Spoiler Alert
Some knowledge of what the graphic novel series, Surviving the City, wants to educate is required to acknowledge what the latest instalment Volume 3: We Are Medicine, hopes to heal. Ever since the news about finding a mass grave of children near a former residential school in Kamloops broke out in 2021, there were a lot of protests and finger pointing. The world blamed people in prominent positions of power of the atrocity. Even now, the after-effects are still ongoing. Some reconciliation has happened since, but what’s presented here as fiction is coming true in the real world after reading “Chief says grave search at B.C. residential school brings things ‘full circle’” from the Kelowna Capital News.
This story by Tasha Spillett (pictured above left) makes up the backdrop where Miikwan and Dez are thinking about their futures. This author/educator/public speaker strives for a world where multiculturalism is embraced and everyone is treated with compassion. It’s basically what Gene Roddenberry envisioned for Star Trek, and everything Sisko would fight for when he travelled back in time and became part of the protests for equal rights in “Past Tense, Parts One and Two (Deep Space 9).”
In this story, these youths want to make the world a better place. They will soon graduate, and instead of figuring out what to wear for their last prom, these two indigenous teens change their plans and want to help after this news broke out. These are wonderful kids. Even Dez, the protagonist from the first two books, gets involved! After her own dealings with “The System,” how she deals with authoritarianism is important too.
Based on the summaries I’ve read, she expressed displeasure with the medical system’s decision to move her ill grandmother to a care facility. When they said she can’t stay with her and had no interest in helping her too, I felt for her plight. It’s tough to see older adults put in the pasture with the knowledge there’s no coming back. The fact she disappears makes her friends worry. There’s a resolution even though in the next volume, she’s coping with the inevitable death too easily foreshadowed.
Also, this work shows her discovering she’s a Two-Spirit person. The term does not necessarily mean being queer. It acknowledges a role that is better defined by Ojibwe term aawi, which literally means he/she is who he/she is supposed to be. Albert McLeod further describes it as, “Algonquian people who are gender fluid and/or sexually diverse (LGBTQI) are accepted as the part of the intentional design of the Spirit and Natural Worlds, and as such, it is a cultural taboo to critique or interfere with their identity, role, or life journey.”
Although this third volume doesn’t work well standalone, just how Dez’s behaviour changed would have gone unnoticed. Another perspective is brought in because of Gineberg. This new character gets profiled by white authority because of his Afro-Indigenous roots, and just what happens is not all that shocking since it still goes on in real life too.
What I like here is how these Indigenous ghosts act in a way described as caring and playful. Their role in this tale is splendid because they are truly guardian spirits. The younger ones are still playing, and the older ones are reaching out as though wanting to comfort those in grief.
After another protest group calls for “Truth before Reconciliation” these spirits are out in force. The way they are behaving suggests that they are glad to be finally acknowledged. And for the artist team of Natasha Donovan and Scott B. Henderson, just how they are drawn show them as individuals given a new purpose in the afterlife. And because this tale is really about them, to acknowledge their existence sort of brings closure to this terrible moment in British Columbia, where the system truly failed those who first called this area home. Hopefully, someone has kept records of their names buried somewhere in a vault, so we can put a plaque in place.
While I can’t help but get reminded of my culture’s brush with colonial attitudes, that’s because the story about the Asian leper colony on D’arcy Island, is a separate tale in itself. What the people here faced included survival against nature!
Surviving the City Book List
