What drives visual artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas to tell stories through comics?

A number of years ago, curators from the Humboldt Forum approached visual artist and storyteller Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, asking him to do some sort of commentary on Johan Adrian Jacobsen, a Norweigian explorer, who travelled along B.C.'s coast in the 1880s. 

"It was a bit of a challenge," he said.

"The challenge was to tell someone else's story and to do it accurately as opposed to telling my family story, as is with earlier books. There's a comfort in that because you can claim a certain degree of authority, but when we step out to tell someone else's story, we have to tread carefully."

The work he did, learning about Jacobsen and the time he spent in Yahgulanaas's home community of Masset on Haida Gwaii, inspired his latest graphic novel, JAJ, to be released May 27. 

JAJ blends colonial history with elements of Yahgulanaas's own family legacy. The story follows several historical figures through first contact, the smallpox epidemic and "the mass resettlement of disenfranchised peoples, both Indigenous and European," publisher Douglas & McIntyre said.

Yahgulanaas spoke with CBC's Margaret Gallagher, host of North by Northwest, ahead of the book's release.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Where does the title JAJ come from? 

It's the initials of a Norwegian seaman who came to this part of the world, the West Coast of Canada, the North Pacific in 1881. His initials, JAJ — Johan Adrian Jacobsen — is also a Hindi word. My translation of JAJ is discernment. I think that this speaks to the narrative itself. It's an exploration of how we look and how we measure, how we evaluate, and ultimately how we judge situations.

How did you begin to work in graphic novels?

Early exposure to European comic books as opposed to American comic books, which I think is a whole different approach to stories. The North American comic market has, for a long time, been marked by this sort of good versus evil story, the European comics seemed to be more complex.

In my own community we produce monumental artworks and they're gorgeous, they're very powerful, but they're also somewhat inaccessible. It's not every household that can have a large piece of Haida work.

I thought there was a need to connect the narratives embedded in the monumental artwork and to make them accessible to a greater population. The driving force for making these narratives accessible is to try to diminish the tropes, to take some of the fear and the loathing and the misunderstandings that really mark the relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples.

The tragedy that marks this Canadian-Indigenous relationship needs to be challenged and changed and I thought that if I could create works that were really as accessible and complex as comics can be, that this would be a small contribution towards moving the needle to a better place.