How Indigenous creators are decolonizing the fantasy genre in books, games and more

Unreserved49:33Turning the page on the fantasy genre

Fantasy literature is a much wider and diverse genre than some people may realize — and Melissa Blair says you can find many works with anti-colonial narratives and stories that focus on Indigenous or Indigenous-inspired characters.

But in the romance-fantasy subgenre, which has grown in popularity in part thanks to communities on social media like TikTok, the Anishinaabe-kwe writer found that most stories still centred on European-inspired conquerors or the descendants of rulers who had conquered others' lands.

"Indigenous characters were always an afterthought or very rarely mentioned. And if they were, it was always ornamental and they were never a side character, let alone a main character," Blair, who splits her time between Treaty 9 in Northern Ontario and Ottawa, told Unreserved's Rosanna Deerchild.

So she set out to write her own "romantasy" book, A Broken Blade, which draws on her own life experiences as a queer Indigenous woman. The book was a success when it launched in 2022, kicking off what has become a multipart series called The Halfling Saga.

Blair isn't the only one turning the fantasy genre and other historically nerdy spaces on their heads. From novels to comic books to board games, Indigenous creators are bringing their own spin to creative spaces that also navigate the complexities of reflecting Indigenous trauma without becoming exploitative — and even setting the table for stories about joy and optimism.

The Halfling Saga stars a character named Keera, who is a halfling, a label in Blair's world for a half-mortal, and half-elf. Two societies of magical beings, the elves and faes, have been subjugated by a kingdom of mortals. As a halfling, Keera has a foot in each world, but is still counted among the king's wards, a step below citizenhood.

"The books are her journey from leaving that role behind and fully rebelling against the crown while making connections with her true kin that are still living in the fae-land. And you see her deal with that guilt and deal with that trauma, but also grow and heal and find a community throughout all four books," said Blair.

Colonial trauma is felt differently among Indigenous people who lived under colonialism and their descendants, so Blair wanted to explore as many of those ways as possible through several characters and communities in her books.

Some, she said, felt "a loss of bloodline, like not even knowing who your parents are" — something she says Indigenous people often experience but is not often explored.

Much of The Halfling Saga is about Keera navigating these kinds of dilemmas — and Blair resolved to make it a key element of her narratives, rather than a momentary obstacle as she says it often appears in other fantastical stories.

Alternate timelines without colonization

When Connor Alexander set out to create a game, he wanted players to be able to craft stories about Indigenous characters without the constant weight of colonial trauma.

"I don't want Natives to have to face the stuff that we're always having to face every day with residential schools and missing and murdered Indigenous women. I don't want that to be part of my game," said Alexander, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

With that in mind, he created Coyote & Crow, a pen-and-paper role-playing game inspired by games like Dungeons & Dragons he played as a kid. It's set in an alternate future North America where colonization never happened.

"Thankfully I have a big, long history and love of science fiction, and so an alternate timeline was an easy one for me to jump into," he said.

Alexander says it was important to create positive representation for Indigenous people in games, where he often saw stereotypical or offensive stereotypes.

He cited a trailer he saw for a 2019 video game called Greedfall, where alternate-history European characters travel to a "magical savage land" in search of the cure to a plague.

"It was leaning into all of the worst stereotypes of native people. And it made me so angry. And I remember thinking, I'm tired of telling these publishers to at least get a consultant on their game," he said. So he set out to make one himself.

The gamble paid off — Coyote & Crow debuted in 2021, crowdfunding over $1 million US on Kickstarter before its release in 2022.

Preserving language through comics

When comic book creator Scott Wilson began building his own "Indigiverse" of superheroes, he made sure to include his peoples' languages, so the books themselves played a part in keeping them alive.

"As a wee little boy, as a young fella, I struggled to read. But when it came to actually reading comic books, which I discovered very young, the stories came much easier and it became much easier to retain," said Wilson, who is Gooniyandi and Gadgerong from the northwest of Australia. 

Wilson's comics grew directly out of his childhood love for superhero comics. The first issue of Dark Heart, released in 2022, was published by Australian independent publishing house Gestalt Publishing. Taking inspiration from his own experience of leaving home for boarding school, the titular Dark Heart can travel between present reality and The Dreaming, a parallel spiritual realm based in the concept from Australian First Nations philosophy.

Wilson sees his comics as doing his part to continue his elders' oral tradition. To that point, several characters speak in Gooniyandi, with English captions providing translation. A glossary in the back of each issue offers word-for-word translation and descriptions.

To Wilson, the project is about creating space in a medium where Indigenous characters were minor distractions at best.

"We come from a huge history where stories are only told by the conquerors. And here we are reinstating that right to share our own stories, but also sharing the endless possibilities that come with our ideologies," he said.

"That is about community, that is about the collective, that is about a more ecocentric view of the world and the anthropocentric view."