Zegaajimowinan
I am deep in my horror era right now. There's three reasons for this.
1. Horror movies are the best genre of movies for these anxious times.
2. My friend Robyn tends to recommend horror when she recommends books to read, and she recommends a lot of books which is only fair since I'm like that too.
3. I picked up Bloodied Bodies, Bloody Landscapes: Settler Colonialism in Horror by Laura Hall at a conference on language reclamation of all things, so now I'm re-watching a whole lot of movies with the lens that she articulates so beautifully.
This panel discussion is not about horror, it is about graphic novels and comic books and the stories we tell through them. I included them in my year of Indigenous Reading because they are also a kind of literature, and my cousin Anrya, who participated in the panel, brought in the disability angle because she finds this kind of literature much more accessible than other types. Zines are like this too, making social or political education more accessible and available.
So it isn't really about horror, but we did talk about the A Howl anthology which brings me to werewolves. And weirdly, to Mennonites.
In Bloodied Bodies, Bloody Landscapes Hall talks about werewolves and has a bunch of movies, including the Canadian Ginger Snaps trilogy, that lay out various ways that the werewolf, a European monster who came here along with everything else the colonists brought over, embodies the savage threatening settler homes. Which is a neat inversion making this very European monster the threat to European settlement, and while Mennonites aren't the first or only group to confuse werewolves and winter spirit they are not the same kind of monster. Possession is not the same thing as transformation. That's just basic theology.
There are similarities tho. Both require some kind of cure to either cast out the spirit or arrest the transformation if not reverse it altogether. We all know that werewolves can be killed by a silver bullet, the TV show Supernatural taught us that it can be cured if it is caught early enough.
Werewolves are a wrongness that has to be healed or undone which is what Brigitte, the younger sister in the Ginger Snaps series, tries desperately to do while Ginger, the one who gets bitten, embraces her descent into wolfy chaos. It starts as a story of sisterly connection, their rebellion against white suburbia, and a gothic kind of feminism that rejects things that need rejecting. It's all very tragic until we get to the third movie which is set 200 years in the past and the Indians are no longer vaguely present as the existence of something savage that must be tamed or destroyed but actually present with prophecies, a willingness to save the white girls, and the good manners to fade away. Or in the case of one, get killed by Ginger.
I want to think for a moment about this confusion between werewolves and winter spirits because it's making me wonder about the ways in which European wrongs changed when they got to these lands. In Becoming Kin I rewrote a whole chapter after realizing that, for the Anishinaabe anyway, the winter spirit was very real and possession by it posed a material threat to our communities. It was a graphic anthology, This Place: 150 Years Retold where I encountered the story of the Fiddler Brothers, who were arrested by the RCMP for the death of a woman in their community said to be possessed of the winter spirit and posing a threat to their community. Their story is told more completely in Killing the Shamen.
You might hahaha those natives, so primitive to believe such a thing but Christianity all the way to the white house itself also believes in a spiritual world that is very real and you might hahaha about that too but you don't laugh so hard when things go bump in the night do you. So the winter spirit is not just a metaphor for greed and avarice, though it can be that too. In that chapter I also rejected the idea that we infected them because Europeans had their own monsters they brought with them. I describe that in one of the early Kwe stories from Bad Indians Book Club, she watches the people come ashore, along with the spirits that clung to everything they brought.
But what if there was some cross-pollination? Because Christianity, capitalism, and slavery all took a distinct and ugly turn once they got here. Not that they were terrific otherwise, all three have a legacy of horrific violence in service to a particular way of existing, but there is also a measurable change in their functioning and cruelty. Which again, I don't want to blame on "there's something wrong with the land and even the Indians abandoned it" like Pet Sematary does. Maybe the reason these things became uniquely awful once they took root here was because they were brought here by uniquely awful people who wanted a place where they could run amok .. and then their mean spirits met our mean spirits in the worst romcom ever.
And all that makes me think about the vampire in Stephen Graham Jones's The Buffalo Hunter Hunter which is the story of a Blackfoot man who gets bitten by a vampire and then discovers that he becomes what he eats which would mean that the more the Anishinaabe winter spirits transformed settlers, the more settler they became which is its own horror story of Orientalism on these shores because that's the whole problem with white anthropologists telling our stories which you will remember is something that Sonia Sulaiman brought up two weeks ago.
None of which explains this confusion between werewolves and winter spirits but I'm going to put that down to newcomers simply not understanding what they're dealing with and relying on something familiar. Although they would have their own possession narratives going all the way back to the New Testament, so that doesn't really explain it either does it. I think that the simplest explanation is that they couldn't be bothered to know anything about us that didn't help them convert or assimilate us. Elsewhere in that article the writers cite Mennonites commenting that "Mostly [the native] is above most of the coloured and savage races. It is not a very difficult task to lead him from a "big spirit" to the true God." which just shows how little they understood what we meant by a great spirit or mystery.
It's a really interesting article that, despite the quote about werewolves, doesn't really have much to do with monsters. It's just one example among many about how they saw us and understood their role in obtaining land through civilizing (and displacing) the original people and creating an agrarian-based claim to belonging that they denied to us.
Episode 9 Bad Indians Book Club: Zegaajimowinan
Patty Krawec: This is Patty Krawec, your host and the author of Bad Indians Book Club: Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds. This podcast series, which formed the basis of the book, brought together marginalized writers and the people who read them. Zegaajimowinan scary stories. Graphic novels and comic books are a vehicle for unconventional storytelling often, but not always. Stories that are scary or imagine other features in this conversation with authors and publishers. Lee Francis IV and Jay Odjick. We talk about monsters, movies and the worlds that might yet be.
This is part of a yearlong project of why where we're talking about Indigenous literature and it started with a book I read that Daniel Heath Justice had written. And as I was going through the months and creating the different categories that occurred to me that this is a valid category of literature.
But it doesn't often get it, it doesn't often get a lot of attention. So I'm here, I've got we've got Jay Odjick, who actually designed my avatar and if you see me on social media and I look like a superhero, Jay is why. And so we've got Neil, who is probably my most frequent flyer with this 'cause he's just so cool and into everything.
Lee Francis, who was actually one of the very first guests on my Medicine for the Resistance podcast that I co-hosted with Kerry Goring and we were talking about Indigenous futurism and that was just such a neat conversation. And then we've got Anrya Foubert who is my cousin, but also a really cool person and likes comic books, graphic novels, all that art, all that artistic literature stuff. So now what I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna go around and ask each of you to give a better introduction than the one that I just gave. A little bit about how youconnect with or do this, this kind of what it is about graphic novels and comic books that got your attention and keeps you here.
