Indian Comics Irregular #67

Addressing the new television season, CBS.com says:

There are strange happenings in the small Pacific Northwest town
of Wolf Lake, where the most prominent residents are
"shape-shifters" who can transform themselves into wolves.

Notably, "Wolf Lake" is the first network TV series in a while to
feature a Native American influence. In the premiere, someone asks
officer John Kanin (Lou Diamond Phillips) if he's Spokane or Coeur
d'Alene. Someone else refers to an Indian legend of a white wolf.

Most important, adds CBS.com, "Sherman Blackstone (Graham Greene) is
the keeper of all the town's secrets and he alone knows the ancient
lore of Wolf Lake." As his dialog clearly demonstrates, Blackstone
is an Indian. He's a science teacher, a sleight-of-hand expert, and
an irrepressible joker. A classic trickster figure, he stirs the
others into action.

"Wolf Lake" isn't murky like "Twin Peaks," but both have Native
characters and themes woven into their fabric. These elements are
part of the landscape, the dark truth beneath the surface. They
invoke the feeling noted by Bill Reid, the Haida artist, in
describing his Northwest woods:

Those descended from European stock...still feel a slight unease,
the tiny remnant of the old looking-over-the-shoulder anxiety of
the strangers in a strange land.

All in all, "Wolf Lake" is a sprightly cross between "The X-Files"
and a soap opera. It's campy enough to show a 12-step program for
reformed shapeshifters, yet gruesome enough to show a criminal's
severed head. It's getting mediocre ratings against the popular "Law
and Order," so catch it now before it's gone.

New on the Shelves

TALES OF THE CHEROKEE, a self-published comic book, presents the
Cherokee origin myth and two other legends. Writer/artist Gene
Gonzales uses simple black-and-white drawings to convey the stories'
essence. A Choctaw himself, Gonzales also did the art for 1999's
SEQUOIA AND BROWSER comic.

One reviewer compared TALES to Kipling's "Just So Stories" and wrote,
"This book is a wonderful introduction to another culture." For
children, I'd say that's just so. More on this and other Native
comics at http://www.bluecorncomics.com/nacomics.htm.

Americans at War

As the US invades Afghanistan, we'd do well to remember how Native
people traditionally conducted war. Far from being the killing
machines of fiction, they battled in human terms, if that isn't an
oxymoron. To Indians, wrote anthropologist Stanley Diamond, war was
"kind of a play. No matter what the occasion for hostility, it [was]
particularized, personalized, ritualized." To Westerners, in
contrast, "war is an abstract ideological compulsion" resulting in
"indiscriminate, casual, unceremonious killing."

In "The Book of Woodcraft" (1912), Ernest Thompson Seton wrote, "It
is notorious that all massacres of Indians by the whites were
accomplished by treachery in times of peace, while all Indian
massacres of whites were in time of war, to resist invasion." If
that's the case, who are the real savages in American history? (For
the answer, go to http://www.bluecorncomics.com/savagena.htm.)

More Rave Reviews

Bandwidth, an e-zine of popular culture, gave PEACE PARTY a great
review recently. You can find it at
http://www.bluecorncomics.com/reviews.htm. Even better, famed author
Barbara Kingsolver ("Animals Dreams") wrote to say, "I love what
you're doing." Read what she and other fans have said at
http://www.bluecorncomics.com/fans.htm.

Rob Schmidt
Blue Corn Comics