Cover art by Jim Terry and Brian Reber
Dr. Courtney Lewis (Cherokee Nation) was never a fan of comic books that featured Native Americans within their pages. “The representation was just so awful overall,” she explained at an “Indigenous Futures & Sequential Art” panel at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2025. “I’d say ninety-nine percent, because there are a couple out there that are kind of surprising. But I went to a show in 2012 at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum called Comic Art Indigène and that really changed everything.”
The exhibit was the brainchild of Antonio Chavarria (Santa Clara Pueblo), curator of ethnology at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Comic Art Indigène premiered there in May 2008 before traveling to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. and then other museums across the country, including the Pequot Museum in Mashantucket, Connecticut.
“It blew my mind because I’ve never seen comics written or illustrated by the Indian people,” Courtney Lewis said of Comic Art Indigène. “That was it for me. I started collecting as many as I could, which was not a whole heck of a lot. But my dream was to have enough to teach an entire class just with American Indian content on comics because I felt like it was a medium that could reach students in a different way than any other kind of content I was providing at the time.”
In 2022, Dr. Lewis’ dream became reality. At the time, she was an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina and the only Native American faculty member in a school that contained a mere seven students out of thirty thousand who self-identified as Native Americans. The course was thus tailored toward non-Natives and incorporated into the school’s Honors College curriculum in order to entice students looking for courses outside their major.
“I began with historical representations,” Dr. Lewis explained in the Fall 2024 edition of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society. “These comics ranged in their representation of US Indigenous peoples from stereotypical to overtly racist. One in particular that surprises students is the issue in which Superman goes back in time to ensure that land is taken from its Native peoples. I then moved linearly through comic book eras, adding graphic novels, entire comic books, and excerpts from each to support the book chapter readings,” which were selected from Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study by Michael Sheyahshe (Caddo Nation) and non-Native Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.
After the semester ended, Courtney Lewis accepted an associate professor position at Duke University in North Carolina. With only 6,500 undergraduate students, Duke was smaller than the University of South Carolina but contained a larger number of Native Americans students nonetheless.
“My classes were filled with more Indigenous voices than I had ever had in my teaching career,” Lewis wrote in Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society. “The tenor of the discussions shifted dramatically. The lecture format shrunk as Indigenous students’ experiences were brought into class discussions; students took the lead many times, and the discussions became more dynamic and active as Indigenous and non-Indigenous students exchanged ideas, questions, and opinions about the reading materials in ways that were productive beyond what I could ever have provided alone.”
Despite the differences between teaching a course with Native American comic books to a classroom primarily composed of Natives and a one overwhelmingly filled with non-Natives, Dr. Lewis’s style remained the same. “With both of them, I was able to lay the foundations and on top of that have these discussions about the modern change and challenges that we’re facing,” she explained at San Diego Comic-Con. “We have an entire section on MMIW, MMIP, MMIR – Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Peoples, and Relations.”
The aforementioned foundations, meanwhile, include both Native American history and U.S. government policies regarding Native Americans. “Every one of my students has to learn federal bureau policy before we can talk about MMIW, before we can talk about Super Indians,” she continued. “And then we talk about things with the comics like resistance. How do we see resistance in comics? What do superheroes mean to American Indians? We have a different perspective on what the responsibility of the superhero is, and superheroes do have responsibilities.”
Courtney Lewis also discovered that comic books brought certain questions to the surface quicker than other media. “Who gets to write this material?” was the first that Lewis mentioned. “Who gets to write the representation of American Indians and Indigenous People? Who gets to draw the representation? And what does it mean to write down these stories? Some of these stories are trickster stories. Some of these stories are oral narratives that are meant to evolve and change. What does it mean to fix those in time and place? And the difference between the Native and non-Native students really kind of comes to the surface in those kinds of discussions.”
Although the course primarily focuses on the past and present, the future is addressed as well. “One of the most important weeks in my class is the Indigenous Futurism class because the students who are non-Native remember nothing but dead Indians (from their previous courses),” Lewis noted at San Diego Comic-Con. “So being able to show these visions that are of all kinds – we have utopias, we have dystopias, but we also just have Jeffrey Veregge’s ‘Sisters,’ just a couple of sisters hanging out in space, doing a job but talking about that guy they met last night. Right? Just the fact that we can show our presence existing in the future is one of the most powerful forms of resistance we have.”
In 2012, Courtney Lewis ventured into the Pequot Museum in Mashantucket, New Hampshire, for an exhibit on Native American comic art called Comic Art Indigène. In many ways, the experience changed her life’s journey, and she spent the next ten years collecting enough Native comic books to teach a college course based on them.
As a result, she became – as legendary Marvel editor Stan Lee was fond of saying – a “true believer” in the power of comic books in the classroom, especially the Native American classroom.
Anthony Letizia