Jay Odjick: Hello, my name is Jay Odjick. I'm an Anishinaabe artist, writer, TV producer, Jack of all trades, master of absolutely none. And I've been reading comics since I was old enough to be able to read even though I'm from the Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg community in Quebec, which is where my dad's from. I was born in Rochester, New York and 'cause my dad, like a lot of guys from the rez, there wasn't a lot of work in the community. So a lot of guys left to work construction, high steel jobs like that. So I was born in Rochester and right up the street from where we lived there was a comic book shop and we didn't have a lot of money, but luckily for me, the comic shop had this kind of dubious practice of taking the comics that didn't sell and tearing off the covers and selling them for 5 cents.
So as a kid without a lot of money. It was pretty great. 'cause you walk in with 25 cents, walk out with a couple of comics, roll 'em up, stick 'em in your back pocket. Nowadays, as a guy who makes comics for a living, I'm like, how could you? But at the time it was absolutely awesome. That's how I got into it.
I fell in love with the idea I think of using pictures to tell stories. I really wanted to be able to tell stories and that's what brought me to it. And I fell in love with the medium in that way of doing because it seemed like something we could do without needing a ton of camera and equipment, video equipment and things like that.
I've been working at comics for longer than I care to mention on camera. I feel I'm actually a lot older than I look. I'm like, and I'm best known I would think, for my original graphic novel called Kagagi: The Raven that led into an animated series. I was the executive producer and showrunner for Kagagi: the Raven, which aired in Canada, the United States, and Australia.
I drew two books by Canadian author Robert Munsch, called Black Flies and Bear for Breakfast. And both of those I think are important 'cause they were very commercially successful, but they featured all Native cast of characters and they were both set in First Nations communities. And it was a real trip for me to be able to go into any bookstore anywhere in Canada and find books with heroic looking native children.
And in addition to that, we had Bear, which these are published by Scholastic Canada, and we had Bear for Breakfast published in Anishinaabemowin. And I think that was a really important thing too, because up until then they just published the books in English and French and I said, why don't we consider doing a, an Indigenous language?
So that's something I'm gonna try to push for and hope we can see more of is more books like that, mainstream books published in Indigenous languages. I think in Anishinaabemowin was just a start. And hopefully we can move into more in the future.
Neil Ellis Orts: Oh, howdy. I'm Neil. I'm in Houston, Texas. I grew up reading comics.
Archie was the gateway drug, the 1960s Batman TV series also a little bit. I am not native. There's not a ounce of anything in my cells that is native, so I'm the settler here who lives just coming here to talk, geek out about comics.
Anrya Foubert: Hi I'm Anrya. I grew up reading comic books because they were easier for me to read than those nasty paper books. As someone who is disabled, having something that was easier to read was great because I read just as much as all the other kids did, if not more, I just read Calvin and Hobbes instead. Because that's the comic book that was my gateway drug, but that got me into superhero comics like that got me into Spider-Man that got me into the X-Men.
I was a huge fan of the DC comics for Bat Girl. I'm still a huge comic book and superhero nerd. But yeah, my, my interest in comics really stems from wanting to read as much as everybody else, but not really having the ability to, and just the easiest form for me to consume literature was through graphic novels and stuff like that.
And I still own graphic novels. I still read them as much as I can, though admittedly being a university student I have not really had the chance to read them because I've been really busy with all the mandatory stuff that I have to read. But yeah that's me.
Lee Francis: Hey, this is so exciting that we get to hang out again.
Yeah. My name is Lee Francis. My family's from the Pueblo of Laguna on my dad's side and the Pueblo of Missouri on my mom's side. So I was like to say that. And then people get confused. They're like, there's a Pueblo of Missouri? And I was like, no, I'm just kidding. And my mom's straight anglo. Yeah.
So my love of comics also stretches back to about as far as I could read. My dad was a huge science fiction and fantasy fan. That's what our shelves were built with. It got to the point where my dad literally had to look at the dates that things were published, because oftentimes they would upgrade, update the covers for like science fiction, fantasy things. and if it was any time before, he would like, he'd be like, if it was any time before 1986, he's I've read it. That's how much like I come by my nerditry. Like it's genetic nerd, right? It's genetic indigi-nerd. But most of the time I spent my world leading up until I started Native Realities in education.
And I think that was really formative. I'll make the joke that the other joke I like to make, which is I got a PhD in education so that I could open a comic shop. But eventually, when I started working in schools, because I loved comic books, what I would see on the shelves from my kids, I worked at home.
So I worked at my home rez at Laguna-Acoma High School. That's where I, almost a decade of my career there. And when I look at the shelves, what you would see is essentially you'd see like a whole bunch of kids books and a lot of them would be non-native writers within early kids literature.
And this is probably, this is 20 years ago when I started teaching. So you'd have this stack of kids books do stuff like Paul Goble, maybe there'd be a storyteller or two, like a local storyteller or two. Not a, not really, not a lot. And then on the same shelf, there would be just like this gap.
There was no YA, there certainly were. There was like maybe two comics that people could find out, and then it would jump right into adult literature. And then you're reading Louise Erdrich, right? And it was just like, man, that's a huge span to cover from reading a picture book to jumping into Louise's work.
And especially for me, because I didn't see any comics, and I think a lot of us have gotten into this as native creatives of yo, I didn't see anybody that looked like me. And even when there was a comic that came out or something, at least in the mainstream, oftentimes it would be, my Northern Plains brothers and sisters, right? So headdress, horse riding, just ripped. They're all jacked and they're, those guys are just yoked across the board, right? For real plains riding the horse. I was like, yo, my people were short and we like grew corn. I was like I don't see my people all that much in this kind of stuff.
So I just started kicking around ideas and I wasn't really doing anything and it was 2014 I met Arigon Starr at a native writer's event. We just started laughing about, like we should have a native comic code that we can stamp on books to give them like some authority. And a lot of it just took off from there.
