IndigePop

Svetlana Seibel

Approaching IndigePop: Some Thoughts to Start

Get your Indigenerd on!

– Programme booklet of the IndigiCon 3, 2018

This book began with a journey. On a cloudy November day in 2017, we, the editors of this volume, have met in the waiting area of the Copenhagen airport – Kati coming from Helsinki, me coming from Frankfurt am Main – to board our joint flight to Albuquerque, NM. With the generous permission of its executive director and the CEO of Native Realities, Dr Lee Francis 4 (Pueblo of Laguna), we were bound to attend the second Indigenous Comic Con – IndigiCon, as it came to be called – which was taking place at Isleta Resort and Casino on the Pueblo of Isleta land near Albuquerque (Figure 1). Merely in its second year, the Indigenous Comic Con has by then become arguably the most significant event on the Indigenous pop culture calendar.¹ The atmosphere of excitement suffused the venue from the eve of the event on and did not diminish until its end. At the time of this writing, IndigiPopX 2024 – this year’s instalment of the Indigenous Pop Culture Expo – has just wrapped up. The Expo represents an expansion of the Indigenous Comic Con and an effort to formally embrace and explore Indigenous creativity in all popular media. The core of its mission and vision, however, remains true to its beginnings as Indigenous Comic Con eight years ago.

Whomever we talked to in the course of the convention’s three days, we met with kindness and generosity, and a good bit of humour. Among this warm welcome that had been accorded to us, we did raise an eyebrow or two, with people humorously reacting to our questions and explanations along the lines of ‘Really? You are academics, and you are studying this?’ Invariably, we all laughed at that. Because we all understood the importance of this. This book is very much informed by our experiences at the Indigenous Comic Con, the embodied perceptions they generated and the relationships they forged.²

It is easy to see why the IndigiCon, and now the IndigiPopX, carry such a strong significance. It is a space that is dedicated squarely to celebrating ‘Indigenerdity’³ – Indigenous geekdom, fandom and nerdy creativity – without reservations. It is a space where Indigenous geek culture, Indigenous fandom and entrepreneurship are at the centre of attention. As Lee Francis tells Taté Walker (Miniconjou Lakota) in an interview for Walker’s article on the first Indigenous Comic Con (2016) in Native Peoples magazine:

It’s important for us to be able to have an event like this, our own space, where we have sci-fi and fantasy that’s about our future, and we’re writing ourselves into the future and into mainstream pop culture[.]‌ […] It shows the world we exist intellectually, creatively, culturally and in stimulating, dynamic and exciting ways. (qtd. in Walker 2016: 19)

Given the history of appropriation and cultural colonization through misrepresentations of Indigenous people(s) and cultures in the context of popular culture, the importance of a space like this for both decolonization and resurgence cannot be overstated, as Francis reiterates:

In this nerd pop-culture era we live in, especially for Native folks, we’re marginalized in those spaces. Specifically, we’re historicized, seen as artifacts or relics, or we don’t even exist[.]‌ […] But it’s also something internally for us. It’s a place for us. A place where we can nerd out. A place we don’t usually get to exist within. This event is built as a safe space for Indigenous people and the content we create. (qtd. in Walker 2016: 19)

The Indigenous Comic Con can be viewed as a microcosm that reflects the entirety of Indigenous popular culture, and many of the dynamics Francis notes in his remarks on the story, purpose and motivation behind the Con’s inception are visible as the defining characteristics of IndigePop at large – a cultural field that encompasses all expressions of Indigenous creativity at the intersection with popular culture.⁴

As is the case with popular culture in general, Indigenous popular culture is difficult to define with any degree of exhaustiveness – because of its dynamic and ever-evolving nature, it refuses to be conceptually pinned down, and any definition seems outdated the moment it is committed to paper. Far from being a cause for despair, however, this elusive quality constitutes one of the main strengths that define popular culture, Indigenous and otherwise: pop culture goes where its participants take it. Any attempt at definition therefore presupposes a degree of incompleteness and conceptual volatility that at the same time flows back into this very same definition. Simon Frith sees this elusiveness as in itself constitutive of popular culture, pointing out that ‘the essence of popular culture is its conceptual slipperiness, its fluidity, and lack of clear definition. Any critical analysis of popular culture must, therefore, be concerned to open up the concept rather than to close it down’ (Frith 2010: 555). The open-endedness of popular culture is such a prominent feature that John Storey ventures to interpret popular culture as ‘in effect an empty conceptual category, one which can be filled in a wide variety of often conflicting ways, depending on the context of use’ (Storey 2006: 1, emphasis in original).

