Seeing Histories, Building Futurities: Multimodal Decolonization and Conciliation in Indigenous Comics from Canada (original) (raw)
Related papers
Drawing Identities: An Ethnography of Indigenous Comic Book Creators
2020
This research examines the experiences of Indigenous comic creators when making comic books, and I aim to investigate the individual and communal motivations for creating comics. Representations of Indigenous characters and storylines have primarily been told through a white lens in mainstream comics. Within the past five years, this trend has shifted with increased academic and public attention on Indigenous comic books and the rise of comic conventions like Indigenous Pop X. I argue that these comics are acts of decolonization and self-determination where creators use comics as educational tools and as a form of cultural preservation by documenting Indigenous histories, languages, and perspectives. The data was captured through participant observation at Indigenous Pop X and semi-structured interviews with six self-identified Indigenous comic book creators. These experiences were categorized with thematic and narrative analysis, and analyzed through the frameworks of postmodernism, decolonizing theories, and Tribal Critical Race theory.
Image & text, 2023
The Greenlandic visual artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen and his literary and scientific collaborators have produced a series of four graphic narratives to represent distinct moments in Greenland's history, spanning the pre-colonised and colonial period. These narratives employ aspects of magic realism and adopt an approach to narrative that focuses on the supernatural and presents modes of being that contrast with their audiences' understanding of realities that are ordinarily (only) visible. I argue that these graphic narratives use strategies from speculative fiction that frame the modern European presence in Greenland and the narrative of colonialism as one of several multiple realities in the Arctic, rather than its central axis, leaving open the possibility for indigenous Greenlanders to speak on their own terms. This enables these graphic narratives to illuminate aspects of knowledge (including features of oral legend and supernatural encounters) that were previously discredited in colonial discourse. Furthermore, I show that attending to how embodied aspects of Greenlandic Inuit storytelling traditions can be captured in the graphic narrative medium may be an effective decolonial strategy, which could be employed by speculative fiction. I thus advocate methodologies for speculative fiction that strategically broaden its boundaries in order to address its intractable colonial legacy. Informed by approaches that focus attention on form-such as Marks's haptic visuality (2000) and visual theories of the power of hand-drawn comics (Groensteen 2010, Chute 2008) to engage the reader/viewer in both an embodied and reflective way-I assert that including graphic narratives which employ strategies of speculative fiction may present a unique opportunity for the genre to mount a powerful challenge to a colonial knowledge production.
Drawn Into Being: Transformative Voices of Native American Women in Comics and Visual Narratives
Intersectional Feminist Readings of Comics: Interpreting Gender in Graphic Narratives, 2021
For Native American comics creators, the fictional worlds that they imagine contribute to decolonization, a process that works against coloniality in part by centering the power of storytelling. Native theorist Mishuana Goeman, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, explains how “The narrations of national myths normalize colonial closures, but the many creation and migration stories of Native people attest to their presence.” In the face of normalized accounts of history that erase indigenous voices, fiction in the form of comics is a way to witness the continued presence of Native stories. This chapter explores how Native American and First Nations women cartoonists actively push against discourses of domination and disappearance by imbuing their contemporary comics with narratives of Native “survivance” (the term that theorist Gerald Vizenor, Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, employs to understand how indigenous communities simultaneously survive and resist colonization). I trace the presence of a Native American feminism that emerges in the plot-based and formal transformations that recur in three contemporary Native American comic anthologies: Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection Volume 1 (2015) and Volume 2 (2017), Deer Woman: An Anthology (2017), and Sovereign Traces Volume 1: Not (Just) (An)Other (2018). Building on Susan Bernardin’s survey of innovative forms in Native comics and digital media, this chapter intervenes in the growing field of indigenous comics studies by focusing on narrative voice and character transformations as indigenous feminist practice. The contemporary women cartoonists in this chapter, including Weshoyot Alvitre (Tongva/Scots-Gaelic), Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe, Métis, Irish), and Arigon Starr (Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma), combat narratives of Native disappearance that persist in the U.S. and Canadian cultural imaginary. I demonstrate how they combine creation stories in their comics with transformation narratives, speculative fiction cues, and feminist messages of resistance in the face of domination.
