Native-American Cartoons

I am working here on a web publication based on research Sylvia and I did at UCLA analyzing cartoons in Native American publications. This resulted in two presentations – one at the 1974 annual meeting of the American Folklore Association in Portland, Oregon, with the title, “‘You Didn’t Really Want to Go Anywhere, Did You, Chief?’ Some Comments on the Socio-Psychological Implications of Cartoons from Native American Publications,” and the other in 1989 at the annual Popular Culture Ass./American Culture Association meeting in St. Louis on “Socio-Political Implications of Cartoons from American Indian Publications.”

The research was done in cooperation with The UCLA American Indian Studies Center (UCLA AISC). The library of the UCLA AISC, as well as the Library of Congress, have indicated their interest in working with me on updating our material. We want to see what has changed since the original research was done in the early 1970s. This will refer not only to socio-psychological implications but also to the nature of American Indian publications.

For anyone interested in further studying Native American cartoons, I am including several galleries with all of the 340 cartoons we collected. Every cartoon is labeled and annotated. This online web project has been done for research purposes only. Do not copy the material in any form without the permission of the respective artist(s) and/or the publisher(s).

All cartoons are organized into the following topics as they reflect the feelings, views, and concerns expressed by those cartoonists and the editors of the many Native Americans publications we studied at The UCLA American Indian Studies Center: