Visual Storytelling in the Indigenous North is a three-year, Indigenous-led initiative that connects storytellers, artists, and scholars from across the Circumpolar North to share stories of Indigenous survivance through comics, documentary film, podcasts, and digital media.
Spanning Canada, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), Sápmi (Norway, Sweden, Finland), and Denmark, the project brings together First Nation, Métis, Inuit, and Sámi knowledge holders to co-create graphic narratives and arts-based public programming that highlight resilience, resurgence, renewal, revival, and resistance.
Rooted in Indigenous methodologies and a commitment to two-eyed seeing, our approach centers relationship-building, memory work, and land-based learning. We collaborate with museums, cultural institutions, educators, and artists to produce multilingual, multimodal storytelling that reimagines truth and reconciliation across geopolitical lines.
This project is hosted by the UBC Comics Studies and Pop Culture Clusters in collaboration with the UBC Circumpolar Indigenous Storytelling Research Cluster and the Centre for Migration Studies and builds on the SSHRC Partnership Grant Visual Storytelling and Graphic Art in Genocide and Human Rights Education, expanding that work with an Indigenous-centered focus on storytelling as solidarity and future-making.
This project is co-directed by Shannon Leddy (Métis, UBC) and Biz Nijdam (UBC) in collaboration with Asta Mønsted (Kalaallit, UC Berkeley), Tim Frandy (Sámi, UBC), and Frederik Byrn Køhlert (Edinburgh Napier University). It is generously financed by a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant.