Coyote And Crow

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.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/indigenous-fantasy-books-games-1.7342316