Imagining a World Where Anti-Colonial Fantasy Lit Is the Norm, Not the Exception

In elementary school, when it was my class’ turn to attend the Scholastic Book Fair, I would leap out of my seat and run to the front of the room to claim that first spot in line, leg bouncing wildly until the teacher led us into the gymnasium.

I was a voracious reader and could spot books the school library already had with the merest glance. These each had a different blonde girl with her face hidden in shadow or cut off at the top of the cover, beautiful and anonymous so the reader could imagine themself as the one living through the stories. I tried to cast myself as the girl on the cover, but my face never seemed to fit.

There were other stories I had, though—stories and legends of ancestors long passed that my grandmother and aunties would tell me as we cooked the day’s catch on the fire.

The same characters would make different choices, thrusting the narrative forward in a direction I didn’t see coming, pulling me to the edge of the rusty lawn chair that glowed with the light of the fire. These stories had been weaved together through the generations, passed from weaver to weaver, changing and growing with each heart that touched it, until the story was big enough to wrap around the shoulders of me and my siblings.

We would sit in its warmth and watch my grandmother stitch something new as she threaded in her favorite parts from how her mother told the stories and then some from how her father had, with a little bit of childish glee at adding in something she’d always wished would happen.

These stories breathed with lungs that the ones sitting in the gymnasium didn’t have. They pulsed, beating like a drum. If I was quiet enough, listened hard enough, my own heart would fall into the rhythm of these stories. It was a visceral thing to experience as a child—to feel such a connection to books, and yet, even more strongly, feel the distance between the stories that were told to me, that lived inside of me, and those books I loved so much.

*

When I left home for university, I ached for the pulsing heart of the culture I grew up with. The university’s halls were large, its campus big enough to fit every person in my hometown and then some, with a grand library to match.

I asked the librarian if she had any novels by Indigenous authors. She walked me through rows and rows of books, the dust in the air thickening the farther we went. She stopped at the end of a long aisle and plucked her reading glasses from her head. She squinted through them and pointed to a small section along the bottom of the paint-chipped shelf.

“Sorry,” she said, “Our selection is rather small.” But to me, this shelf was a miracle. Moving to the city was the first time that I had stepped into a library large enough to have an Indigenous fiction section at all. To her, it might have seemed pitiful to only have four dozen books to choose from, but to me, I saw an entire year of homecoming. I checked out five and came back a week later.

The stable and reliable internet connection I now had also meant that I could scour the web for other Indigenous books. I soon found stories by Indigenous authors from around the world, each injecting a piece of themselves, their language, and their land into the narrative.

I started having conversations with other readers in my life about Indigenous authors. We would chirp back and forth like chickadees excited for dawn. I began to feel spoiled by these stories and conversations. My reading was no longer curated by the front shelves at the bookstores or libraries I visited, but curated by my interests and my heritage.

*

During the pandemic, I joined TikTok, yearning for the excited chirping once more. I would make videos about my favorite Indigenous authors and stories, and even though the book community on the app was growing, my videos did not garner many views.

So I started reading what was popular. I wanted to understand why so many people loved the fantasy romance genre, thinking that perhaps I would be able to recommend Indigenous stories that fit into that space.

I read dozens of series. They were thrilling, and fast paced, with love interests that made the heart swoon. But none made mine pulse like a drum. I realized that was because in every single book that TikTok curated for me, I was cheering for a colonizer. No matter how many times I shushed that Indigenous voice inside my head, the twisting, uncomfortable feeling in my belly returned.

The stories themselves never said the word colonizer, yet it was everywhere. They would reference the lore of a story’s first peoples of “long ago,” and a voice inside my head would whisper what had been left unwritten: that this was the lore of people who were killed long ago. In the mentions of a character’s bloodline going all the way back to the first king, I heard the first conqueror instead.

Some even had Indigenous characters in their story, painting them along the edges like decorations or tools as they were used to play the part of servant or wise, ancient one, only understood through their utility or care for the lost princess or queen. There was no room to explore the complicated dynamics between the oppressed and the oppressor in these popular titles. There was no room for readers like me.

I had read so much fantasy by Indigenous authors, Black authors, authors of color from all over the world, that I had forgotten that when something new emerges, like TikTok, these stories by marginalized voices are not put at the front. My belly twisted harder with each video until an idea sparked.

I could write one.

I laughed to myself, but the spark grew, until I was wrapping a blanket around my shoulders and scribbling well into the night. I stripped the elements of all the stories I had read like bark and tried to find a new way to weave them together until I felt that drumming in my chest.

That became The Halfling Saga: a story I never planned to write yet sounded a drum loud enough that it shook my bones and the bones of countless readers who have messaged, emailed, and posted to say that this story touched them in ways others haven’t.

Every people have an instrument they’re known for. My ancestors, the Anishinaabeg, beat the same drums their descendants play today. It is a beautiful instrument just like so many of the other instruments around the world that aren’t part of the traditional orchestra.

Imagine the music those instruments could play if they were given the stage; imagine the world they could inspire given the chance to play together in harmony. Maybe that would be a world that values community and reconciliation as much as this one values domination.

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A Vicious Game in The Halfling Saga by Melissa Blair is available via Union Square and Co.