Indigenizing the (final) frontier: the art of Indigenous storytelling through graphic novels
World Art, 2019
When Indigenous artists and writers entered the graphic novel genre, they opened up the world of ancient tribal tales, traditions, and customs to a new generation of readers, thus allowing the past to relay important cultural knowledge to our youth while Indigenizing a Western-dominated art form. In this paper, I seek to contribute to the dialogue about Indigenous concepts of space, time, and the oral tradition, to include present and future iterations of our knowledge systems in Indigenous sci-fi and speculative storytelling graphic novels. I contend that Indigenous artists are reimagining an older pictorial tradition that relayed cultural ways of knowing the stars and the universe to our youth, and charting new ways forward by connecting the past to present in the process. These specific genres 'retell' and 're-understand' traditional narratives with culturally grounded speculation about Indigenous futures and space, revealing a persistent cultural continuity that is deeply connected to our traditional terrains in fluid and exciting forms of artistic expression. I argue that Indigenous science fiction can, and does, critique and resist the continuation of settler-colonial endeavors by exploring and re-indigenizing a space that we have always been connected to, but is also customarily part of the settler frontier narrative in this genre.
“Here we are”: Comics Combating Colonialism
Indigenous ways of knowing for many Indigenous communities traditionally relied on experiential learning and oral tradition, unlike a Western-modeled school system (based on a curriculum); however, Indigenous groups post-contact have adapted traditional Indigenous ways of knowing to contemporary colonial pedagogies. Most recently, the use of comics have increased as a method to disseminate Indigenous knowledge, cultures, and stories to the body populous. Many Indigenous cultures used different medians to share their culture, spiritualty, and identities. Wintercounts, petroglyphs, and carvings are just a few of the ways. This paper explores the use of comics, using examples from MOONSHOT: The Indigenous Comics Collection Volumes 1 and 2 as an innovated Indigenous pedagogy, and its contribution in combating colonialism by reaching beyond communities to educate not only Indigenous people, but non-Indigenous people as well.
A surge of Indigenous graphic novels
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2020
This article surveys Indigenous graphic novels created between the year 2000 and 2017 and identifies some trends in the corpus. Because information is still scarce on this subject, three Indigenous creators were interviewed for this article: Jason EagleSpeaker, David Alexander Robertson and Sean Muir. After discussing the inadequacy of the term 'Canadian' to qualify the nationality of Indigenous creators, a chronological inventory of Indigenous graphic novels reveals that only two were published before the year 2000 and that the production really started in 2008. Indigenous publishers are also surveyed. Among the most important trends in the corpus, there seems to be an overarching purpose of education in Indigenous graphic novels. There is also a desire to rewrite history with an Indigenous perspective, as well as a strong wish to show that Indigenous culture is alive today and not a remnant of the past. Indigenous creators are also using the medium of the graphic novel to express their Indigenous identity while making their voice heard to a public as wide as possible.
Alter/native Heroes: Native Americans, Comic Books, and the Struggle for Self-Definition
Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 2009
This article offers a critical interpretation of Native Americans as objects and authors of comic books, an often maligned and neglected domain of kids' popular culture. The discussion begins with a brief overview of the misappropriation of Indianness in North America. Against this background, it elaborates a three-fold analysis. First, it details the prominence of anti-Indianism in comic books, particularly as means through which Euro-American authors and audiences have made claims on and through Indianness. Second, it unpacks the use of comic books to challenge and question dominant misappropriations and misunderstandings. Third, it examines the recent emergence of indigenous comics intent to use the medium to reclaim Indianness. In conclusion, it proposes that the alternative uses of comic books should be read as an excellent example of a larger movement for visual sovereignty in native North America.