Connor Alexander
“There are hundreds of years of colonialism to untangle. That’s partly why I had to set the fracture in our timelines so far in the past ... One of the biggest gaps I saw was a lack of representation for Native Americans”
Writer, game designer, and owner of Coyote & Crow LLC, Connor Alexander is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and lives in Seattle, Washington. His company and his personal designs reflect his desire to amplify Indigenous voices and projects, especially in the game industry. One of the company's primary goals is to connect non-Natives to those projects in a way that fosters communication and understanding while avoiding appropriative pitfalls common in popular media.
While he has written non-fiction for years and been an avid gamer for more than 40 years, it wasn’t until he entered the hobby game industry in 2014 that he began to see the possibility of contributing to the industry in a new way. In 2018 he began developing a tabletop roleplaying game, Coyote & Crow, with the idea that both Natives and non-Natives needed to see what a world might look like where European colonization never happened. Incorporating science fiction and spiritual elements, and more than 30 Indigenous writers and artists, the game became an unexpected success on Kickstarter in March of 2021, generating more than one million dollars in funding. It went on to become the most successful original core rulebook roleplaying game in Kickstarter history.
Since then, he has left his day job to pursue Coyote & Crow full time. He and the company are working on expansions, tabletop board games, books and other projects set both within and without the world of Coyote & Crow. As always, the company seeks to foster and uplift Indigenous creative voices from all over the continent.