Would you like to learn more about how the first NAGPRA Issue was created? And some behind the scenes information about how it was made? These stories are included in a 2019 article published by the journal American Anthropologist.
The American Anthropologist journal invited us to submit our Ethno/GRAPHIC panel presentations from 2017 at the American Anthropological Association meetings to be featured in their print journal and also in the journal's online "multimodal" section. This was a wonderful turn of events - the discipline of anthropology is fully embracing new ways of communicating our research and community partnerships to the public. This panel, titled "Ethno/Graphic Storytelling: Communicating research through graphic novels and animation" included faculty and students from across the country, all of whom present their work in this article. The print journal is behind a paywall (article available here), and includes an introduction to all the projects and individual introductions to each project, including NAGPRA Comics (see below). The "multimodal" online section is open for anyone to view, and includes the entire NAGPRA Comics Issue 1! The link is below the NAGPRA Comics introduction from the print journal. COMPLETING THE JOURNEY: A GRAPHIC NARRATIVE ABOUT NAGPRA AND REPATRIATION By Sonya Atalay and Jen Shannon American Anthropologist 121: 769-772 (doi:10.1111/aman.13293). "NAGPRA Comics, Vol. 1: Journeys to Complete the Work: Stories about Repatriations and Changing the Way We Bring Native American Ancestors Home (2017) is a coauthored comic book by archaeologist Sonya Atalay (Anishinabe‐Ojibwe), museum anthropologist Jen Shannon, and archaeologist and comic artist John Swogger in collaboration with the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture & Lifeways. This comic book—the first in the NAGPRA Comics series—is based on our research, scholarly commitments, and practical experience implementing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA). As an applied comic, Journeys to Complete the Work is both a scholarly resource and a call to action. It aims to empower Native communities by informing them about their rights under NAGPRA and to educate Native and non‐Native communities about the law—its benefits and its shortfalls (Swogger 2017). Graphic narratives are a vernacular and popular form, which allows us to use a direct vocabulary and avoid sanitized legal language for concepts relating to the unsettling history and reality of burials, bones, and digging up graves. In 2012, it was estimated that there were 300,000 to 600,000 Native American bodies in US university, museum, and laboratory collections that were subject to NAGPRA (McKeown 2013, 10). While we may slip into using NAGPRA legal terms like “culturally unidentifiable individuals” and “associated funerary objects,” we are talking about Native ancestors—bodies that were dug up from burials, burials that reflect spiritual care for individuals and the items buried with them that were intended for traveling with the ancestors on their journey. Repatriation is a part of completing this interrupted journey." The article continues online here: http://www.americananthropologist.org/ethno-graphic-atalay-and-shannon/
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NAGPRA ComicsJen Shannon Archives
January 2023
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