Representing Aboriginal Culture in Canadian Children’s Literature: The Case of Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection

Abstract

This essay examines how comics have been utilized as a type of children’s/young adult literature within Canada by focusing on Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection series (3 volumes; 2015-2019). The essay thus fills a gap within the scholarship on Canadian children’s literature, which has, for the most part, focused predominantly on picture books or novels. If one aspect of children’s literature is their educational value, the Moonshot series aims to educate Canadian youth on the long-neglected history of colonial oppression and to raise awareness of the ongoing repercussions of colonial violence affecting Aboriginal populations. Moonshot thus practices an anti-colonial pedagogy via ideology critique of hegemonic whiteness. The Moonshot series attests to how Aboriginal tradition and culture provides Indigenous youth of today with not only a better appreciation of their traditions, but also a way of dreaming of alternative futures that do not repeat a traumatic past.