We started publishing out of my nonprofit 'cause I was like the comic people, let's arrange them and start getting stuff out the door. And I, and then a lot of people hit us about Facebook. They're like, this is great. You guys should publish more. And I was like, yeah, we should publish. So we started publishing and then just crazy way leads unto way. It started out we're publishing and then 2016 I was like, we should all get together and have a Comic-Con 'cause there's not one for us. Like usually we are the, what are we are the, we're the token native at the Comic-Con talking about native stuff, right?
And I was like, I'd rather it be the we're not the token natives at a Comic-Con anymore. It's just a Comic-Con for us. And we all get to hang out and party and play. That's what I wanted to do. And then 2017 we opened Red Planet Books and Comics. 'Cause I had so much stuff piled up from the Comic-Con in my house. My wife was starting to get a little, she's this has gotta get outta the hallway. So I was like, all right, we should open an office or something. And we opened a shop instead. And now we are the only native comic shop in the world. We're the largest distributor of native comics. We still publish, we're doing A Howl with Jay and a whole bunch of other native writers.
We've got a water protectors comic coming up. We just, I'll talk more. We just got the license from Tim Truman. We're his publisher for Scout for his reproduction on Scout. So if anybody knows, that's probably the original native comic like single superhero comic that came out in the mid eighties.
So yeah, that's this all revolves around my life. I love comics, nerds, toys, collectibles, I do RPGs, I do comics. It's just it's writing and trying to get more of the stuff out there on the shelves for our kids, any way that I can.
Patty Krawec: Neil, you had mentioned when we were emailing or messaging or whatever it was we were doing, you had mentioned about a couple of comic book characters and Indigenous comic book characters whose names have fallen out of my brain. Because I didn't write them down. And what Lee was just saying just made me think of representation. Like how were we there back when we were younger and I was just reading Archie comics when I was a kid, so there was like no Indigenous content at all unless it was a Halloween story.
Neil Ellis Orts: The two series that I followed a little bit one I followed completely. The one I fell in and out of the earliest one I remember was called Turok: Son of Stone was a Indian and dinosaur story that Turok and his young ward Andar, because they always had a young sidekick, got lost in this lost world with dinosaurs and cavemen.
And the whole story was them trying to find their way out. This was published originally by Dell Comics and then later by Gold Key. And it wasn't really a Indigenous setting. It was Indigenous characters lost in a lost world kind of thing. And I, as I was thinking about this the similarity between this and the next one was called Arak which was created by Roy Thomas who did a lot of Marvel. He brought Conan into comics. He created this for DC Comics. And Arak was a Indigenous young boy who gets, his tribe is decimated by another tribe, they made up a tribe and is set adrift at sea and is picked up by Vikings and taken to Europe. So he is another kind of fish out of water story, not an Indigenous setting, but an Indigenous central character.
As a young person reading those books, and I thought I was reading something really different. Of course, it's all by white creators as far as I know. But respectfully behind the course, previous to that there's, all kinds of Westerns and you have the character Scalp Hunter, which was a white guy raised by Indians. I think there's more than one of those kind of characters in the back, in the canon. And of course there was a time when Lone Ranger was a big franchise. Tonto had his own comics for a while, but this was all very mainstream generic Hollywood, Indian.
Patty Krawec: Are those familiar to you? Jay, I think you and Lee were both nodding along at different places. Were those familiar to you?
Jay Odjick: Yeah, for sure. Turok more so than the others. I remember Arak from when I was just a little kid. But I remember Turok because there was some cross media stuff that was done. There was a video game, I believe, for the Nintendo 64 or something that was a pretty popular game.
And so far as Scalp Hunter and things like that go I remember those. And the first one, that really first Indigenous character that was created by non-Indigenous people that I remember really prominently was in a book called Alpha Flight by John Byrne. There was this character called Shaman, and it was, the tropes we've come to know and expect as it comes to native people. The mystical native guy. I don't know about any of, the rest of our guests, but I don't actually have mystical powers. I'm sorry. I hate to disappoint for anybody who's tuning in, who's expecting me to do some some magic, but not in my repertoire. We saw that a lot. And as well with Shaman, it was really funny because the thing I always say is, whenever you get a native character in these, from these corporate companies, their identity as a hero tends to be their indigeneity.
So we can't have a guy who's just like a crime fighter, like a daredevil or somebody like that. He has to be, like Red Wolf or something of that nature. So the way I would, the way I always explain it is like, if there's a fire in Gotham City and there's a building on fire, people aren't like oh no, the building's on fire, we're all gonna die. Wait, we're saved. It's white Batman. He's just Batman. Whereas when you look at African American characters. Every one of them has the word Black in their title. So it's like Black Vulcan, Black Panther, they all get that. And it's been the same in a way for us, where, every character has that thing hung on it. And you never get to see just the native character who's just a cool native character. It has to be about that. At the same time, the costume has to have all of the stereotypes and tropes of the past. e
So we don't see guys in modern superhero costumes. We see people still wearing leather and buckskin now looking at, like Lee and everyone else here. We're not wearing leather and buckskin. I'm wearing t-shirts, some jeans and some shoes. Like some Jordans I paid way too much for. So I always kinda wondered as a kid why these things were the way they were. These people didn't speak like sure, but with all due respect, we're not here to fight crime.
And for most of us, our day-to-day attire is not that, right? We've seen it. It's a thing that's played out numerous times, and that was a part of the reason why I created Kagagi the way I did, because I wanted to create a character who moved away from the stereotypes, who just looked like a visually cool character that any kid could look at and go, oh, that looks interesting I want to check that out. And almost suckering them into reading it if they weren't Native, because it was a costume design that I felt could stand next to Batman or Wolverine, and didn't scream this is a stereotype where he's wearing clothing that's been outdated for a hundred years or something.
So I think that's one of the big things with modern Indigenous comics is we're starting to see from Indigenous creators moves away from those types of things. But yeah, and as far as Scout goes, Scout was the first time I saw an actual Native character who I thought was cool. And I remember we used to go to the store that would take these like kind of mystery bags where they'd take a bag and you couldn't see what was in it.
You’d get stack of comics for five bucks or something and you just hoped there was something decent in it. And my brother and I picked up a couple of these and got home and there was a book with this Scout and we're like, oh, he's native. And it was the first time I saw something where it wasn't that stereotype where the character, again, when all due respect to characters like Shaman and the people who created them, a lot of those characters spoke in that very, like many moons ago, my people.
And I'd be like, Hey dad, can tell me something you did a long time ago. And he'd be like, yeah, way back in the day. And I'm like, yeah, that's it. We don't talk. So it really, there, there weren't a lot of times when I saw characters who really reflected who we are in the modern era.
