In the end, the young girl finds the herbs to help her dying grandmother have a more peaceful transition to the spirit world. The girl passes the tests by not showing fear when encountering the wolf and the demon and by assisting the elderly woman even though it delays the medicine gathering. The three spirits are a wolf, a demon, and an old lady. On a journey to find herbal medicine, the young girl encounters three spirits, who each give her a test of courage necessary for gathering the herbs. The theme revolves around the idea that sometimes a person has to leave home to help one’s tribal community. The main character, a young girl, makes sacrifices to care for her dying grandmother. Journey of the Healer, an animatic film funded by Health Canada, was created to attract First Nations youth to nursing careers in northern Canada, where there is a shortage of healthcare providers. The comic was funded by the Healthy Aboriginal Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting healthy life styles for youth. Another goal is to create an animation version of the film. The first video of Darkness Calls is in the Gitxsan language from Northwest Canada Sanderson also wants to make a Cree language version, as well as versions in other tribal languages. (Sanderson was inspired to write the story and to take on youth-oriented health and lifestyle projects by his own younger cousin, who had contemplated taking his own life.)
He finds one particular day so overwhelming that he considers suicide-an epidemic problem in many Native communities. (Animatic films are made from comic strip stills in contrast to animation, which has a three-dimensional background and movable figures.) The story is about a teenager who is bullied at school, misunderstood by his teacher, and socially isolated from his family. Sanderson has also ventured into animation filmmaking through various funding organizations, such as The Healthy Aboriginal Network, the Canada Council for the Arts, Health Canada, and the British Columbia Ministry of Health.ĭarkness Calls, his first venture, is a suicide-prevention comic book and animatic film. Since 2005 he has been writing and illustrating his own aboriginal comic books and has so far completed six of them.
With that training under his belt, he landed a job as a storyboard artist for the popular animated television show ED, Edd n’ Eddy on the Cartoon Network. Later he enrolled in Vancouver Film School to study computer animation in a 10-month program that he completed in 2000.
TREASURE PLANET BATTLE AT PROCYON MOUSE NOT WORKING PROFESSIONAL
Sanderson got his first professional job writing and illustrating comic books that were printed in multiple Native languages to encourage language skills. He says he dropped out because he was bored with the curriculum.įortunately, he had a natural gift for artwork, and with his basic draftsmanship skills he was able to get positions with several animation companies, where he did on-the-job training in Photoshop and digital painting.
He grew up off-reserve in the urban environment of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and despite having excellent models in his mother, who is a professor at First Nations University, and his father, who is a blue-collar worker, Sanderson dropped out of high school. You might not have predicted that success from his early life, though.
A self-taught artist, he has become a force to reckon with, having developed a number of comics with Native superheroes as well as producing his own animated films, working on hit cartoons for the Cartoon Network and Disney’s computer game Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon. Steven Keewatin Sanderson, a Plains Cree illustrator and animator, is one of the few Native comic book artists working anywhere.
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