Friday, March 29, 2024

TONGVA DENOUNCE ‘FAMILY GUY’ WRITER PATRICK MEIGHAN’S “SHE KILLS”

Ventura, California: Traditional Chumash Territory:

Weshoyot Alvitre, a Tongva illustrator and comic book artist, and several members of the Tongva tribal community have been working to stop the digital publication of a comic book written by Family Guy writer Patrick Meighan called “She Kills.” The comic book is being released monthly from April 2020 on Comixology, an Amazon Company. The story revolves the main protagonist, a Tongva woman and her 13 year old daughter, around Los Angeles during the 1850’s. The writer paid a consultant from one band of Gabrielino/Tongva tribe and has since published 2 issues of the comic, which features violence, crude dialogue, mentions of child rape and violence again the main character in issue #1. The book has been summarized as “A Tongva Native American woman has one knife, one daughter, and zero yū-ah’s to give. “. All three covers of the book depict violence, including a beaten Native woman’s face for issue 3.

Alvitre and members of the tribal community have engaged directly with Meighan on Twitter, asking for the immediate halt of publication of the material, which is detrimental to historical renditions of the Tongva people, handles physical and sexual violence against Native women crudely, and is spreading false narratives about Tongva Indians during the mission period. Meighan has since gone on to engage in more press and interviews for the book, ignoring the many requests of those who condemned the book, including prominent author and owner of the blog American Indians in Children’s Literature, Dr. Debbie Reese. Tongva and other supporting indigenous allies have since filed formal complaints with Comixology and Amazon, asking for removal on the grounds that the book was “racially offensive, degrading to all Tongva tribal members, and promoted violence against and sexual exploitation of Native American Women.”

The Tongva community will not support written material such as this which not only degrades our ancestors and tribal members, but continues to proliferate violence against Native American women, false narratives of the Tongva people in California history and uses our tribal name within interviews and podcasts in promotion of the material without our permission. The Tongva community condemns this work and asks for publication of the materials to stop immediately and for it to be removed from Comixology, Kindle and Amazon.

A Tribe Called Geek
A Tribe Called Geekhttp://www.atribecalledgeek.com
A Tribe Called Geek is dedicated to offering indigenous perspectives on both mainstream and indigenous geek culture and highlighting indigenous contributions to geek culture and S.T.E.M Fields.

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