When Connor Alexander set out to create a game, he wanted players to
be able to craft stories about Indigenous characters without the
constant weight of colonial trauma.
"I don't want Natives to have
to face the stuff that we're always having to face every day with
residential schools and missing and murdered Indigenous women. I don't
want that to be part of my game," said Alexander, who is a citizen of
the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
With that in mind, he created Coyote & Crow, a pen-and-paper role-playing game inspired by games like Dungeons & Dragons he played as a kid. It's set in an alternate future North America where colonization never happened.
Alexander says it was important to create positive representation for
Indigenous people in games, where he often saw stereotypical or
offensive stereotypes.
He cited a trailer he saw for a 2019 video game called Greedfall, where alternate-history European characters travel to a "magical savage land" in search of the cure to a plague.
"It
was leaning into all of the worst stereotypes of native people. And it
made me so angry. And I remember thinking, I'm tired of telling these
publishers to at least get a consultant on their game," he said. So he
set out to make one himself.
The gamble paid off — Coyote & Crow debuted in 2021, crowdfunding over $1 million US on Kickstarter before its release in 2022.
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