{"id":63763,"date":"2018-11-27T17:27:01","date_gmt":"2018-11-28T00:27:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/comics-fan-uses-superheroes-to-fight-indigenous-stereotypes\/"},"modified":"2018-11-28T00:27:01","modified_gmt":"2018-11-28T00:27:01","slug":"comics-fan-uses-superheroes-to-fight-indigenous-stereotypes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/comics-fan-uses-superheroes-to-fight-indigenous-stereotypes\/","title":{"rendered":"Comics fan uses superheroes to fight indigenous stereotypes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Lee
Lee Francis, owner Native Realities, a company producing comic books, graphic novels and with plans to create video games, says influencing today\u2019s popular culture is one of the best ways to combat past, inaccurate stereotypes of Native Americans.<\/span>Patrick Armijo\/Durango Herald<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Using the power of popular culture to combat stereotypes of Native Americans drives Lee Francis, a self-described \u201cindigenerd\u201d who grew up with a passion for comics but who rarely saw portrayals of indigenous people and certainly not as superheroes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up with \u2018Star Trek\u2019 and \u2018Star Wars\u2019 in the house. I grew up a nerd, and it\u2019s hard to be a nerd and showcase your indigenous identity,\u201d Francis told a group of about 60 students who gathered to hear him Monday night in the Student Union at Fort Lewis College as part of the Native American Center\u2019s Speaker Series.<\/p>\n

Francis, who has a background in education, teaching at Laguna Acoma High School in New Mexico, is now fully engulfed in popular culture \u2013 seeking to bring complexity and modernity to outdated, mainstream tropes of indigenous people.<\/p>\n

Francis owns Native Realities<\/a>, a company producing comic books, graphic novels and with plans to create video games, featuring Native American superheroes.<\/p>\n

He also owns Red Planet Books and Comics<\/a> in Albuquerque, a comic and graphic novel store featuring stories of Native Americans, and he organized Indigenous Comic Con<\/a> in Albuquerque.<\/p>\n

Tapping popular culture, Francis said, is a bit like fighting fire with fire.<\/p>\n

He sees influencing current popular culture as one of the few effective ways to add accuracy, complexity and nuance to stereotypes of Native Americans spread historically by past eras of popular culture dating to the 1600s.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thing about popular culture is it settles in the brain. We\u2019re permeated by it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Francis noted the power of popular culture when talking to a Navajo code talker who had never seen \u201cStar Wars\u201d but was aware of the influence of the series given his familiarity with \u201cthe little trash-can robot that rolls around.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s how popular culture absorbs us,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Popular culture from four eras, he said, gives us incomplete views and harmful stereotypes of indigenous culture:<\/p>\n

The 1600s provided the view of the \u201cnoble savage,\u201d the wild human uncorrupted by civilization.<\/em>The 1700s presented the view of the \u201cvanishing Indian,\u201d a stereotype that Francis said provided psychological solace to settlers taking land from Native Americans and violating sovereign treaties.<\/em>The 1820s and the election of President Andrew Jackson gave the view of the \u201cred devil,\u201d a stereotype that enabled Americans to psychologically accept efforts to exterminate Native Americans.<\/em>In the late 1800s, \u201ca sense of guilt\u201d emerged in popular culture, he said, giving us the \u201cneo-noble savage,\u201d a stereotype that uses the original \u201cnoble savage\u201d stereotype to represent positive modern values, such as environmental consciousness.<\/em>Using comic books, graphic novels and video games, Francis said, is a way to fight the simplistic views of indigenous culture passed on over the centuries.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we tell our own stories, we are able to deconstruct these stereotypical images and we can combat the view that the only way to exist is as a \u2018red devil\u2019 or a \u2018noble savage,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

parmijo@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Francis taps power of popular culture<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":63764,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[2007,28,561,29,1850],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-63763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-culture-general","tag-headlines","tag-native-american","tag-newsletter","tag-racism"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63763"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=63763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}