Abstract
Janelle Niles launched Got Land? to hand the microphone to Indigenous voices
CREDIT: Brian Otter
"If I had to have it up, I was looking like Steven Seagal," she told Index from her home in Ottawa. She decided to have a crew cut, but in her culture cutting off your hair signifies cutting off your strength, and she had to grieve the loss.
"That intergenerational trauma comes from residential schools, where they had no choice in the matter. They wanted to take away our culture through our hair," she said.
"But a comedian comes up to me, and he looks at me with my new haircut. He’s like, ‘You look like the ghost of the residential schoolkids.’ Now that is in my act."
After Niles delivers the ghost line to the audience, she says: "How dare you? I look like Kim Jong Un if he had a sex change."
It’s a dark joke. Niles is painfully aware it might sit uncomfortably with some audience members who are dealing with trauma from the residential school system, which forcefully separated Indigenous families and is now recognised as cultural genocide. She also says it’s how she takes back her power.
"That’s how we heal, through humour," she said. "There’s nothing you can say to me that I’m not going to make funny and also never let you forget."
Niles is constantly walking a tightrope between what can and can’t be said in comedy - she describes herself as bouncing either side of it.
A Black, Indigenous, two-spirited woman (both masculine and feminine spirits), there is an intersection of prejudices for her to unpack in her comedy, which she uses to change perspectives around Indigenous culture.
"I started off with Indigenous jokes and Indigenous humour, because that’s how I talked in real life," she said. "Because even though people say, ‘Don’t talk about sex, race, politics or religion,’ that’s all people talk about behind closed doors."
There are topics that Niles is reluctant to tackle this early on in her career because she doesn’t yet feel she has the tools to do so - largely the problem of murdered and missing Indigenous women, a well-documented epidemic of violence across North America which she knows is a trigger for a lot of people. She’s seen that negative response play out first-hand.
It is, however, a subject to which she wants to call attention. The threat of violence is constantly on her mind while she travels alone.
"And that is, again, that fine line, because a comedian can just mention something and it can be turned around and misconstrued, because comedy is subjective," she said.
"So, I will not joke about murdered and missing Indigenous women."
However, she might one day find humour, she said, in making fun of the audacity of those who kidnap.
In November 2012, the Idle No More Movement took hold in Canada, building a movement around Indigenous rights. Niles feels this gave her permission to speak for herself on the stage. "Because in our culture, we had to remain humble. And remaining humble is also remaining silent."
She questioned why, when Canada has such a huge Indigenous population, only one Indigenous comedian at a time would be booked on a show. Why couldn’t there be two or three? Then she asked: "Why don’t we have our own show?"
In 2019, she put that right and founded the Indigenous comedy variety show Got Land?
The first show, set up in a small diner, sold out within days. Fire regulations meant they had to turn people away at the door.
"It was only going to be a one-off show," Niles said. "But when I got off stage, everyone’s like, ‘When’s the next one?’
"Got Land? was born because our people wanted it and our Indigenous comedians felt we were finally able to speak freely."
Along with Niles’s victory for free expression, she has also had to defend the principle itself, to her own detriment. Flipping the racist practice of tokenism on its head, Got Land? would often invite a secret guest on the show.
"Because we were always the ‘token Indian’ on the show, Got Land? used to have a token white person or a token person who’s not native," Niles explained. "Kind of like, ‘We’re getting back at you!’ But it was always a joke."
The secret guest would reference the joke and the audiences loved the segment. Every time Got Land? hosted a secret guest, it went down brilliantly. Except on one occasion.
"One comic said something that was a little too dark. It was a murdered and missing Indigenous women joke," Niles said. The joke worked in the room, but the comedian in question then clipped the joke for social media, and in that context it was not well received.
"People looked at that and blamed me," she said. "Even though I didn’t say the joke, I just had him on my show. And that was my first cancellation."
Niles did not know the comedian was going to make the joke. What she does know is that jokes without context don’t work on social media, where she says people are "cancel hungry". The clip was shared widely throughout the Indigenous comedy scene, and 11 comedians from her roster of 41 pulled out. She received threats. Some comedians refused to work with her again.
"They tell me I’m the worst human being in the world, that I’m dangerous for Indigenous women… They even tried to make a campaign that I wasn’t Indigenous at all," she said. "They were doing anything and everything possible to discredit me over a white man’s joke."
The narrative became about Niles’s response to the joke rather than the joke itself.
"My reaction to it was, if he’s allowed to say whatever he wants up there, so am I. And comedy is supposed to make you uncomfortable," she said.
She knew that people were hurting, that they needed to retaliate and find the enemy, and she described the attack on her as lateral violence: "Someone that is on the same playing field fighting the same battles."
Niles was encouraged to publicly denounce the comedian and apologise. She refused.
"I’m not going to play that tune, where I step on somebody to look altruistic," she said.
Niles got a call from a broadcasting company she works with wanting an explanation. After a long conversation, they said they’d call her back the next day. As she waited to find out her fate, she remembers thinking: "Everything I have built is burning while my phone is blowing up."
Fresh in her mind was the case of Mike Ward, who faced the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal in 2016 over his joke about a child singer with Treacher Collins syndrome, which was found to "exceed the limits of free expression" - a decision reversed by the Supreme Court in 2021.
"Am I going to be sent to the Human Rights Tribunal? Is someone else’s joke my responsibility?" she asked.
At 8am, the phone rang, with the broadcasting company on the end of the line.
"Janelle, we’re not going to cancel an Indigenous woman over a white man’s joke," they told her. She was astonished - and relieved - at that response.
The secret guest is no longer a segment in the Got Land? line-up, and Niles hates that she’s had to surrender. She believes that people are too polarised, and that there’s no room for nuance, which is vital in comedy. She tackles issues such as trauma, racism and colonialism on stage, and comedy makes it all more digestible.
And Niles believes unwaveringly that the stand-up stage is a place for what is elsewhere unsayable.
Laughing about things allows people to start thinking differently.