Students will learn the craft of zine-making with a focus on the genre of perzines. A perzine, short for personal zine, is a zine that relates directly to its author, often featuring personal anecdotes, stories, and testimonies in a self-published memoir style. They can be silly or profound, they can be about something trivial or monumental, or they can be made to share or just for you.

Jamie John is a two-spirit trans and queer Anishinaabe and Korean-American multi-disciplinary artist and powwow dancer (he/him and they/themme). They are a dually enrolled tribal citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and the United States of America. Jamie’s cultural and familial background gives a profound sense of kinship and belonging, as well as what it means to connect to the land, to our ancestry, and to each other.

From early on, art has been a way of navigating and communicating the complexities of colonialism, Indigenous worldviews, gender variance, and the intergenerational capacity for trauma and joy. The responsibilities Jamie has to their community(ies), kin, and culture is a mindset that extends throughout their body of work. Jamie weaves a tapestry of Native life in the 21st century by drawing upon similarities between Indigenous nations, global steadfast fights for decolonization, and understandings of belonging to land, family, and non-human kin. The centering of lived experience allows for a palpable sense of intimacy and radical vulnerability to permeate throughout his body of work.