Nagpra Comics

[Tertulio Searcy]

NAGPRAComics is a community- based, collaboratively produced comic series that tells true stories about repatriation from tribal perspectives. They work with Native American communities to share their experiences with the law, from their point of view. This is an applied/educational comic series, so it also explains what the law is and how it works. [excerpt from napgracomics.weebly.com]

Jen Shannon, Program Manager and Curator at the National Museum of the American Indian and member of the NAGPRA Comics team, wrote a fantastic blog for the Ohio History Connection exploring the story and how it will be told in the comic. Her blog includes a glimpse of some draft pages. Take a look for yourself!

Jennifer Shannon, associate professor of anthropology and curator at the CU Museum of Natural History, is one of seven scholars nationwide to win a Whiting Public Engagement Program fellowship, the Whiting Foundation has announced.

The aim of NAGPRA Comics, which launched in 2017 with archaeologist Sonya Atalay (Anishinaabe-Ojibwe), and archaeologist and comics creator John Swogger, is to tell true stories about repatriation from Native Nations' perspectives.

Taking its name from the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, the series helps Native peoples, museum professionals, university students and others understand both the obligations and impact of the legislation, Shannon states.

At San Diego Comic-Con in 2019, members of the NAGPRA Comics team met Mike Connolly, tribal historian of the Campo Kumeyaay Nation, a federally recognized tribe 60 miles east of San Diego, and Stan Rodriguez, tribal historian and professor at Kumeyaay Community College.

Shannon and her collaborators will use the fellowship to support a Kumeyaay-directed, community-based research project on Kumeyaay history, which will inform a series of co-created comics that illustrate Kumeyaay history and lifeways.

Shannon and her collaborators say they hope Kumeyaay Comics will lead to a broader, multi-tribal community engaged comics series, Indigenous Histories of the Americas, that further contributes to public scholarship and public education.

Since it began in 2016, the program has given $2.4 million to launch and expand projects in the United States and beyond. Winners are selected through a competitive process beginning with nomination by a university, scholarly society or state humanities council and proceeding through two further stages of peer review by expert public humanists.

In addition to seven $50,000 fellowships, the foundation this month also awarded five $10,000 seed grants to a cross-section of public-humanities collaborations. Their projects draw on topics from the global history of paper currency to the culture of rural Hispanic communities in eastern Arizona, and they use media from traveling museum exhibits to virtual-reality film to community oral-history workshops.

NAGPRA comics are intended to help Native peoples, archaeologists, historic preservation officers, museum administrators and others involved in repatriation decisions to understand both the obligations and the impact of NAGPRA legislation and process. This comic is not an official publication of National NAGPRA or the Review Committee, and the

content does not necessarily reflect the opinions, legal or otherwise, of the Committee or any other federal or legal body associated with NAGPRA. However, all information contained in this comic is in the public record, and has been reviewed by a former member of the National NAGPRA Review Committee for accuracy and appropriateness.

For those of you interested in how comics can be applied to other aspects of archaeology, here are two comics about science in archaeology, produced in partnership with the Center for Applied Isotope Studies at the University of Georgia:

American Veterans Archaeological Recovery (AVAR) integrates military veterans with physical or mental disabilities into a community of archaeological researchers that supports their rehabilitation through goal-oriented, team-centered excavations. The social bonding and shared experiences of participants are an important feature of American Veterans Archaeological Recovery. Participants share their new experiences in archaeology with others from the community of veterans, and will make new connections in the community of academic and professional archaeologists working to discover and preserve the physical evidence of our common cultural heritage.

This is an exciting project for me, as it starts to bring together several important strands that have emerged through my use of comics over the past ten years: not simply the use of the medium as a way to communicate information, but the potential of the creative process itself to add an additional layer of visibility and depth to that information.

In my TAG paper, I talked a little about how the authorial visibility that comics permits can allow the medium to approach subjects which have traditionally been very much beyond the remit of archaeological visualisation. The SAFE study into sexual harassment in the academic fieldwork, published in 2014, is part of a growing openness about the prevalence of sexual harassment, intimidation and discrimination within disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology. One of the notable features of studies such as this is a lack of awareness about methods of reporting such incidents.

