Indigenous Comics in the United States

Tony Chavarria
From May 2008 through January 200g, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico, featured the exhibition Comic Art Indigne: Where Comics and the Indigenous Meet, which considers how storytelling has been used by comics and comicinspired art to express the contemporary Native American experience. The exhibition is currently at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. (through May ji). The following is adapted from the exhibition materials and presented with the permission of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

s an art form, comics are poorly understood, underanalyzed, and underutiliied. Created to be disposable yet widely read, comics are often dismissed as primitive and juvenile. Nevertheless, a generation of Native artists has embraced comics as an expressive medium. It is only natural that this marginal art appeals to oft-marginalized indigenous people, for both have

been regarded as a primitive and malignant presence on the American landscape. Like American Indian cultures, comic art is amazingly complex and adaptive. As the first widely accessible mass medium, comics were consumed by Indian people as a recognizable form of storytellingexpressing cultural sfories through pictures. Indian artists articulate idenfity, politics.

ABOVE Marty Two Bulls Sr. (Oglala Lakota). Mr. Diabetes, 2004, ink on board, courtesy of the artist

May-lune 2009 1 .17

and culture using the unique dynamics of comic art. This is a new world of American Indian art, full of the brash excitement first seen on newsprint a century agosometimes unrefined, often considered crude, but never sterile.

Shared Aspects of Comics and Native Art

In American Indian cultures, art lives in the everyday, as part of the mundane and metaphysical. Art tells stories, reinforces beliefs, petitions the supernatural, and balances the universe. Thus Native art, without the aid of a written language in most instances, developed as a unique visual communication system; symbols float, merge, separate, and repeat, creating unique layers of meaning accessible to individuals, families, clans, and villages, each reading elements within their own understanding. Comic art also developed its own unique dialogue. Figures and backgrounds are reduced to the basics as a result of reproduction on newsprint. Word balloons and visual effects such as motion lines, impact stars, sound effects, and sweat drops drive the story in three panels or less. Newspapers and newsstands offered humor and adventure in dazzling color ready to be devoured and discarded. It is an art for the masses, of any age, gender, or background. The audiences, messages, and media of comics and Native art have contributed to their strange aspects. Although at first deposited in ethnic or cultural categories, art's unstable molecules smashed superficial boundaries to become anthropological texts, social commentary, commercial enterprise, and, ultimately, fine art. The impact of Native and comic art on American culture is fantastic.

Tony Chavarrla is Curator of Ethnology at Santa Fe's Museum of Indian Arts & Culture (www.miaclab. org), a premier repository of Native art and material culture Ihat tells the stories of the people of the U.S. Southwest from prehistory through contemporary art. He was the inaugural Brantgar Fellow al the School of American Research in nanta Fe and has sen/ed as a cultural /exhibit consultant for several universities and museums.

some of these emerging artists would delve into the medium of comics. Since the 1940s, American Indian artists have worked in all aspects of comic art, including comic strips, single-panel cartoons, editorial cartoons, and comic books. With few exceptions. Native artists' explorations in comic art are still informed by their cultural background. Stories are woven from the indigenous experience in a postcolonial world. Issues of identity, representation, Wellness, and self-determination are constant themes in the work produced by these artists. Using the methodology of comics and cartooning, problematic topics can be examined under cover of a quick laugh or an action-packed adventure.
In Mr. Diabetes {see previous page), Marty Two

Indian Artists Making Comics

As Native artists began working in "nontraditional" mediums such as easel paintings, murals, and works on paper, it was a natural step that
I V^or[d Literature Today

Bulls offers a vivid statement on the diabetes epidemic in Natve American populations. The blue marks visible on Mr. Diabetes are from a blue pencil. As blue pencil lines do not reproduce using mechanical reproduction, they are used by artists to lay out a piece before inking without the worry of stray lines appearing on the published art. The blue pencil also was the tool of choice for the editor, to the degree that to "blue pencil" something became a synonym for deleting or censoring.

PREVIOUS P G Douglas Miles (San Carlos Apache / AE Akimel O'Odham), Speedy Skato, 2006, acrylic on 7-ply mapiewood, from the Collertion of Warner Bros, Consumer Products

THIS PAGE Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo), Lest Tyranny Triumph, 2004, ink on paper, courtesy of the artist

Comic Art as the Source

Contemporary Indian artists have grown up under the inspirational tutelage of Martinez, Lewis, Cannon, Houser, and Velardejust to name a few yet they also grew up absorbing the likes of Kirby, Ditko, Steranko, Crumb, and Los Bros Hernandez. Native artists recognize the power of cultural symbols to speak about their past, present, and future. Raised East of the L.A. River, Speedy (Skater) Skato (facing page) lives and thrives in the concrete metropolis. He is proud of his culture, history, and city. He is able to become one with his envirorunent through skateboarding. Pesky cats wait on every comer to escort him off the premises, but this does not deter him in his quest for skate mastery, His battle is threefold: society, which views him as a pest; gravity, which would hold him down; and pesky cats, who try to eat him for lunch in between doughnut breaks. He is the

best-unknown skater out on the streets (written by Douglas Miles).

In Lest Tyranny Triumph {this page), based on

a full-page drawing by Jack Kirby from an issue of The Mighty Thor, Diego Romero's fine example of "iilo-drama" blends the art of the Mimbres, the Greeks, and Lee & Kirby into something distinctive. Just as their ancestors did, Indian artists today use tradition as a foundation mixed with outside influences to comment on their world and lifeways. The works created are not comics, but their insidious influence is seen. Using the conventions of comic art, such as its hyperdynamism and raw absurdities. Native artists are reclaiming stereotypes of their art, culture, and environment, stretching them beyond recognition and transforming the standard expectations of what is Indian art. H
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Editorial note: For more on this topic, see the review of Michael Sheyahshe's Native Americans in Comic Books on page 77 of this issue.

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