Library Company Announces Graphic Novel on Colonial America from Indigenous Perspective

The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage grant-funded work will be written by Lee Francis of the Laguna Pueblo and illustrated by Weshoyot Alvitre of the Tongva.

The Library Company of Philadelphia has announced an exhibit and accompanying graphic novel, Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives on Colonial America. The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage grant-funded work will be written by Lee Francis of the Laguna Pueblo and illustrated by Weshoyot Alvitre of the Tongva. The artists will use reference materials from The Digital Paxton, an open-source digital repository of materials related to the 1763 Paxton Boys massacre, in which a group of Scots-Irish Presbyterian settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier massacred the residents of Conestoga, a small Native American village near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Digital Paxton was created by Elizabeth R. Moran Fellow, Will Fenton, and won the 2016 NYC Digital Humanities Graduate Student Digital Project Award. The novel will be published by Native Realities Press and distributed to federally recognized tribes along with a curriculum for integrating the work into high school courses.

The accompanying exhibit will open in the Library Company and feature artifacts and manuscripts from their collections.