Hybridity and Decolonial Motion in Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ Haida Manga

Haida Manga is examined as a decolonial visual practice developed by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas that reconfigures the comic from enclosed panels into a relational field of continuous motion. Drawing on Haida formline design, Japanese manga, and Chinese calligraphic principles, this practice mobilizes hybridity not as stylistic fusion but as an ethical mode of relation. Central is a mural-first logic in which narratives originate as large-scale compositions and are later fragmented into book form. Analysis of key works— Red, The War of the Blink, Carpe Fin, JAJ, and Clan Hat—shows how line, colour, and scale enact decolonization structurally rather than thematically. Situated within frameworks of visual sovereignty, survivance, and relational aesthetics, Haida Manga emerges as a practice where decolonization is realized through continuity, attentiveness, and refusal of narrative closure within Indigenous modernity and trans-Pacific relations.