Patty Krawec: Yeah. I call that cigar store Indian. When they talk, when they talk like that. But we all know people who put on that rez voice when they get in front of white people. We all know those people. And I you watching the Twitch stream, you can see that when Jay was talking about traditional gear I do have my big blingy earrings on today. Mostly because thanks to COVID, this is the only opportunity I have.
I remember I had years ago, like long time ago, I wrote an article that got published by a Canadian magazine, and they sent a photographer out to take my picture for the magazine. And I wore this purple dress that I had worn, to all the powwows that I had gone and so she says like, where are you traditional clothes? And I was like, what are you talking about? And she says, you're in, you're traditional clothes. She said it louder and slower as if that would help me understand it better. And I was just like, what are you? I don't have. So I let her remake me into, she cobbled together and there's a picture of Ben, I think, and Anrya’s probably seen this he's wearing like a feathered. It's with a hairpiece. He's wearing it like in a medallion. It's just, she wanted beads and buckskin. But Anrya, you read some of Kagagi, right?
Aya Foubert: I was blown away. I was like, this is awesome.
I want more. I could not. I had to keep putting it down because I like, I need to make sure I'm on the right, I'm getting off of the bus at the right spot, or I don't wanna be stuck on the bus. I have to go to class. But yeah, it was I really liked it because it, I, it really played into the superhero stereotypes, but not the, this is this is native stereotype.
It played into the, this was a superhero trope, the transformation scene. I was so excited when he finally, for the first time, transformed into the Raven and I was like, this is awesome. This is great. This is, this really scratches that superhero itch. Growing up, reading superhero comics, watching Iron Man, watching Thor, being a huge Marvel in DC fan, there is just tropes that you expect to see in superhero comic things.
And one of them is have a cool costume, have you know, a cool transformation moment, have a cool name, have some cool powers. And this checked off all of the boxes that I had going into it and I was pleased as punch reading it. And I'm super excited to continue reading it. I'm excited to watch the animated series, especially 'cause it like streams here and in Australia and my significant other's Australian, so I'm gonna force him to watch it with me because he doesn't get a choice anymore.
But I'm I was super excited and especially 'cause I read it because I knew that Jay was gonna be on the panel and I was like, oh I'll read this, it, to be able to like, these are my thoughts. And I was like, this is awesome. And it made me so nervous that I was gonna be here and had to have to talk about it in front of the guy who made it.
You put me on the spot here but yeah it really, like I was I mentioned ear earlier. Me and Patty were talking about the, an episode of the X-Files in which they're on the rez. And one of the things that you see a lot in shows around that time and in the X-Files was definitely guilty for doing this, but people of color showing up and being the magical fixers, but they're magical people of color powers doing magical things.
And I just, something it struck me as something was off as I was just trying to enjoy the episode when there was just a few too many cinematically timed like eagle noises. And I was like, I'm starting to think that, yeah, I'm starting to think that there's something a little pizzazzy about this and they're not exactly, doing what they should, but I would be, if I could remake the X-Files, I'D totally, that was, that'd be one of the episodes I'd wanna redo and I'd wanna redo it right.
Because there was just a couple issues with that. They made up a tribe. There was a whole, there's a whole thing about Indigenous people and werewolves which I'm super excited to, to read Lee's stuff about because it's definitely an interesting trope, but why is it always Indigenous people that are werewolves?
Jay Odjick: I'd just like to say a quick thanks to Rya for that. Honestly, it was incredibly touching and don't be nervous. You did a great job and I'm really glad you enjoyed it because honestly that's why I wanted to do it was because I don't think we ever got to see those things at the time when I created Kagagi. I know there's a lot more comics now created by Indigenous people with really cool Indigenous characters. But you made my day.
Patty Krawec: Rya brought up werewolves. And so that kind of brings me to Lee and your project, 'cause there's wolves, werewolves, and these other ones that I don't know who they're, so can you talk a little bit about who they are?
Lee Francis: Yeah. So Wolves, Werewolves, and Rougarou, which is the transformational, right? So that, that Métis pronunciation. And I think it's very interesting and I love that you brought that up Rya as well, because it's actually not something where we said they would be native. We just put out the call and we're just like, “Hey, we just wanna write a book about werewolves.”
And everybody took, like we had so many people that just, Beth LaPensée, just made this call out and everybody just jumped on it because I just think there's. I don't know what the attachment is, and I don't know, I know Hollywood likes to make it something, but there's also something that I think we have internally.
Maybe it's our connections to, our ancestors, right? So to our wolf ancestors and to our, our clan relations. But it is something that's, that, that turned out to be just so fantastic of just the responses and the range of stories, right? Because what I think what Hollywood does is it does the same thing that Jay was talking about, is it identifies the identity of of, native existence also becomes this thing about, this animalistic werewolfy existence, right?
And so they all have to, and they're all, it's all melodrama. It's all, like everything, it's just it's about the transformation and living in two worlds, that kind of stuff. And the stories that we're getting are stories where it's just. It's just a thing. Dale Deforest’s story is fantastic about just werewolf heavy. It's a werewolf heavy metal band, right? That's it. They just go on the road and tour as a heavy metal band. I have this one that it's basically a were a native werewolf family that's like in the middle of this werewolf fight until they get mom pissed off and then mom, it's turns into the werewolf and is like stop, damn you.
And then everybody chills out. I was like, that I think is in many ways is the beautiful parallel to what we were just talking about, right? The existence of indigeneity parallels what, how Hollywood and how pop media has hyped all of these things and found these interconnections for us. Whereas, man, if you're just a werewolf, you're just trying to get by. More often than not, you gotta go to work. If you got like a werewolf society, you're probably gonna hang out with them, more than likely you're gonna sit there and just be like all the old werewolves are just all out there smoking cigarettes together, shooting the shit, the whole thing. They're just gonna be doing that all day long, just just like we normally do. And I think that's the brilliance of what, how, and I think we're so close. We've just got a few more of the art that's coming in at this point.
Then we're putting everything together. We're gonna try and get it out, crossing the fingers with the, the postal apocalypse and everything that's happening that we get it out by December. Just trying to get everything into production is a, it's a crazy time for that.
