Parallel Sovereignties: A Comparative Visual Analysis of Indigenous Childhoods in Indian and Canadian Picturebooks

What does it mean to picture an Indigenous child, and who decides how that picturing happens? This paper investigates how Indigenous childhood is visually constructed across two postcolonial contexts rarely read together: the Adivasi child-subject in Indian picturebooks and First Nations and Mi'kmaq child-subjects in Canadian children's literature[SB1] . Both are shaped by editorial and curatorial gatekeeping not always of the communities' own making, and both remain contested terrain as Indigenous communities increasingly demand authorial and artistic sovereignty over their own stories. Using a social semiotic framework (Kress and van Leeuwen), my earlier research has shown that Indian picturebooks such as Mahasweta Devi's The Why-Why Girl encode assimilationist values beneath a surface of cultural representation, through choices of gaze, spatial positioning, colour, and the relation between text and images, choices rarely made by the communities being depicted. This paper extends that analysis comparatively, reading Indian Adivasi picturebooks alongside Canadian titles such as Theresa Meuse-Dallien's The Sharing Circle and the bilingual Walking Together, which introduces Elder Albert D. Marshall's concept of Etuaptmumk, or Two-Eyed Seeing. The comparison is not incidental: Adivasi scholars have increasingly situated their struggles within the language of comparative indigeneity, aligning local politics of belonging with Indigenous rights movements elsewhere. Yet this alignment has scarcely entered children's literature scholarship, where India remains largely absent. Attending also to the archival structures with classification, acquisition, curatorial choice that determine which Indigenous childhoods are preserved and which are not,

this paper asks what happens when the visual grammar of Indigenous childhood is translated across these contested, geographically distant, but politically resonant terrains.