Franklin called the Paxton Boys “White Savages.” Hundreds of pamphlets, political cartoons, broadsides and letters followed, fueling a heated public debate that provides rich insight into the colonists’ feelings about race and what it meant to be a Pennsylvanian on the eve of the American Revolution. The back-and-forth was the social media interac- tion of its day. In that vigorous colonial debate, Fenton


Top: This 1841 political cartoon reflects the prevailing account of the Conestoga massacre by the “Paxton Boys” in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, by portraying the Indians stereotypically as noble victims of violence.


Below: By telling the story from the Conestoga perspective, “Ghost River” breaks this long-told narrative by presenting these American Indians as real people with real emotions and concerns.


Facing page: The flexible medium of the graphic novel enabled the action to jump in and out of the present to reveal the process that its creative team—(middle panel, left to right) illustrator Weshoyot Alvitre, writer Lee Francis IV and historian Will Fenton—underwent to put the project together.


found the absence of the Conestoga perspec- tive particularly disturbing. That’s when the idea of a graphic novel came up: it seemed an ideal platform to reach a broad audience and tell the story from the Indigenous point of view. The Conestoga left very few writ- ten documents, so the idea of using a mix of words and images that echoed oral storytell- ing traditions seemed an effective format. Also, the novel form enabled the narrative to jump episodically between the past and pres- ent, even incorporating the very act of writing the book into its pages. Fenton enlisted Laguna Pueblo writer Lee


Francis IV and Tongva artist Weshoyot Alvitre to create the graphic novel. The creative team faced a large hurdle: the absence of virtually


16 AMERICAN INDIAN WINTER 2019


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