Imagining futures through graphic storytelling : a Qazaq dystopia in Orda and an Indigenous utopia in kitaskinaw 2350 ...

• Main Author: Kanasheva, Malika
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2023
• Subjects: Wolastoqiyik
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0438322; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0438322

Imagining and visualizing futures through graphic storytelling, Indigenous comics writers and illustrators create alternative possibilities that inherently reject colonial narratives that do not envision Indigenous cultures surviving into the future. Deliberately centering Indigenous Peoples in the story in various ways, they represent utopian and dystopian scenarios that serve as not the destruction of Indigenous worlds but instead catalysts of decolonization. This thesis analyzes the futures imagined in a Qazaq comic series, Orda, written by Orazkhan Jakup and featuring different illustrators for each issue, and an Indigenous comic from Canada, kitaskinaw 2350, written by a Métis writer Chelsea Vowel, illustrated by a Wolastoqiyik artist Tara Audibert, and coloured by Donovan Yaciuk. Engaging the dynamic critical conversations about Indigenous Futurism and comics as a form, I draw on Chadwick Allen’s trans-Indigenous reading methodology and his arguments about “legitimiz[ing] our expanding archive for ...