So You Care About Indigenous Scholars? Claiming the Academy as Indigenous Place by Creating Comic Art Across Difference

Abstract: University campuses are located within the homelands and lifeworlds of Indigenous Peoples, and often host Indigenous faculty, staff, and students from multiple Indigenous nations. Yet many Indigenous scholars continue to experience higher education as an extractive force and carry additional loads that extend far beyond the intense pressure that all academics experience to excel in a hierarchical setting. We examine how a year-long solidarity collective of Indigenous and allied scholars and artists created four comic art posters centering the experiences of Indigenous scholars in the academy. The So You Care About Indigenous Scholars? posters, titled “Extraction Zombies,” “Pass the Ball,” “The S.S. Academy,” and “Indigenous Land,” are an arts-based intervention using humor and irony to grow critical consciousness toward Indigenizing and decolonizing the academy. Following Patricia Hill Collins’s flexible solidarity thesis (2020), we discuss our experiences building an intentional and contingent alliance, where differently positioned individuals came together for a common cause of Indigenizing the academy. We show how our positionalities informed, charged, and constrained the project, and how making mistakes and learning through doing is part of working across difference. In becoming “a group going together, shifting camp together,” our collective both visualized and materialized a different kind of academic collaboration, unsettling our academic institutions—beyond making space for Indigenous scholars we demonstrate that Indigenous leadership is already present in the academy and claim the academy itself as Indigenous place.