This academic year Native American and Indigenous Studies, English, and Comics and Cartoon Studies will present the Indigenous Comics Speaker Series. 

The series begins with Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, an award-winning visual contemporary artist and author, on Wednessday, October 11, 2023 at 4 p.m. in the Knight Library Browsing Room. Yahgulanaas’s publications include national bestsellers Flight of the Hummingbird and RED, a Haida Manga. His most recent publication is JAJ: a Haida Manga (May 2023).

Yahgulanaas became a full-time artist after many decades working as part of the Haida Nation’s successful campaign to protect its biocultural diversity. He is a descendant of iconic artists Isabella Edenshaw, Charles Edenshaw, and Delores Churchill, and he had early training from exceptional creators and master carvers. In the late 1990s, after exposure to Chinese brush techniques, he consciously began to merge Haida and Asian artistic influences into his self-taught practice, and created the art form called “Haida Manga.”

Haida Manga blends North Pacific Indigenous iconographies and framelines with the graphic dynamism of Asian manga. It is committed to hybridity as a positive force that opens a third space for critical engagement. That hybridity becomes woven through the artist’s art, books, and speeches, and offers an empowering and playful way to view and engage with social issues.

Exploring themes of identity, environmentalism, and the human condition, he communicates a worldview that is, while particular to his ancestral North Pacific archipelago of Haida Gwaii, also relevant to a contemporary and internationally-engaged audience.

In addition to his public talk, Yahgulanaas will visit two classes and engage with the Native American and Indigenous Studies Academic Residential Community at the Many Nations Longhouse.

The series will continue in winter term with Cole Pauls, a Tahltan comics artist, illustrator, and printmaker from Haines Junction, Yukon Territory; and in spring term with artist Arigon Starr, an enrolled member of the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma and one of the founders of the Indigenous Narratives Collective (INC), a group of Native American comic book writers and artists.

The Indigenous Comics Speaker Series, cosponsored by the OHC’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, is free and open to the public.