My Native Rep Growing Up Was a Goddamn Red Echidna
Jude Bigboy
→BFA PRINT 2025
Hi. If you’re wondering about my last name—yes, it’s very cool, thank you, and yes, it is my real last name. It comes from the Ojibwe side of my family. The Ojibwe people are one of many broader Anishinaabe tribes in North America. But I wasn’t raised on the rez. I was raised in apartments and places with suboptimal mortgages until I was relegated to the pension-funded home of my white maternal grandparents. I’m from Philadelphia, PA, where the Lenni-Lenape previously resided.
My father was not present in my life. Within a year of trying to get his drinking under control and step up to co-parent, he scurried off to the rez, forsaking my mother’s patient grace. Thankfully, my mom and grandparents did not hold contempt for my indigenousness despite his absence. They raised me to be proud of it and to not forget that I was native, even if I didn’t know my father or even anyone from other Anishinaabe tribes. I only really knew what the media I consumed depicted as being indigenous.
In grade school, I was obsessed with handheld video games. While I loved Pokemon, I also greatly enjoyed the Sonic the Hedgehog games. One of the main characters in Sonic is Knuckles the Echidna. Red and spikey, he’s a dumb brute with a heart of gold. His race, the Echidna, is what first introduced me to what indigenousness might look like. He is the last survivor of the Echidna Tribe, an ancient race dwelling on Angel Island, a place in the sky that’s in harmony with nature. The Echidnas were nearly exterminated after being betrayed by their god, Chaos, in a fit of rage. Chaos’s immense power was sealed into the most important relic in the series—the Master Emerald—by the last Echidnas struggling to survive. These survivors then took up the role of guardians of the Master Emerald.
Many people already familiar with the Sonic series know that it’s an incredibly racially coded series—in the characterization, aesthetics, and with Sonic himself being voiced in ’90s cartoons by the sitcom star Jaleel White. Recently, Knuckles was voiced by Idris Elba in the 2022 Sonic the Hedgehog movie. The characters in the series being racially coded as Black is commonly understood, especially as the series pulls from hip-hop and other Black cultural elements of the 1990s. I saw this somewhat as a child, but what stuck out to me so strongly was Knuckles and how his relationship with the Echidna tribe is depicted. In his theme song in the Sonic Adventure games, he drops these corny, earnest bars:
“Born on an island in the heavens
The blood of my ancestors flows inside me
My duty is to save the flower
From evil deterioration”
The blood of my ancestors flows inside me
My duty is to save the flower
From evil deterioration”
The Sonic games already focus heavily on environmentalism, but Knuckles is the distilled example. After discovering the history of Angel Island and Knuckles’s dedication to his inherited role as the guardian of the Master Emerald, it wasn’t difficult for me to connect these elements to the common indigenous creation myth of Turtle Island. With little relation to local tribes (who still are not legally recognized by the state of Pennsylvania) and no knowledge of my own, Knuckles was the first character that modeled what indigenousness could look like beyond a list of historical facts.
A goddamn anthropomorphic red echidna.
As I grew older, my bedtime was pushed back so I could watch new episodes of my favorite cartoons. Once it was late enough, my Cartoon Network viewing sessions led into the switch to the Adult Swim programming block, the first show each night being King of the Hill. For a child now living in the suburbs in southeastern Pennsylvania, the Texan ethos didn’t really make sense to me. I still greatly enjoyed it. I loved watching it before bed, settling into the awkwardness of Bobby Hill, his friendship with Dale Gribble’s dark-skinned son, Joseph Gribble. Dale is a scraggly, conspiratorial bug exterminator, and his wife is a weather reporter with tousled blonde ’80s hair. But Joseph bears almost no resemblance to either of his parents. It’s heavily implied to the point of indirect confirmation that Joseph Gribble is actually the son of John Redcorn, the indigenous new-age healer and metalhead who has a long-running affair with Dale’s wife, Nancy.Dale is utterly oblivious to his son’s blatant resemblance to Redcorn. It’s a frequent elephant in the room played to absurdity in the show. At this point in my life, I was beginning to reflect and question who my father actually was, as I was now living with my mom and my stepfather. John Redcorn seemed to resemble my own father, a womanizing metalhead who took pride in their indigenousness despite not actually living up to their tribe's teachings of a virtuous life. I began to slowly see why my mother spoke of my father with disdain and spite. I was being raised by a conspiratorial blue-collar white guy, who would never be my dad, and my biological father wasn’t going to fulfill that role either.
When I finally contacted my father, he never quite bothered to stay in touch. Nor did he particularly take to teaching me much. However, the rest of the Bigboys would send me occasional cards, small trinkets, and craftwork from the tribe. I still use a small birch bowl from them to hold all my sentimental knickknacks. I adopt abandoned braids of sweetgrass. I see myself in these braids, isolated from their home. Their new home is with me, cobbled together with the collection of small gifts from my friends.
Even though dad rock isn’t enough, I take what I can get.
