Teaching Indigenous Graphic Novels: English / Indigenous Studies 360

Abstract

Teaching Indigenous Graphic NovelsEnglish / Indigenous Studies 360 Sophie McCall (bio) My name is Sophie McCall. I am a Scottish-descended settler scholar teaching Indigenous and contemporary Canadian literatures at Simon Fraser University, forever learning and unlearning how to read, listen to, and engage with Indigenous stories. The focus of my teaching is how writers challenge the violent histories of settler colonialism and use forms of literary expression to imagine and bring into reality narratives of cultural and artistic reclamation. It is an honor to think through how to do the work I do at the University with a sense of accountability and responsibility to unceded, ancestral, and traditional xʷməθkʷəy ̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl ̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) lands and knowledges in Vancouver, British Columbia. This territorial acknowledgment asks me to think about what it means to be a part of the ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands, and how to become an ally in Indigenous-led initiatives of decolonizing and indigenizing the university. I am indebted to my Indigenous colleagues and students, who have helped me in my own process of learning and unlearning the histories I have been brought up with. I grew up on unceded Kanien'kehá:ka and Algonquin territories in Montréal, Québec, in the 1970s and 1980s during a heated moment in Québec politics. My father was very involved in advocating for a bilingual, multicultural Québec and against the separation of Québec from Canada. Every morning and evening, with the radio and TV blasting, he would be on the telephone, coordinating with community organizations and diasporic communities such as the Chinese Canadian community concerning minority rights in education and language. However, especially during the Oka crisis of 1990, it became clear that the liberal, multicultural politics of recognition that I grew up [End Page 92] with in my white, Anglophone family do not acknowledge or engage with Indigenous conceptions of self-determination. I became aware of the high cost of what Dene scholar Glen Coulthard later would call the "colonial politics of recognition in Canada," in which a liberal-multicultural political framework harmonizes Indigenous rights within the state's assertion of sovereignty. In all of my work, I ask whether a(n other) politics of recognition, or perhaps the language of recognition, as a shared sense of responsibility and accountability across Indigenous, settler, and racialized communities is possible, in the ongoing project of working towards social justice on unceded and Treaty lands in Canada. Introducing myself and acknowledging the territories where I grew up, as well as where I now live and work as an uninvited guest, offers an opportunity for me to reflect on my own social location and how my experiences on a daily basis shape my research questions. In Cree scholar and filmmaker Tasha Hubbard's words, "I have students who have expectations when they take my class that they're going to learn all about Indigenous people. [Instead], at the beginning of the class, I will [say] that they are in this space to basically turn their gaze towards themselves. Because so much of the time Indigenous people are the object of the gaze" (CBC Arts 01:25:05). This work of self-reflection is an important part of Indigenous studies—to articulate to whom one is accountable, to engage in a process of un-learning one's history and its relationship to other histories, and to suggest how to remain relevant in ongoing struggles of decolonization, reconciliation, or other social justice projects. What first inspired me in developing this course were the brilliant Indigenous graphic novels, comic books, and illustrated stories that have appeared over the past ten to fifteen years. To name a selection: Kwak'waka'wakw writer Gord Hill's history of Indigenous Nations' resistance in the making of the Americas in 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book (2010); Anishinaabe writer and scholar Elizabeth LaPensée's retelling of a Deer Woman story in graphic form in Deer Woman: A Vignette (2017); Cree writer David Alexander Robertson's cycle of intergenerational stories in 7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga (2013); Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas's dynamic...