The Imagine… cover gets rid of all the noise, all the people who made an Indigenous individual’s choice their business and clears them out of the space. It is much quieter and allows for aspects of spirit and culture to come through. Emancipation is the process of being set free from political, social, and legal restrictions.
The Dalkelh saying Oo Dzi Nzoo means he/she has a good heart.
I put it on this cover to humanize the individuals that were controlled and harmed by the Indian Act by the various controls like prohibition. Too often we see them as statistics, numbers, history. These were and are real people with good hearts and I want them to be seen that way too, not just as difficult statistics in a bad story.
Title: Indian Prohibition
The systems of control produced by the Indian Act were profound and hit all aspects of Indigenous life. While the non-Indigenous population had the freedoms one expects in a democracy, the Indigenous population had to deal with the creeping controls of an ever-evolving Indian Act.
Prohibition was one of the first controls placed on the Indigenous population, its inception mentioned as early as the late 1700s, setting the tone for the federal government's desire to control First Nations peoples’ access and consumption of alcohol. The policy in its whole was finally challenged only in the late 1960s by the Drybones vs the Queen case, in which it was eventually deemed unconstitutional to punish and imprison Indigenous people for drinking when the general population could do so lawfully.
This is not ancient policy.
Inspiration cover
DC Comics (Vertigo) Transmetropolitan
August 1999
Cover Artist: Geof Darrow
Writer: Warren Ellis
Pencilers: Darick Robertson
Inkers: Rodney Ramos
Colourists: Nathing Eying
Letterers: Clem Robins