Screen Zombies, Alien Settlers, and Colonial Legacies

Abstract

ABSTRACT You Are On Indian Land, a Challenge for Change documentary shot during a border-crossing blockade on Akwesasne territory (near Cornwall, Ontario) in 1969, helped interrupt the colonial legacy of Canadian cinema. Since then, activism in defense of Wet’suwet’en struggles to protect unceded territory, including remarkable uses of video and social media, carry on the transformative spark of this and other Indigenous films. Until recently, Indigenous filmmaking in Canada has mostly been relegated to informational and documentary programming because this is the genre sanctioned by colonial institutions. The commercial success of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), disrupted this gatekeeping, and the release of Mi’kmaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013) and Blood Quantum (2019) completely shattered the imposed barrier. Barnaby’s films are about the crimes of colonialism inflected through the zombie-horror and revenge-fantasy genres. This article weaves together these formative moments of Canadian documentary and fiction filmmaking with respect to issues of justice, land claims, and visual sovereignty, raising the question of what it means to represent Indigenous social struggles in popular film genres and what they say about the concept of Canadian identity.