You Are on Native Land Anthology Review

Some of the comics deal with the theme of MMIP, but most do not. The comics vary in genre and art style – from slice of life to non-fiction, and from watercolors to digital art – and represent the work of people from many different Tribes.

There were two standout comics for me, one was an excerpt from ‘Embers’ by Chag Lowry, with art by Weshoyot Alvitre and letters by Buddy Beaudoin. From the excerpt, it seemed to me that ‘Embers’ was about the importance of fire to life as we know it – without fire, there would be no obsidian with which to make arrowheads, and without fire it would be impossible to clear the dry underbrush that could spread more dangerous forest fires. It was also really nice as a reader to see characters who looked like relatives on the page, with traditional chin tattoos and practicing preventative burning.

The other standout comic for me was a short silent one by David Mack. It is of a person passing inuksuit on a journey, or maybe different people passing inuksuit on different journeys, or maybe the same person on different journeys. I liked the ambiguity, and I liked the colors for this one (the purpley-blue sky and purple shadows) and the way the landscape was the focus of the panels, with a lot of empty space.

There were a couple things about the anthology that disappointed me, though. The information about the charity shared by the founder and executive director of NOND, Lynette Grey Bull, read as generated by an LLM to me. I wonder how anyone can expect to encourage others to care about an issue when it feels that you don’t even care enough to write about it yourself? More than that, having browsed the NOND website and seen more evidence of AI use, I worry that AI, being the conglomeration of so many things, also carries racial biases within it… Do we really want a machine in redface speaking for us?

Additionally, there is a section by Gene Jimenez detailing his journey to founding MACHINE Comix. The way this section discusses DNA as proof of cultural heritage (culture is by necessity social, not biological) combined with the mention of an upcoming series titled ‘the Last Rainbow Warrior’ really bothered me. I don’t know Jimenez’s story beyond what he shared in the anthology, and it is unfortunate to be cut off from one’s heritage, but to replace it with things that apparently reference the racist evangelical Christian tract ‘Warriors of the Rainbow’, that as Nick Estes et al. put it ‘dehumanize us as an indigenous Nation because they imply our culture and humanity, like our land, is anyone’s for the taking.’, is even sadder.

I am also not exactly sure who the target audience for the anthology is. The ultimate piece, the excerpt of a statement prepared by the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center Policy team members, had a difficult task of explaining the history of Indian Law and how that affected Native women today in only a two page spread, and it did mostly a good job, but I wonder how much of a background the audience was expected to have, and how much that differs from the truth. To be honest, I do not expect the average non-native person to know about the termination era by name, but maybe living in Ireland has affected my knowledge of the average reader.