Carolyn Dunn's News and Views

My introduction to the world of comic books began at age 9 when my mom, who was an educator, took us on some educational adventure to the missions or to Oak Glen to get apples or some other Southern California one day road trip and we stopped to go potty (sorry, I do have small children) and get something to drink at a mom & pop store and there was a limited, first edition of the first five Wonder Woman books from the 1940's in mint condition. Mind you, this was in the 1970's, way before Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, Charles Vess and their contemporaries revolutionized the industry in the late 80's, so the books weren't that expensive and my mom, who I found out later loved Wonder Woman, Batman and Superman from the 40's, bought the books for me. I read that thing cover to cover. I still remember William Moulton's artwork and writing and the melodrama of Wonder Woman’s romance with Steve Trevor and the Amazonian purple healing ray that brought Steve back to life so he could accompany Wonder Woman back to Man's World and be by her side in a dramatic clinch and save the free world from the tyranny of Nazism. I knew the origin story of Bullets and Bracelets and how Diana won the competition to be Wonder Woman and how her mother, Queen Hypolyta, didn't want her to go. I loved the idea that women were warriors, having been raised by women warriors myself, and this was nothing new. But Wonder Woman was created in the 1940's when we really needed as much feminine s-heroics that we could get.

So thirty something years later, when I was asked to talk about Jason Aaron's new book Scalped from Vertigo for an article for the student publication of the Native American Journalist's Association, I thought, here is my chance to be an Indian and a comic nerd at the same time...since there's only two...maybe three...of us out there (Arigon Starr, this is for you) I thought I could do this. So I ran down to 3rd Planet and picked up the first five issues of this new, well received Vertigo series and got to reading.

First of all, let me say this: Jason Aaron is a great writer. The pitch for these books has been "the Sopranos meet the rez," and I would say that's pretty accurate, except my take would be if Deadwood, The Sopranos, and Thunderheart all got together and had a love child, it would be Scalped. The writing is sparse and poetic, the art is gritty, and unfortunately, it's the return of the western all over again.

But at least it's not 1870 in the Great Sioux Nation as they are "the last vestiges of a great civilization fading with the frontier". But it's the great Sioux Nation on the “Prairie Rose” reservation that's supposed to be Pine Ridge or Rosebud, a place where "the great Sioux Nation came to die." (Scalped,). Many Lakota people, especially the literary critic and writer Elizabeth Cook-Lynn would argue that Pine Ridge is where the Lakota people came to live. That is, to survive and continue in a way that the federal government would never have imagined. It is a place of survivance rather than death, destruction and corruption. Scalped is the complete end of the spectrum of Indian stereotypes… if the 1970’s activists grew up and became mortal enemies. The chief, Red Crow, is a corrupt crime/casino boss who runs the tribe; his old comrade, Gina Bad Horse, still a badass community activist. Into this walks Gina’s son, Dashiell Bad Horse, who has been gone for years and there is no love lost between him, the chief, and his mother. Good and evil is delineated very early on, and the characters are complicated, but in the sense of one note complications. Red Crow is corrupt. Gina is angry, Dash even angrier. Red Crow’s daughter, Carol, is the angriest of all, so when she and Dash rekindle their “romance”, we know something bad is going to happen. All of the Indians in the book are pissed off, corrupt, violent, and addicted to some substance in some form. It is what most non-Indians imagine Indians to be (if they haven’t imagined Indians killed off with the buffalo yet), especially if they live near rural areas such as Pine Ridge, Rosebud, etc.

As an Indian woman who knows a lot of Indian women, I won’t even get into the outright misogyny of the book. I won’t treat you to a treatise on native feminism, because I don’t think there’s any such thing, but the Hollywood Indians are alive and well in Scalped and although I applaud the effort to place Indians in the contemporary moment, it’s a contemporary moment that takes its cues from the imagined Indian rather than Indian survivance.

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Next time… Scottish men…and the Indian women who love them…