Indigeneity

Sherman Alexie’s oft-quoted 1998 reflection recalls learning to read with a Superman comic book as a three-year-old Spokane Indian boy on the reservation. While Alexie himself has become a controversial figure, his memory speaks to a profound truth about comics and Indigenous experience: that for many raised in the ethnoracial and socioeconomic margins, comics provided both literacy and escape. Yet this same medium that offered reprieve has historically been a site of violent misrepresentation, where Indigenous peoples were frozen in imagined pasts, reduced to savage hordes, mystical sidekicks, or noble relics. This chapter examines how indigeneity operates within comics—both as a site of colonial violence through stereotypical representation and as a space of resistance, sovereignty, and futurity through Indigenous creation.