While this conceptual nebulousness makes popular culture a challenging, at times downright frustrating object of study, the possibilities for practitioners, artists and fans are virtually limitless. Storey’s idea of popular culture as an open receptacle for varieties of content is of great significance for conceptualizing Indigenous popular culture in particular, insofar as Indigenous practitioners of the popular modify and (re)invent the content of popular productions by introducing culturally sensitive (counter)content rooted in Indigenous perspectives and lifeworlds. As noted above, participants and practitioners are the driving force and the defining agents of popular culture, so much so that, for Stacy Takacs, the central conceptual nexus of popular culture lies in involvement and interaction – between producers and consumers as well as between members of the audience among themselves: popular culture is about ‘the expression of people’s interests, choices, and activities’ (Takacs 2015: 6). Consequently, one of the main features of popular culture becomes the fact that within its bounds

people are active agents in the production of cultural meanings and pleasures and […] they use the raw materials provided by the cultural industries to enact their agency. The ‘popular’ of popular culture, in this case, refers to ‘people’ (members of the populace) and the work they do to transform the cultural resources available in society into meaningful expressions of localized desire. (Takacs 2015: 6)

The idea of popular culture as an expression of ‘localized desire’ – a rooted desire, we could also say – is key for Indigenous popular culture as well. As Francis’s remarks in relation to the Indigenous Comic Con indicate, participation is a vital issue where Indigenous popular culture is concerned – and, to stress this again, the issue of participation in popular culture always involves both producers and consumers. In other words, a question introduces itself: who is part of the ‘people’ in popular culture and who is not? Is everyone who participates doing so on equal terms and under equitable conditions? Until quite recently, in – for lack of a better term – mainstream popular culture, both on the level of production and on the level of representation or text, Indigenous creators and audiences have been largely excluded from participation. What is more, mainstream popular culture was, and often still is, ignorant or actively hostile in its representations of Indigenous people, creating a culture of representational toxicity that both discursively mirrors and politically promotes coloniality – what Lee Francis in this volume terms ‘Pop Culture Colonization’. Indigenous popular culture corrects this asymmetry of representational sovereignty in the field of the popular while simultaneously localizing its desire, to once again use Takacs’s terminology, in diverse Indigenous cultural contexts and realities, from nation-specific to urban to transindigenous and beyond. It challenges stereotyping expectations pointedly described by Dakota Sioux scholar Philip J. Deloria in his book Indians in Unexpected Places, expectations that present Indigenous people as ‘distance[d]‌ from both popular and aesthetic culture’ and ‘[unable] to engage a modern capitalist market economy’, at the same time as it provides a space and a platform for Indigenous creativity and entrepreneurship in the context of the popular (Deloria 2004: 230). Indigenous pop culture is able to do all that not only by specifically targeting Indigenous audiences but also, crucially, by supporting Indigenous creators who produce content in the framework of popular culture.

Building on these deliberations, for the purposes of this book Indigenous popular culture may be defined as a field of cultural production which encompasses Indigenous-authored cultural texts and creative expressions that make use of tropes, icons, genres, media, industries and practices of globalized popular culture and are simultaneously situated in Indigenous cultural contexts, ancestral as well as contemporary (categories that, naturally, frequently overlap). This definition, while certainly imperfect, allows us to delineate and approach Indigenous popular culture as a specific cultural field, and, in the words of Frederick Luis Aldama, ‘to think deeply about everyday, living, breathing cultural phenomena that richly texture vital intersectional identities and experiences’ (Aldama 2019: xii). In many respects this definition connects to the definition proposed by Mintzi Auanda Martínez-Rivera, who understands Indigenous popular culture ‘as cultural practices that are imagined as such both in and by indigenous communities, that are not used for rituals, and that have a ludic component’ (Martínez-Rivera 2019: 96). However, in this book we seek to take a more comprehensive approach, conceptualizing the Indigenous popular as a diverse but unified cultural field that, in addition to the ludic, is governed by a number of defining characteristics which we also see emerging in and from the contributions to this volume – a conceptual understanding that is emphasized in the term ‘IndigePop’. In the following, I will explore this understanding through a triangulation of three areas at work in IndigePop: community and communitism, politics, and resurgence and celebration. As we consider these characteristics, it is crucial to note that these aspects and areas are not sharply separated from each other. On the contrary, they routinely intersect with and connect to one another, which makes drawing sharp demarcation lines difficult and perhaps counterproductive. Therefore, as I look at these characteristics separately, it is done merely for the purposes of clarity and does not imply any ontological or experiential separation.