In this week’s episode, guest Channette Romero discusses her article “Toward an Indigenous Feminine Animation Aesthetic,” which analyzes the aesthetics and politics of animation shorts created by Indigenous women situated in North America. Romero argues that these women’s innovative animation styles draw attention to the pervasive colonial gaze in mainstream animation and position Indigenous creatives as foremost multimedia artists.

“Indigenous women’s animation is decolonial. It rejects that colonial gaze by trying to show what are the other things outside of that frame. What are the other kinds of stories that exist where Native women have their own agency, where they are subjects that watch settler culture and make active decisions about settler culture instead of just tools or objects to be used by them?”

Episode Transcript (opens as PDF)

Show Notes

9:00 “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice” by Angela M. Haas

14:45 Fantasmagorie (Émile Cohl, 1908)

18:15 I Am But a Little Woman (Gyu Oh, 2010)

20:00 Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes) (Amanda Strong, 2018)

23:45 Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation by Nicholas Sammond

25:30 a report on how Indigenous women more likely to be murdered and sexually assaulted

28:00 Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology by Brian Hochman

37:00 about the imagineNATIVE festival

38:00 about the 68 Voices project

43:15 Glenn Gear’s portfolio

46:15 a series of reports on the impact of COVID-19 on Indigenous lands and communities

About the Guest

Channette Romero is an associate professor of English and Native American Studies at the University of Georgia. She is currently completing a book that explores North American Indigenous filmmakers’ growing appropriation of popular Hollywood film genres—especially science fiction, horror, animation, Westerns, and sports movies.