For context, I'm not racist but currently researching a dissertation that centres around Indigenous Horror and the ways the genre confronts colonialism and cultural trauma, and I want to place this critical lens onto several works of fiction that Indigenous Horror actively works against. In other words, I'm looking for largely racist fiction that depicts Indigenous peoples as savages and monstors in order to better explain the necessity of the Indigenous Horror genre.
Works like Heart of Darkness (set in the Congo) aren't really relevant either as I'm specifically looking for fiction that deals with First Nations/Native Americans.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
by the13thReason
12 Comments
The Only Good Indian by Stephen Graham Jones. Jones’s work in general.
James Carlos Blake
HP Lovecraft is the ur-racist horror writer
*Blood Meridian* by Cormac McCarthy.
Blood Meridian.
It’s not really racist, but it does give you a lot of insight into the horror someone would have felt knowing nothing about natives and seeing a war party on the attack for the first time. There’s a scene a couple chapters into the book where one of the characters is with an army group moving through the desert when they’re ambushed by Comanche’s. They way the author describes them cresting over the hill, screaming, wearing wild masks, and just slaughtering and scalping the army then leaving like nothing happened is something right out of a horror film.
That said, the scalp hunters are depicted as far more monstrous than the natives in a way that’s not even close, but it is very honest about the reality of that time.
I read a lot of older horror but I really haven’t run into that specifically with indigenous people in North America, and of course you’re not going find it in anything modern. There’s Blackwood’s “The Wendigo,” which has a racist portrayal of the cook with the expedition, but he’s demeaned, and he’s not a monster. You’re as likely to run into a “noble savage” narrative as you are a negative one.
I think maybe look at the captivity narratives, starting of course with Rowlandson?? They offered incredibly negative views of native peoples, although of course sometimes for understandable reasons. Westerns might be another genre worth looking at, although in both films and books there’s seldom a single simple narrative.
A lot of horror tropes to do with Native Americans are about the vanishing Indian and white guilt rather than depicting Native Americans as savage monsters. For example, the Indian burial ground trope you find in books like Pet Sematary by Stephen King. I’m not sure if that is too far away from your research prompt, but might be worth looking into.
The buffalo hunter hunter
Jack London has a couple of stories around indigenous peoples that are a bit like this. Name escapes me, but there’s one story which tracks the last few hours of a blind indigenous elder who is left behind on purpose when the tribe moves. In general I get a bit of the “manifest destiny” and “superiority of the white anglo male” vibe from his stories. Some would say “To Light a Fire” is horror, but most of his writing isn’t genre AFAICT.
*Heart of Darkness*
Seriously? Fucking Laura ingells wilder. The way they talk about the savages and getting scalped. Absolutely colonialist, racist brutality, especially for kids books!
As a source that talks about this subject from the Native American side I would recommend:
Black Elk Speaks. The best book I’ve read about it.
Reel Injun documentary. So good, telling how Hollywood has portrayed NA’s from the beginning and ends with the renaissance of NA directors and movies.