But yeah, and I think that, I also do wanna give a big shout out to Jay as well, because Jay is, and I think, everybody needs to know this. There are three people, three native folks that were publishing prior to the 2010s, right? It was Tim Truman. It was John Proud Star and it was Jay. And Jay was one of those guys. 'cause Kagagi, I think 2004 when you first created it, and then it got picked up in 2010, right? So there wasn't anything else but these cats, right?
Maybe you saw, like you had, I think I wanna say you had, I wanna say there was like superheroes and there were like cartoons. So there was like cartoon style, like Muttpn Man was out there. There was some really small indie stuff of people we're finding some of that stuff that's pulling around.
But like these aspirations of creating superheroes, like Jay was one of those dudes right at the beginning. And then Arigan Starr hit, like right after that, she'd done Super Indian, the radio play, and then she just started hers. So those four people as native peoples are, those are the giants. Those who like, man, I love being on here with you. These are the giants that I stand on their shoulders, right?
So any room that I'm in, I was like, yo, I always throw it out because whatever I do has to do with any of this stuff, right? And. Even when I see it right now, it's, the last thing I'll say for this moment is that like when I see Marvel coming in, columbusing native comics, as if they finally discovered that there's native comic book artists out there, right? Marvel is just look at our Indigenous voices. And I was like, listen, I got a lot of friends who were drawing and doing art around that right now Jim Terry's in there, W's been doing art to that. Like these are friends, like these are, these are truly people I hang out with, but it's like all of a sudden, they make such a height, like they finally deserve this kind of credit.
When I have to point to folks like Jay and John and Arigan and Tim, and I'm saying 40 years we've been making comics, we've been superhero comics, not just like native stuff. 40 years we've been doing this. It didn't just happen in 2020. So I think that's one thing that I always gotta shout out to all these folks, especially when we're making this.
And so glad Jay is making A Howl with me too.
Jay Odjick: Thank you, Lee. That's really amazing. I am really touched, man. One of the things that I think I would like to mention, 'cause I think it is really important, is there were certain other anthologies that I had taken part in, specifically the moonshot anthologies where I was given direction. I was on one of them. I was actually, I'm not gonna say told, but asked, do you have a wendigo story? And I was like, yes, I do. It's called Kagagi. I did it fucking 20 years ago, like it's been done. But they had asked me for that and I didn't take part. That's the reason why I wasn't in I believe the second one.
There were a number of rules that were given to me on that. It was like nothing political, which I thought was crazy because, realistically a lot of what a lot of us are doing is allegory for political and social issues that our people face. And it's an important issue for us.
So without getting too further into it with A Howl, there was literally no directives given beyond that. It had to be Indigenous and it had to be wolf related. And just to show you how far some of us have taken that, my story in it is not even really a comic. It's a 10 page werewolf love song told in poetry with painted art.
And I was so nervous to email Lee and Beth, I'd be like, so here's what I wanna do. It's something I don't, 'cause I'm always nervous when it comes to anthologies that I'm doing something that somebody else is doing. So it was really about two things. It was about trying to do some and make sure I wasn't stepping on anyone else's toes.
And number two, it was playing with that idea of the werewolf as this, again the tropes of it playing into prejudices towards our people and so far as us being primitive and savage in these things. And I said, no, I'm gonna try and make the most beautiful love story and poem that I can and tell something beautiful with it. I was able to find the exact right artist for her name was Crystal Cox. She's absolutely phenomenal. Seriously couldn't be more happy. And there was not a single thing I was asked to change on this by editorial or publishing. And we were just allowed to do what we wanted. And that, to me as a creator, is that's magic.
That's the most important thing. So I think they're gonna find a wealth of different werewolf stories and it's not just gonna be the same kind of tropes that we've seen Hollywood commit in the past. I can, speaking from what I've seen and then from what I did for sure I definitely tried to move away from that.
I think if you're interested, check it out because there's some pretty wild stuff and it's definitely pushing the boundaries of what comics can be, I think. And visual storytelling as a whole,
Patty Krawec: because that's Jay had, has also been on Medicine for the Resistance and, we're talking about monsters and, about werewolves and we were talking particularly about the wendigo and that story, we've always heard that as this cautionary parallel with colonialism. And I wrote about this in the newsletter for anybody who got it. But it really isn't, and it's starting to trouble me to see it that way. To see it as this parallel with, we call politicians wendigo, we call capitalists, we call them Wendigo.
And there's Wendigo Catering up in Sioux Lookout. So as far as saying it's name repeatedly and calling it into being, I think that ship has sailed. But the conversation that we had with you Jay, about that, about it, because in some versions in the legend that you had grown up with. The original creature isn't killed, the ones that he turns are, but you don't kill the original monster because then what happens to the hero? And that was something that you explored in Kagagi and then, or you wanted to explore sorry as the animated series went on. But what do you do then when you killed all the monsters? What's the hero left with? And then as I was reading the graphic novels, what I was reading was This Place: 150 Years Retold, and there's a Wendigo story in here, but it's true, it's the story because this is a history book, so it's not fantasy.
These are histories, Indigenous histories that are being retold in graphic format. And then that led me to the book about the last wendigo Killer, Jack Fiddler, who was actually arrested and executed by the RCMP in Canada in the early 1900s because we can't kill people that are threats to our communities, but the RCMP can kill. 'Cause that makes a lot of sense. And it occurred to me that for Indigenous people, these creatures are real. These creatures are real. They're something that possessed us, that threatened our communities. They weren't metaphors for anything. They were real, they were part of our world.
And Europe, we didn't infect Europe with this wendigo thing. They had their own monsters that they brought here. And so I'm really troubled now by that comparison with capitalism. But then the way I'm tying this into that whole werewolf thing is when you have stories written by people for whom these things are real, you get much different stories, you get much different stories with much different outcomes, much different goals.
And I just think you get much better stories. So now I'm gonna let Anrya talk about her anthro angle.
Aya Foubert: Awesome. So the, my, I don't have anything to back this up, but because this is just from the top of my head, logically, what would make sense for the reason why we associate werewolves and natives is because it goes way back to that colonialism of savagery.
What is more scary than a scary wolf creature that is going to savagely rip off, rip out your innards and throw them everywhere. I don't know what werewolves do, but it ties back to that it, it is a trope that exists because people say, not very nice things.
But that is likely my anthropological assessment of culturally why that is the tie there.
Neil Ellis Orts: So I don't know anything about werewolves history. Is that an Indigenous creature? I mean I, in all the movies that I ever took notice of, it's some white guy transforming. So where does that connection get made?
