How Indigenous creators are decolonizing the fantasy genre in books, games and more [Video]

Fantasy literature is a much wider and diverse genre than some people may realize — and Melissa Blair says you can find many works with anti-colonial narratives and stories that focus on Indigenous or Indigenous-inspired characters.

But in the romance-fantasy subgenre, which has grown in popularity in part thanks to communities on social media like TikTok, the Anishinaabe-kwe writer found that most stories still centred on European-inspired conquerors or the descendants of rulers who had conquered others’ lands.

“Indigenous characters were always an afterthought or very rarely mentioned. And if they were, it was always ornamental and they were never a side character, let alone a main character,” Blair, who splits her time between Treaty 9 in Northern Ontario and Ottawa, told Unreserved‘s Rosanna Deerchild.

So she set out to write her own “romantasy” book, A Broken Blade, which draws on her own life experiences as a queer Indigenous woman. The book was a success …