Indigenous Peoples Day: Remembering the Story, Working Toward Reparations

Notes on an adaptation, by Paul Buhle:

The idea of making Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s classic New York Times best-seller—already adapted for a Young Readers’ edition—into a graphic novel  or “comic”  seems entirely natural. It is the kind of book suited for what is now called “All Ages” readers.

Paul Peart-Smith, the son of Jamaican immigrants who emigrated to the United Kingdom, is an experienced and much-lauded artist. He has dealt with a wide variety of themes in a graphics career of more than thirty years. He readily accepted my proposal, a few years ago, for adapting W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk into a “graphic novel” that brings new readers to one of the most important collections of essays ever written on race in the United States.

The Indigenous Peoples History, in its new format, is not easy to describe in words. It offers a rainbow of colors and designs revealing, more than anything else, the culture, the humanity, and the courage of  Indigenous populations facing a European onslaught. So much is explained, as only pictures can, that the result is  simultaneously overwhelming and enriching. This is a book  likely to be banned in the public schools of the Florida Republic of DeSantis, but read widely by Floridians and others, far and wide. I predict it will do a lot of good.

Read some excerpts below:

 

Images excerpted from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States: A Graphic Interpretation, by Paul Peart-Smith. Copyright 2024. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.