I'm not aware of that connection, I guess is what I'm saying, and
Jay Odjick: unless I'm mistaken, I think a lot of it comes from France, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's my understanding a lot of it.
Lee Francis: Yeah. Anyway, and a lot of their stuff was based around wolves being used as like this fear of, it, the romanticism.
So it was a lot of gothic. It really tied into the gothic writing as wolves being dangerous while they were doing the big wolf purges, through their areas. Think did, what is it? HBO, Wolf Walkers. Fantastic animated show. They do a flip of it and it takes place all in occupied Ireland. And the werewolves are the wolf walkers are the Irish, essentially. And the English are the ones that are basically murdering any wolf they can find because they, to bring them under heel.
Fantastic. I, with our relatives, right? I watched this and I was like, dang, this is so similar, right? You're just like, wow, this is totally colonization. I think for us, as far as I can tell, and I haven't done a huge amount of story anthropology or story archeology on this, but we don't have a lot of, we have not in the way that it's done in these types of stories.
We have wolf relatives, we have wolf stories, we have people that do become wolves, but then don't, then they just pop in and out like it. It's not a stay. It's not this struggle with the internal nature of it. It's just a, it's just what happens. And that's the thing about if you look at any of our stories, it's that's a thing. It just happens, it's a gig. So that's it. And I think we found somebody looked it up, so you should jump in and run that out right now, Rya.
Aya Foubert: Okay. I just gave it a quick Google, and I don't, looking at this, the only thing that could give any credence what this person is saying is that this person who wrote this is a PhD candidate.
But basically the earliest known surviving example of a man to wolf transformation, and I am quoting here is found in the epic of Gilgamesh from around 2,100 BC. However, the werewolf, as we know, now know it first appeared in ancient Greece and Rome in ethnographic, poetic and philosophical texts.
So that. A lot of things started in ancient Greece and Rome and have really stuck true myth-wise and stuff like that. And the, one of the, I think, best quotes that really helped me as an anthropologist and also someone who studies like the classics and stuff like that understand myths, legends, stuff like that, is that myths exist to categorize and organize the world that we live in and explain things when we don't have any other explanation for things.
Jay Odjick: When it comes to the popular werewolf myths that we see, especially like from Hollywood. I think the original probably would've been like the old Wolfman with Lon Chaney Jr. or whatever. If I'm not mistaken. I think he gets turned in France and I think a lot of what we see as modern werewolf fiction tends to come from France because they're term for the monster is loup-garou, loup meaning wolf in French.
But if we look at it, I don't know why human, like humanity for the most part, especially in Europe, has always been really taken with the idea of the wolf. Even though there's a million different kinds of animals out there. When you mentioned Rome it made me think of the idea of the founders of Rome were raised by wolves, Romulus and Remus. It's never bears for some crazy reason. I'd hate to see the human who was reared by skunks, for example. But we're always gonna get wolves. So I don't know what it is. It has something to do, I think with humanity's preoccupation with the wolf, maybe because it's a social animal, I'm not sure. But it's a really strange thing.
It always tends to be wolves. It's never raccoons or porcupines. It's always gonna be wolves. I don't know why.
Patty Krawec: Just to be completely weird, I wonder if Stephanie Meyer and the Twilight Series are responsible for this big Indigenous werewolf connection. Because she had her shapeshifters who, they thought they were werewolves, and it turned out they were just shapeshifters.
And there's a Canadian novel from the seventies called Bear where she wasn't raised by a bear, but it's really weird. You can look into that. Jay, what are you working on now?
Jay Odjick: Right now? Holy cow. I don't sleep a lot these days. I was really the, I was more excited about A Howl everything is because it's such a departure for me because, again, I'd worked in television and I'd worked in comics and children's books, and it was something different to do, something that was essentially long form poetry.
The story is called Moonlight Somata, and it's a play on moonlight sonata. Somata means bodies, so it's called the Song of Bodies and Moonlight, and it's about two people who come together and I don't want to give it away, but I think it, it came together really well. Other than that I got a couple of children's book projects I'm looking at that I'd be writing myself.
I was teaching a course on writing at the University of Ottawa for comics as well as screenwriting. And I had to step away because I just have too much stuff going on to be able to devote to that. The big thing, I suppose the two big ones would be I've got a graphic novel at Scholastic called I Am Thunder that's essentially about myself as a kid and how I came to comics and create comics. So it covers what we were talking about in so far as not seeing ourselves reflected in media and why I decided to try and do what I did with Kagagi because I was pretty young when I got into it. And one of the things that's important to note with Kagagi was I did three self-published, black and white pretty crappy comics that I was doing out of my basement.
And then I brought it to this company called Arkana which was at the time maybe one of Canada's, if not the biggest publisher of comics, up there. Because I wanted the book to be able to be carried through Diamond, even though that seems to be going the way the dinosaur, but I wanted the book to be available in any comic bookshop.
And that's something I'm very proud of. You could go into any comic bookshop in North America and order a coffee and Kagagi. So I Am Thunder is about a kid much like me. It's really based on my life as a child and how I came to comics and the things that we go through as native people coming into a world that I think a lot of people in corporations still believe it is not our place. And I think it's important that we discuss those things. And then more recently I'm working with a production company here in Canada to create a feature film. It's not animated, it's a live action feature that I'm describing as a gritty crime drama.
And it's really about how people, especially native people, are put into certain boxes and how much leeway we have to get out of them. And I think a lot of that applies to what we're talking about here, insofar as what society expects Indigenous people to be and the fight we've gotta go through. To escape those boxes if we can.
Sometimes we can, and I think sometimes we can't.
Patty Krawec: I think about those boxes, you said you talked about Indigenous people, being put into boxes. And then that makes me wonder, what is it about comics? Do they offer a way for us to get out of those boxes that maybe other media don't offer?
And now I'm thinking particularly about representation, how this particular medium allows us to break out of boxes in a way that other mediums maybe don't.
Lee Francis: Yeah, I think that's, that's a great way to frame it too. 'cause I think it's, it allows the imagination to go beyond what we've been told we have to be.
When you can portray yourself. Like the hardest part with filming, Jay just talking about it, right? You got insurance and you got a production company and how, and they gotta get money back. But when you're just writing and making comics, the sky is truly the limit.