How this comic will ultimately be published is not clear. But I hope it suggests ways in which comics might be used in archaeology: to give voice to situations and experiences which are important, and which deserve to be talked about.

Jennifer Shannon is an associate professor of cultural anthropology and curator in the Museum of Natural History at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is currently on leave from the university to be a Supervisory Curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Her research focuses on changing museum practices and disrupting dominant historical and contemporary narratives through collaboration with Indigenous peoples. She conducts community-based research as well as collections research and has taught courses in cultural anthropology and in museum studies. Previously, she was a lead researcher in the curatorial department at the National Museum of the American Indian. She is the author of Our Lives: Collaboration, Native Voice, and the Making of the National Museum of the American Indian (SAR Press 2014), is a co-producer of NAGPRA Comics, and was co-host of SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human.

Tribal historian Ethan Banegas (Luiseno-Kumeyaay) is the Research Director for the project. The Content Development Team includes tribal historians Michael Connolly Miskwish (Campo Kumeyaay Nation) who is the author of Kumeyaay: A History Textbook, Precontact to 1893 (2006); Stan Rodriguez (Kumeyaay-Iipay, Santa Ysabel) who is a Kumeyaay Language Instructor; and Lorraine Orosco (Kumeyaay-Ipai) who teaches Kumeyaay humanities and is the Education Director for the San Pasqual Band of Indians.

John Swogger, a comics creator and NAGPRA Comics co-producer, is the Creative Director for the project. He will translate research into comics format, contribute artwork, and mentor local artists. Jewyl Alderson, the Integrated Curriculum Coordinator for the San Diego County Office of Education, is the Educator Liaison and will facilitate connections with educators to develop lessons plans and teacher engagement activities. As Project Videographer, Elijah Benson (Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation) will create video for the website and to supplement lesson plans.

Hekking, of the department of anthropology at the Autonomous University of Quertaro, has been working to address that absence ever since. The Dutch-born researcher helped translate the comic, and more recently, he co-authored an anthology of ho oral traditions and beliefs.

About 1 in 5 Mexican citizens self-identify as Indigenous, roughly 26 million people. However, since the 1930s, the percentage of speakers of Indigenous languages has dropped from 16 percent to 6.2 percent, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography. At the same time, long-developed knowledge, cultural practices, and intricate details of the land have also been lost.

Linguist Ewald Hekking (second from the right) attends a festival to support ho language, arts, and culture. He holds a copy of his co-authored book r nthanduximhai ya ho, which contains ho oral traditions and beliefs.

An emphasis on Spanish continues in schools to this day, despite legislation such as the General Law of Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples passed in 2003, which legally allows citizens to speak their Native tongue in every sphere of public and private life.

Hekking began to see a bifurcation between generations. Parents were bilingual or only spoke Hho, and children only spoke Spanish. Oral transmission from adults to children had helped the language survive despite limited writing, but this change troubled him.

Hekking realized that his first task was to describe the orthography, or rules for writing, and its grammar and phonemes, or language sounds. While standards had been developed for Hho by the National Institute of Indigenous Languages, they were based on a Hho variant from another region.

To get started, Hekking needed to examine the particulars of the language in Quertaro. He began working with Severiano Andrs de Jess, who was born and raised in the predominantly ho community of Santiago Mexquititln and was a bilingual teacher with the department of Indigenous education in Quertaro.

In their work, Hekking identified words and phonemes exclusive to Quertaro that would have otherwise been lost. The pair went on to co-author the Gramtica of Hho in 1984 and the first bilingual dictionary of the variant spoken in Santiago Mexquititln in 1989, among other works.

They developed resources to assist in classrooms too. In 2014, they unveiled trilingual courses in Hho, Spanish, and English, which they hope school systems will implement. During the pandemic, Hekking has worked on a virtual course for teaching Hho as well.

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