic and historical grief as our only authentic modes of thought, elevating a grey melancholy into a kind of odd virtue. It is into this airless room that Tomson Highway brings his Laughing with the Trickster, a book that acts less like a lecture and more like an open window. Based on his CBC Massey Lectures, this small, unassuming book offers something far more radical than a standard lecture series on comparative mythology. It offers a theology of pure vitality, proposing that a wild laugh is not a flight from reality, but an entry into it. For those of us at The Eighth Fire, a magazine founded by Grade 11 students at the University of Toronto Schools, this text carries a unique weight. As young, largely non-Indigenous Canadians learning to navigate a national history marked by erasures, our purpose is never to speak for Indigenous thinkers, but to listen and amplify their voices. Highway offers our generation a vital inheritance. He shows us that retracing our steps toward reconciliation does not require us to wear a heavy shroud of permanent guilt, but rather demands the humility and courage to look forward and embrace life fully.

Highway lays this out spatially. He maps out what he terms the “Vertical” hierarchy of Western monotheism, a strict pyramid where a distant and perfect deity looks down upon a creation crippled by guilt, and sets it against the “Horizontal” circle of Indigenous pantheism. With an immense, theatrical warmth, Highway gets rid of the idea of original sin. In place of a judge, he gives us the Trickster, a gender-fluid, shape-shifting prankster who lives not above humanity, but directly with them. This Trickster is greedy, foolish, and unrepentant. He cannot condemn our human clumsiness because he shares it completely. By reminding us that the Cree cosmos does not have a Garden of Eden, Highway quietly eliminates the whole idea of inherited guilt. Without an apple to be forbidden, the universe no longer resembles a courtroom. To banish original sin is, inevitably, to liberate the anatomy. Highway approaches our stubborn biology not with the pinched suspicion of the Western prude, but with a grand, carnivalesque realism. For centuries, Western thought has encouraged a suspicious relationship with our own biology, treating the body as a site of temptation. Highway completely flips this script, reclaiming the physical self as a happy center of sensation. He describes sex as a sacred, fundamental energy, a moment where human biology mimics the creative force of the cosmos itself. There is no squeamishness here. Highway insists that we learn to laugh at our physical absurdities, using humor as a vital tool to ground our cosmic pride. What makes the book extraordinary is how this freedom is traced back to the style of grammar. In a brilliant chapter on the Mind, Highway explores how language constructs the limits of what we can feel. English, in Highway’s view, suffers from a heavy, transactional thicket of nouns, a language obsessed with the ledger and the property line. Cree, by contrast, is pure velocity, a kinetic theater of verbs where the world refuses to sit still long enough to be owned. To switch from English to Cree is to watch unmoving nouns dissolve into motion. With a dry, precise wit, Highway drops a beautifully simple observation: if your language has no word for Hell, the psychological terror of eternal punishment simply ceases to exist. The universe is freed to become “The Great Dreamer,” a consciousness dreaming our world into existence for the sheer pleasure of the performance. You can hear Highway’s musical training in the very heartbeat of his prose. The text moves with the syncopation of a piano, full of sudden, rhythmic listings and short, percussive sentences that leap off the page. If the book stumbles, it is due to the transition of moving from the microphone to the page. It is because these chapters began as oral broadcasts that the introductory flourishes in a few sections feel slightly repetitive when bound in print, briefly stalling an otherwise high-speed pace.

Yet Highway’s central insight remains urgent: giving in to pessimism is a form of failure, a literal insult to the beauty of the world we inhabit. Even death is stripped of its grim shadow, reimagined here as a final, carnivalesque transformation into a grand party where our ancestors are already drinking, joking, and waiting for our arrival. For a generation over-schooled in dread, and for young readers striving to carry the torch of reconciliation with care and humility, Highway offers a vital corrective. He reminds us that the only dignified response to the terrifyingly messy business of living is not a frown, but a wild, unrepentant laugh.