Like, all you gotta do is find either, and I don't draw very well, but maybe you find a friend or maybe just go ahead and do what you're gonna put out there in the world anyway and eventually get better because you can write whatever story you wanna write in, and that's, you're not you don't have to conform to the way that pop media has insisted.
And I think what comics allow us is that we get to be living, live, powerful, empowered amazing characters and beings, not at anyone's whims, on our own terms. How we want to tell the stories in whatever fashion we're gonna do it. So I think that's why I love this medium more than anything. 'cause I also, I'm not beholden to a production company.
I just get to draw and write whatever I want. If it gets picked up, it gets picked up, not, I got a lot of good friends. And I run a bookstore, so I'll just throw it on my own shelves. That's how it can play out.
Aya Foubert: There is, it, representation for me is really weird because there is, when it comes to like mental health with like specific mental health issues that I deal with myself, there is really no good representation for people with borderline which is something I myself struggle with.
And that is, I don't see that in the media. There isn't a good outlet for that. And the people that I do see on social media talking about their mental health, talking about stuff like that. They get so much hate and horrible things said to them about you're faking it, stuff like that. That it's just, I could not put myself out there like that.
I could not be there to tell my story and how I feel about things. So that is, it that's I hope someone else is strong enough to do it, but that's something that I myself would really struggle to do as far as something like autism or Asperger's go because that's something that me and my siblings I deal and struggle with.
I was talking to my father about this recently, and my father is this, straight white guy who is neurotypical and, he's just a normal guy. He, representation for him is fine. But we had to talk about Sheldon Cooper versus Dr. Temperance Brennan, who was a better representation for someone who doesn't understand social practices and social norms.
And Dr. Temperance Brennan was the winner here because there is quite a few things wrong with the Big Bang Theory which is unfortunate because it, it's entertaining and then you look at it for a little bit longer and you go, wait a minute, this is not great. That kind of really sexist what they're doing, but that's past the point.
But yeah, maybe comic books and stuff like that is the route that I need to take. Maybe I need to get into making comics or writing stories and stuff like that so that there is representation for people who struggle with disability. 'cause I would've given anything to see more things about kids who didn't understand what was going on with their friends on the playground. Like I felt very alone as a kid and still do as an adult.
Jay Odjick: When you look at comic books, okay, graphic novel is just a term that was created because the term comic had been stigmatized. I was so glad when Rya spoke and the first thing she said was Calvin and Hobbes because that's a comic, it's a goddamn comic. Just like Kagagi is a goddamn comic. Just like Watchmen is a goddamn comic. It's all comics, no matter what we choose to call it. We can call it graphic novels. We can call 'em trade paperbacks. We can call 'em comic books. Fucking it doesn't matter. It's pictures and words.
That's what it is. That's comics. So no matter what we call them, they are what they are. All we have to remember is not to stigmatize certain things and think that one thing is worth more than any other. It's all the same. It's pictures and it's stories, and that's what we're all looking for. We're all looking for something new.
If we look at what happened with comics, things changed around the mid 80s, late 80s. DC comics started bringing in a bunch of English writers. You had the Allen Morris, you had the Grant Morrisons, you had, all these people come in with a different take on superheroes, completely changing the industry.
What I believe we're headed for now is the same thing's going to happen with the Indigenous writers because fresh takes on things. We have fresh ideas and we're coming. And for an industry that worked really long and hard to keep us out of it for decades, the doors open and we're coming. You can slow it down, you can delay it, but it's gonna happen.
And that to me is the most exciting thing. And I'll end on, we're about to see, I think, a real overhaul in industry in so far as Indigenous creators and Indigenous presence. Rya, by all means, like I said, if I can ever help, let me know. And you'd be shocked at how helpful and welcoming the Indigenous comic creator community is.
We need more voices like you.
Patty Krawec: Are we in a moment now? I feel like Indigenous people, broadly speaking, and a whole lot of places. I feel like we're in a moment. I feel like we are in, a place of opportunity right now. What do you think?
Lee Francis: Yeah, I think it's, and it's that I think you're right.
It's the opportunity and it's gonna take that, it's gonna take, keeping the thumb, it's, it's that pressure point, right? You've got and not letting him, I'll say not letting him get away with saying that you can only get one or two writers in this space, right? Because right now they're starting, what they do is they say we're all about opening up diversity and all the rest.
And then they start to narrow that down, right? And then it's only a few that get selected at that point. And only a couple that start to they'll weed, they'll we know that out as their diversity stuff. But I've seen it because we saw that happen with, that's the Sherman Alexi era, right?
There were to the early 90’s was this great boom of native writers. Writing, poetry, writing, like novels, short fiction. And you saw that crest and as we know, when Sherman took up a lot of the air, but they also the industry was more than happy to accommodate. And they were very happy to accommodate around just a small select group of native writers that they would champion.
And those became part of the canon. So the opportunity is there, and right now it's up to us, in this part, me, in the industry to do the best I can as a publisher, as a bookseller, to keep pushing any chance I can, like with American Bookseller Association or American Library Association to say this is going, you, you can't stop.
You have to carry these comics. I'm gonna make you carry these comics. You ask me for a book list, it's gonna be these comics, it's gonna be wherever I can find them, it's gonna be talking to whoever I can to get licenses to get things out back into print. Because a lot of times they just let stuff go.
They're like it's fine, or whatever. You saw, that's one of the conversations. I met Tim Truman at Indigenous Comic-Con and struck up a relationship. Scout, went into print, they had a fuse through diamond, and then they just kinda let it lapse in terms of the reprints. And I talked to him. I was like, so who has the rights? Because there's a generation of kids who have never read this. This should always be in circulation. That's how we want to be able to see all this stuff, right? And to continue to push this stuff forward as much as we can. So I think we're at that moment, we're at that, that, that precipice, and it's up to all of us to keep making more.
That's the other part I say. I was like, don't give 'em a chance to just find, I got, everyone's like native creatives. I was like, I got tons of people. I know, right? And I'm finding more. We just got this whole new chunk of people for A Howl, right? I was shocked how many cool, awesome artists doing, native artists doing amazing things that I knew of peripherally from like Instagram or from something.
They're now drawing comics right now. They've got a portfolio. So Rya, same thing. We'll toss it, I'll toss it out there like Jay, make that comic, right? You got two good writers in the house that will totally help out and find illustrators and do whatever you need to do because I think that's the part, the opportunity is here. But now we have to keep pushing in every single nook and cranny. Not just comics, but autobiographical. So you got Jim Terry's, you got Jay's coming out, right? So you got two autobiographical comic based anthology, graphic novels, right? Those are gonna be, those are out on deck. You've got, like these niche ones, you're starting to see more horror.
