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Blood Quantum

Posted on October 25, 2023

Face to Face: Indigenous Experience and Zombie Cinema

Guest Post

by

James Rose

In June 1981, Minister of Fisheries Lucien Lessard authorised more than 300 Quebec Provincial Police (QPP) to raid the Restigouche Reserve in relation to restrictions placed upon the indigenous peoples by the Department of Fisheries: the point of contention was salmon fishing rights; the Mi’kmaq claimed their right to fish salmon six nights a week while the Quebec government attempted to limit their fishing to three days a week as, according to them, their fishing practices were endangering the salmon population. A survey commissioned by the Mi’kmaq and undertaken by Dr. Alan Roy demonstrated the indigenous salmon haul did not exceed 1,200 fish a year, a smaller amount compared to the 1,800 per year that were fished by commercial organisations (Ambroziak). Despite this, the QPP raid occurred and, one of the young people involved was Mi’kmaq Jeff Barnaby:

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woman walks alone
Posted on January 2, 2022

America’s Original Sin—Top Ten Movies About the Horrors of Settler Colonialism

Guest Post

“Once upon a time, there was a girl, and the girl had a shadow.”

-Red (Lupita Nyong’o), Us (2019)

We live in a haunted house. The founding of the American nation began with a moment of sweeping amnesia about its defining structure—settler colonialism, a form of colonization that replaces the original population of the colonized territory with a new society of settlers.[1] From depopulation to the reservation system[2], the residential school system[3] to the plantation system[4], settler colonialism as an ongoing process depends upon a constant flow of physical and cultural violence. Colonization is as horrific as humanity gets—genocide, desecration, pox-blankets, rape, humiliation—and it is the way nations are born. It is an ongoing horror made invisible by its persistence. And yet since the inception of film, the horror genre has, perhaps sneakily, participated in, portrayed, and resisted settler colonialism, ensuring at the very least that it remains visible. Horror movies invite us to rethink the roles that fear, guilt, shame, and history play in the way we conceive of the United States as a nation founded through settler colonialism.[5] They unveil the American experience as based on genocide and exploitation and force us to consider horror as a genre about marginalization and erasure. The ghosts in these films are “never innocent: the unhallowed dead of the modern project drag in the pathos of their loss and the violence of the force that made them, their sheets and chains.”[6] Most importantly, they force us to see them—the shadows of our sins. Read more

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