It's International Blog Against Racism Week, huzzah!

I am head down in writing up a progress report which decides my capability to continue in my PhD, so I'm going to do something that might seem odd or out of place for a Pākehā chick living in Australia; lord knows there is plenty of racism-related material closer to home. Instead I am going to reproduce a section from the dissertation, with some commentary, because I have it partially prepared, and because I suspect that it's going to be excised from the final version of the dissertation as wandering too far from the topic. I want this on record.

Marvel 1602, by Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert et al, at first appears to be an Alternate Universe story, where the early Marvel heroes have appeared all over the world in the Elizabethan Era; the story itself takes place over a period just before the death of Elizabeth I and just after the ascension of James I and VI.

However, it is eventually revealed that this is not an alternate world at all – the Captain America/Steve Rogers from main continuity, many years in the future, has been transported via technological spatiotemporal interference to the America of this alternate history. Rescued by the people native to the area, he later encounters the (in our own history) doomed English settlement of Roanoke and saves it from destruction. His appearance results in an "anomaly" that threatens space-time.

Disaster is averted by a number of heroes, including Sir Nicolas Fury (the Queen's Spymaster), Dr Stephen Strange (her physician and magician), Carlos Javier and his mutantor students, and Sir Richard Reed of the scientific ship The Fantastick, who return Rogers to his correct time. The 1602 world is then made an alternate history by the cosmic powers of the ever-monitoring Watchers.

Huzzah! Huzzah! Huz- wait.

Yeah, you saw the problem, didn't you?

I go on to say that Gaiman's construction of his ideal fan-object [theory wank - ignore at will] in terms of the early Marvel heroes is not purely reactionary - he includes, for example, a queer romance of the kind only metaphorically present in the actual early X-men comics. Then I go on:

However, Gaiman's treatment of "Rojhaz"/Captain America and his assumption of Native identity is much more problematic: Rojhaz appears as a blond man "wearing a buckskin loincloth, his long hair twined with feathers and beads", speaking in stereotypically ungrammatical and laconic "Me Indian" dialect [when, of course, he speaks perfect modern American English] (Gaiman 2003, 1602: 1 script, np), which is a stereotype located in white ideas of what Native people are like. He's not native, but he is presenting Native; to the Queen of another nation, no less. He could be presenting as English-fluent and intelligent - instead, for the purposes of disguise, he is deliberately choosing to appear as sullen and unable to communicate, and confirming those stereotypes.

Moreover, though, in Rogers' own account, he was rescued by Native Americans, which would seem to be a positive representation, which specific people they are is not identified*. They are shown in a mere two panels**, and they have no voice in the story: once again, as in so many colonial narratives, they are marginalized in the narrative of the Old World/New World and the almost exclusively white heroes that apparently populate it.

Later on, Rogers (wearing blue face paint with a white A smeared over his forehead) confronts Fury.

Rogers: "This is my country. They need me. I can't leave them. We don't have to make the same mistakes again. We're here at the birth of a nation... of a dream. Nobody has to die. We can work together to protect them. My people."

Fury: "One girl, currently in the form of a hound, and a handful of settlers? Your people?"

Rogers: "They're America. One day they'll be America. And I... I'll make them proud to be Americans."

That is breathtakingly arrogant. The birth of a nation? There was already a nation - more than one - there. This is the birth of colonisation, of invasion, of what Rogers knows very well is centuries of slaughter, neglect, oppression, and broken promises by the colonisers. He is the only one in the story who does know that of the many, many things (white) Americans can be proud of, this really is not one.

And while I have no trouble believing that Steve Rogers genuinely thinks that he can make it turn out okay from sheer force of his own heroic will, his speechifying here is profoundly disturbing. Because, while he is so very wrong, the text doesn't problematise what he's saying at all. There is no Native voice offering a dissenting opinion, or any opinion at all - there is only Rogers, who doesn't even speak for them, but past them, while telling the story of his own life and the birth of his nation.

1602 was published in 2004. You'd think that in 400 years, we might have learned something.


ETA: Well-timed addendum! Want to improve the telling of indigenous American stories? Make a donation, to Oyate; "a Native organization working to see that our lives and histories are portrayed honestly, and so that all people will know our stories belong to us. For Indian children, it is as important as it has ever been for them to know who they are and what they come from". More about this and donation instructions here. Thanks, lady_ganesh! Oyate reached their goal, huzzah!


* Although, to be fair, on this point there is apparently some dispute.

** The other main mention of Native peoples is Queen Elizabeth's blithe comment that she had several Indians at court, who got sick and died, but not before performing "several amusing dances for our entertainment" - this, I think, is quite clearly depicted as racist. It's especially sad, then, that Rogers' arrogant cluelessness isn't addressed.