In high school, I lived with my grandparents in a white-flight neighborhood of Philadelphia, in the far northeast. They enrolled me in a small Catholic school, where I mostly kept to myself as a disillusioned former-Catholic with many untreated and neglected mental health issues. Meandering through classes, I ended up in AP English Literature my senior year. I was tired of high school, waiting to start at RISD. I slept sitting up at my desk, and if I was called on to answer a question, I’d quickly give a correct answer, and return to sleep.Our teacher did not wholly hold us to the canon of older English literature. One of the books we read was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by surprisingly well-attuned white guy Ken Kesey. The narrator and protagonist is Chief Bromden, a half-native psychiatric patient who resembles a perpetually sedated Andre the Giant. My last name broadcasts to others that I am also half-native. During high school, I was experiencing horrific brain fog, dissociative depression, and hypomanic swings. The latter was internal, but Bromden’s backstory of his well-respected Native father being disgraced by Bromden’s white hussy of a mother seemed to give my teacher the idea that it was very okay to ask me:
“Bigboy, you would know a lot about this wouldn’t you? Being Native and all.”
I was shocked. Quite frankly, he was correct. Especially since I had a short stint with involuntary hospitalization in my youth. I really did resonate with Chief Bromden. I, too, was wading through a perpetual cognitive fog, unsure of how present I really was outside of my head. But in that moment, I was a bit too taken aback to tell him that his question was comically racist.
I would now like to thank my squirrely classmate for chiming in. She simply announced, “Hey, I think that was a really rude question to ask!” Our teacher scrunched his face and moved on, not wanting to start the daily literary and interpretive arguments that defined our class this early. I am still happy she seemed to support me from a distance despite the rest of my school deeming me a psychopathic lesbian.
“When I look back on the characters I grew up with, I’m both comforted and troubled by how their depictions resonated with me—and how they have informed my own identity.”
Towards the end of high school, I became friends with a group of online gamers who enjoyed the niche indie video games and tabletop games I did. There, I finally met another mixed native person. He is Choctaw, and, like me, living in diaspora, but in the far northwest of New York State. We bond over linguistics, chronic illness, and being the only ones resistant to sunburn in our families. Somewhere in this period of time, I learned about the 2006 video game Prey. I have not had the chance to play it, but I have seen enough gameplay and discussions to glean an understanding of the narrative.
The protagonist of Prey is Domasi “Tommy” Tawodi. He’s a Cherokee veteran now working as a mechanic on his rez in Oklahoma. The game opens with a scene in a bar run by Tommy’s girlfriend, Jen. They are in the middle of an argument. Tommy desperately wants to leave the rez for good. He hates the still, uneventful life of pseudo-sovereignty. He tries to convince Jen to leave with him, but she refuses. Suddenly, the bar is abducted by aliens. Jen is kidnapped, and Tommy’s grandfather, Enisi, is killed. Shortly after, Tommy is left to die. He enters the afterlife and meets with his grandfather, who gifts him the spiritual ability to leave his body and return to it at will, letting him solve puzzles in gameplay and repeatedly return to life after being killed. Tommy also receives aid from his childhood pet hawk as his spirit guide. Clad in denim and a well-worn leather jacket, Tommy begins to follow his ancestor’s pleas to save humanity.
Tommy discovers more about the aliens who abducted his small tribe. They’re a hivemind who kill, absorb, and incorporate the traits of alien races from across the universe. Their eyes are set on Earth now, and Tommy ends up having to mercy-kill Jen, whose upper torso is grafted onto an alien monster. As Tommy fights his way to the Mother of these aliens, he defeats her. In her dying breath, she offers him the godhood afforded her by being the core of this ever-growing hivemind. However, Tommy has now been using his spiritual powers at length, and hears the voice of his grandfather calling him back to Earth. Knowing that this godhood will not bring back Jen or Enisi, Tommy returns to Earth to attend to the land, while knowing his soul will return to his family when it is his time to be with them as spirits.
Something unique about Prey is that the developers actually hired Plains Cree people to voice Tommy and Jen’s roles. Tommy is played by Michael Greyeyes, who went on to speak candidly about how open the developers were to his input and experiences as an indigenous person. Because of the developers’ willingness to listen to the people their story was about, the game speaks truthfully to the complex identity of being indigenous in modern-day America.
Tommy Tawodi is a guy I’d see on the rez.
When I look back on the characters I grew up with, I’m both comforted and troubled by how their depictions resonated with me—and how they have informed my own identity. There’s so little indigenous representation already, most of which is exaggerated and butchered by media’s othering done to keep us on the rez. In movies, books, and games, Native people have been simplified by the mistranslations of colonial anthropologists. But in these few characters, I’ve seen glimpses of my own life. Fully native folks. Half native folks. Absent fathers and spiritual guides. Natives who want to leave what’s left behind, and Natives who want to return without quite knowing why. I used to say I live in diaspora. But all of us indigenous folk live in some form of diaspora, having been shoved into small plots of land under the pretense of being given sovereignty. So few reservations are truly the land we knew, or the particular land our ancestors would’ve called home. Almost all the Native folks I know and meet now are more like me than I expected them to be as a child. Among different tribes, climates, and landscapes, we all know that we are walking a land that we can no longer confidently call our own. Blood quantum be damned, we must make these connections with each other regardless of wampum or arrowheads. Will we ever return to Angel Island? Who knows, but I’m happy to look outside and recognize more people like me than I ever thought I would.
Illustration by the author.
Jude Bigboy wants to see the old Winston Gold packaging return and less cortisol in their bloodwork.