Re-Animalating Native Realities: The Funny Animals and Indigenous First Beings of Native Realities Press

Funny animals make tracks across American and European comics traditions, but this article turns to the offerings of the newly founded, "Indigenerd"-only Native Realities Press to reanimate the longer legacy of animal figures in Indigenous multimodal and multispecies storytelling traditions. From the teen sheep Jonesy in Jonathan Nelson's wordless comic The Wool of Jonesy to the Cherokee trickster Tsisdu in Lee Francis IV and Weshoyot Alvitre's Sixkiller, I argue that Indigenous animal figures reorient and reframe comics reading practices, generating a model of visual and popular culture that productively recenters Indigeneity and unsettles the settler discourses that circulate about Native peoples in mass culture.