Howie Echo-Hawk is halfway through his five-minute set at the Rendezvous bar in downtown Seattle. He has used the word “genocide” six times.

“This is a joke I keep telling because nobody laughs,” he tells the crowd.

The basement lounge he’s performing in has been dubbed “The Grotto,” and it feels like one. It’s cramped. The air is stale. The audience members, made up mostly of white people, shift in their seats.

“Every morning when I wake up and go outside, I recognize that this might as well be the zombie apocalypse for Native people,” Echo-Hawk says. “Y’all might as well be zombies.”

One woman close to the stage lets out a laugh but quickly stifles it. Her friend turns her attention towards her phone, then her drink. Most comics would call this a bomb. On stage, Echo-Hawk is beaming.

A citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, Howie Echo-Hawk, 28, has been making people laugh all his life. But after the 2016 election, he was compelled to confront what he calls white liberal audiences with his “punishment comedy.” Set after set, he seeks to agitate and even irritate with jokes, stories and dispatches from life as an Indigenous man in America.

Reactions range from anxious laughter to full-blown crying, and that’s exactly what Echo-Hawk wants.

“It’s fun for me to see them squirm,” he says. “Because in mainstream colonizer-America, I’m pretty much constantly squirming, so to put that back on them for a couple of minutes is just fine for me.”

Echo-Hawk says he knows of maybe two Indigenous comics, including himself, who perform in Seattle – a scene dominated primarily by white comics. But he doesn’t think audiences should be surprised to Native people on an open-mic stage.

“It’s not an illusion, folks, this is another Indigenous comedian,” says Danny Littlejohn as he steps up to the mic.