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REFLECTIONS ON GORD HILL’S 500 YEARS

AND THE NATURE OF INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE

7

Ward Churchill

I may as well admit, first of all, that I received the invitation to write an introduction to Gord Hill’s “comic book” with a considerable degree of skepticism. Knowing his work in other connections, however, it seemed the least I could do was agree to have a look rather than simply dismissing the idea out of hand. Perhaps the result serves as proof of the old adage about never being too old to learn, but I’m certainly glad I did so, because his 500 Years of Resistance turned out to be a revelation. Before I was halfway through, I’d come to the realization that it would be a privilege—indeed, an honor—to introduce this remarkable piece of work, the sophistication and communicative effectiveness of which has transformed my appreciation for the graphic approach to history.

The question then became how to go about it. After all, it’s not like I’ve had a lot of experience with the medium at hand. Nonetheless, after some reflecting on the matter, I concluded that the answer was obvious enough. I’ve always sought to heed the counsel of Muscogee elder Philip Deere never to try to be someone—or something—you’re not, but instead to always strive to be the very best of who you are. What follows is expressed in the voice I’ve long since found to be my own, with no attempt made to blend my idiom with Gord’s. His voice is his, mine is mine, as it should and ultimately must be if either of our voices is to be of value, even to ourselves.

In the end, it seems to me that our distinctly different stylistic approaches to conveying information tend to be mutually reinforcing, each in a certain sense completing the other to produce something more nearly resembling a whole, far stronger together than either could hope to be on its own, so much so that I’ve come to suspect that Gord foresaw precisely this result. A better illustration of the fundamental truth of Sitting Bull’s famous nineteenth-century observation that it is “unnecessary for crows to