Indigenous writers know what it's like to live in a world where the horror never stops — so imagining an alternate timeline where it does end can be a comforting escape.
What more is there to fear when you’ve already faced governments who have tried for centuries to wipe you out, who have used biological warfare and forced starvation to create apocalypse for your people?
It’s remarkable to consider that many non-Indigenous horror writers depict situations that Indigenous people have already weathered — such as apocalyptic viral outbreaks that decimate whole populations — or use the history of genocidal violence against us to explain why innocent white folks are being haunted today, such as in Stephen King’s It or the 1982 film Poltergeist. In fact, I’m not sure what scares non-Indigenous horror writers and readers more: experiencing variations of what Indigenous folks have already endured for centuries, or the reality that they have built their entire country on literal Indian burial grounds.
Indigenous writers, on the other hand, acknowledge the mundane horror of living in a country that dehumanizes you, weaving the reality of Indigenous life with fiction to scare audiences. In Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, for example, the apocalyptic event that ends life as we know it — taking out power, internet, phones, satellites, etc. — isn’t even really noticed as an apocalyptic event at first; it’s just another day on a northern rez, where power can go out at any time and internet and phone signals aren’t always available. As Nick, a young Anishinaabe man, points out, “We thought it was kinda funny…The blackout was only two days, but it seemed like some people were already freaking out a little bit. I was just like, ‘Come to the rez, this shit happens all the time!’” Once it becomes apparent that things have changed forever, the protagonist Evan observes that “the milestones he [now] used to mark time were the deaths in the community…as people perished through sickness, mishap, violence or by their own hands.” He notes that northern reserves like his are “familiar with tragedy,” the result of generations of intergenerational trauma and genocide — only now this tragedy is magnified.
Similarly, Jeff Barnaby’s new movie Blood Quantum takes the real-life horror of Indigenous history and plugs it into a zombie horror film. In Barnaby’s film, a zombie virus ravages a non-Indigenous community that borders a reserve; the only thing that saves the Indigenous community from the same fate is their apparent immunity to that virus. The community’s decision to take in non-Native survivors, who may turn into zombies and kill their people, is a fraught one for the film’s characters. Considering the devastation viruses carried by white settlers have historically wrought on Indigenous communities — the 1862 smallpox epidemic is estimated to have cut the First Nations population in what’s now known as British Columbia in half — it’s not hard to understand why.
In her bestselling book The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline used the real history of residential schools to create a terrifying post-apocalyptic world where Indigenous children are hunted and harvested for their bone marrow. Her latest novel, Empire of Wild, similarly uses the Métis tale of the Rogarou to tell a story of religion and resource extraction. The Rogarou was originally a story told to young Indigenous children, particularly girls, to keep them from the roads near the edge of their communities, where white men would pick them up and they’d end up missing or murdered. They scared their children in an attempt to keep them alive.
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An article I would recommend to both writers and fans of the horror genre