We need horror genre, we need romances. Like it is a whole area of writing that's just not being covered of romance and chick-lit. I don't mean to degrade it. There's a lot of people that like it, right? I was like, we need to take back our werewolves and we need to redo, these spaces and do our grand romances graphic novel style or whatever, right?
So I think that's where we are. This is the moment and now it's gotta be it. Now we just have to turbocharge it and get and not fall into the lull again, because that's what happened in the nineties moving into the early 2,000’s, is there was just this kind of crest and everybody really started to focus on literature.
So you got a lot of amazing poets that came out during that time and a lot of amazing, novel writers and all of these other little areas were not focused on by the institutions, by the publishers, by the, a small handful of, colleges and whatnot. So now we're at that space, and you know what, everybody's gotta keep doing this. And especially in the field we're doing, I got shelves. I'm waiting to desperately just fill an entire bookshelf of Native comics. People asked me, they're like why do you carry all these things? I was like native nerds, we still like our, but I still like Spider-Man. I still wanna see Spider-Man. I still wanna see, I'll see a little bit of Ironman, and some Batman, white Batman. That's what I’m calling him from now on. So I still wanna see White Batman up in here. But I also want to get to a day with somebody asks, and I have one shop that is literally just shelves of native comics and nothing else.
That's where I wanna be. So that's where I say, I was like, that’s not only a challenge. It's a moment, it's an opportunity and it's challenge.
Patty Krawec: And I think a lot of the novels that came out in the nineties were also particularly a kind of novel. Like they'd had a particular kind of resolution at the end, some kind of happy ending.
Like I think of Tommy Orange's book that just, that came out just a couple of years ago that did not have a happy ending. And I'm sorry if I'm spoiling that for people that are listening, the ending is telegraphed well through the book and that's important. The lack of happy endings is important 'cause we don't always get them happy, sometimes the ending … yeah. And then we just, we deal with that. And that's okay. It's, and I was just talking with somebody else about another book where there, there's no happy ending and that for that lack of a happy ending forces us to think about social realities.
Lee Francis: Just a quick end and I'll just say, I don't think, the thing is what we're looking, I think it's a difference between a satisfying ending or a content ending and a Disney ending. The Disney ending is, it's all tied in a nice little bow and we get the outro that and years later, Lee went on to, marry his girlfriend and drive the fancy car that he'd always wanted to write the whole movie or the book, right?
But I always put it, I was just like, listen, you know what my happy ending is? We're still here. You didn't kill us all off. Yeah. That's a happy ending, right? There's a lot of things that happened and it doesn't, I'm gonna point out tragedy, but I'm still here. My family made it through, but by luck, by whatever you did the best you could, that's a happy ending to me.
I'm still moving on
Neil Ellis Orts: all kinds of final thoughts. I don't have final thoughts. I have continuing thoughts and y'all gave me a lot of stuff to look up now.
Aya Foubert: I am honestly just, my head is just full of ideas. I have comics I gotta finish reading now. I got I, in my spare time, whenever I'm bored, I myself write a bit of a psychological thriller that I've been working on for a couple of years now.
I don't know what I'm ever gonna do with it, maybe it'll just stay in my Google Docs forever and ever. But it's I dunno, storytelling is great, and I think it's something that everybody can do. And that's my, my final take on it is storytelling is for everybody, and everybody should have equal platform to do it.
Patty Krawec: Thank you for listening. You can find me online at thousandworlds.ca where I write about traditional Ojibwe stories and how they connect with our current lives, along with the books that I'm reading or feel relevant to the story. This podcast series and the book that emerged from it changed me the way that good books and the conversations about them do. Remember the first rule of Bad Indians Book Club: Always carry a book.
These conversations originally streamed live and were recorded in 2021. Editing and transcripts completed by Tiffany Hill with the generous support of Dr. Eve Tuck, director of the Visiting Lab in Lenapehoking. Our theme is Biindigen, an original hand drum song composed and performed by Nicole Joy Fraser.
Baamaapii!
Want to add Bad Indians Book Club merch to your life? Get your Live Laugh Lurk on at Johnnie Jae's shop where she sells tshirts, stickers, tote bags and so much more. And that cover art by J NiCole Hatfield is stunning isn't it? She sells prints, cards, and more on her website.
Excerpt from Booklist, a starred review which means the book is "outstanding in its genre": A fascinating advanced seminar about how to think, read, think about reading, and think about Indigenous lives.”
Order your copy of Bad Indians Book Club today in the US at Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and in Canada: Indigenous owned GoodMinds, as well as Amazon, indie books, and Chapters Indigo. Get it wherever you get your books.
Podcasts and Interviews!
Missing Witches Part 1 and Part 2
Turning Pages
A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast
CBC's The Next Chapter
New York Society Library
Shawn Breathes Books
Book reviews!
Featured by Goodreads for Native American Heritage Month
Featured by Powell's Books for Native American Heritage Month
The Miramichi Reacher
I've Read This
Pickle Me This
Foreword
Reading Our Shelves
Red Pop News
On Our Radar: 49th Shelf
Ms Magazine's top 25
Summer Must Reads Toronto Star
CBC Books 45 Canadian nonfiction books to read this fall
My list of "must read books" for CBC on TRC Day, Sep 30 2025
An excerpt published by Baptist News Online.
Do you want me to zoom into your local bookstore or bookclub? Talk with you on your podcast? I can do that. patty.krawec@gmail.com For larger professional settings you can email Rob Firing at rob@transatlanticagency.com
November 15: If you're in the Cambridge Mass area I'll be zooming into the Porter Square Books discussion group. This is in person but there is a zoom option for people who live too far to come into the store.
November 17: I'll be at the Burlington Literary Festival in Burlington, Ontario.
November 26: I'll be at the Gallery on Queen in Fredericton, New Brunswick talking with Sonia Alviles who is an organizer with Migrant Workers Alliance for Change.
November 24: If you're in NYC you can participate in the New York Public Library's discussion of Bad Indians Book Club. I'm not involved in this, but you can go anyway!
March 10, 2026: I'll be at the By the Lake Book Club in Toronto, Ontario.
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