Description:

Indigenous horror is a genre of storytelling that seeks to address the effects of settler-colonialism and racial capital on Indigenous lifeworlds. Within film, Indigenous horror reinterprets the visual language of mainstream culture to process historical trauma and to provide Indigenous viewers with potent fantasies of revenge and retribution. Understanding how contemporary horror emerges from traditional storytelling traditions allows us to understand how these texts appropriate mainstream visual idioms in service of Indigenous cultural resurgence. For example, tales of law breaking and taboo crossing form part of Inuit pedagogical practices regarding survival and resilience. This talk discusses the ecohorror of Nyla Innuksuk’s Slash/Back in the context of traditional practices and contemporary Inuit filmmaking to show how the film negotiates climate change as a problem stemming from the antithesis between settler and Indigenous laws and norms.

Madeleine Reddon is an assistant professor of Indigenous literature in the Department of English at Loyola University of Chicago and a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta. She recently co-edited the creative writing anthology, Carving Space: The Indigenous Voices Awards, with Jordan Abel and Carleigh Baker. She is currently working on her book, Inheritances, which focuses on literary representations of intergenerational dispossession that foreground the ambivalence and complexity of cultural transmission and kinship within colonial modernity.