“An Indian is an Indian regardless of the degree of Indian blood or which little government card they do or do not possess.”
– Wilma Mankiller
In June of 1981, Quebec Provincial Police, game wardens and fisheries officers raided the Restigouche Indian Reserve located on the north side of the Restigouche River, which marks the border of Quebec and New Brunswick in Canada.
The officers beat and arrested Mi’kmaw residents and seized or slashed tens of thousands of dollars worth of fishing nets and salmon. A little over a week later, officers returned for a second raid. The twin incursions were an attempt by the Quebec government to restrict the salmon-fishing rights of the Mi’kmaq, an act of provincial violence and seizure which violated the 18th century Peace and Friendship treaties as upheld in the Canadian Supreme Court’s 1999 Marshall Decision.
The events were by no means isolated incidents, and they are ugly data points on a map that shows a long-running disharmony between the Canadian government and various Indigenous communities. This is due largely to the government’s disingenuous use of treaties to legally strip land and rights from Native communities who signed those agreements in good faith—a way (they may have thought) of sharing land and preserving the rights of their people.
Mi’kmaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby was raised in Listuguj (where the raids took place) and he credits Alanis Obomsawin’s related documentary Incident at Restigouche with his recognition of movies as a form of “social protest.” Blood Quantum is Barnaby’s second feature film and it shows that he (along with his largely Mi’kmaq and First Nations cast) have taken that lesson and run with it.
The film is shot on location in Listuguj and Kahnawake and it takes place in 1981—the same year as the police raids that influenced the film’s subversive premise. It depicts a zombie plague that affects everyone except those with Native blood. The outside world collapses while the Indigenous folks of the Red Crow Indian Reservation must learn how to survive—not against colonization but rather family in-fighting and a new type of physical eradication. The metaphorical layers are not exactly subtle, and the film is just as much a scathing condemnation of colonialism as it is a zombie movie with tropes now familiar to most audiences. Its use of zombie-as-metaphor is not unique, but its subject matter in this context is (that fact alone is an indictment on the larger issue of representation in horror storytelling).
“Blood quantum” itself is not some empty moniker, although Barnaby has observed that its meaning to White audiences has proven “opaque.” I’ll admit that I was not familiar with blood quantum laws until a friend informed me of their meaning (and controversy), and it dramatically influenced my perception of the film (my friend’s own work in unraveling the perils of cultural ignorance is important and worth reading).
Put simply, blood quantum refers to a Native person’s percentage of “Indian blood,” passed down by full-blood ancestors. A person with one Native parent and one non-Native parent, for instance, will have a blood quantum of 50 percent. It is a colonialist measurement imposed by governments as a duplicitous method of Native American erasure, used by European colonizers since the early 18th century but not widely implemented until the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. Not all Native American tribes use blood quantum as a qualifier for membership, and those that do often differ on the minimum allowed ratio. The question of who is or isn’t Indigenous (either in the eyes of government or Native tribes) is often rather complicated, and will sometimes use some combination of blood quantum and lineal descent.
Native Circle describes blood quantum as a form of erasure and assimilation, implemented to limit the rights of Native Americans and erode their populations and culture through intermarriage and census. It is a legal way to “kill Indians on paper,” and the fact that the government-funded Human Genome Project shows that DNA provides “no genetic basis” for meaningful divisions of race or ethnicity is almost beside the point. The fact that so many White people are still ignorant of these laws proves in a way their effectiveness: colonization and cultural assimilation are so often invisible to those in power, built into institutions where its callous nature can hide in structure and legal processes.
“We can survive an apocalypse. We can exist after the world has ended.”
– Jeff Barnaby
But how is Blood Quantum when judged not as political activism but as, you know, a zombie movie?
Barnaby (who wrote as well as directed) is still figuring out how to bring life to dialogue, and there are aspects of the writing that are a bit wooden. But the characters in a larger sense are satisfyingly complex, and much of the emotional drama of the film comes from the bond (and friction) between the family at its core. It is fitting that a First Nations film centers on the indelible ties of family and community, which have so much more to do with Native identity than some government-issued card.
Stylistically the film is impressively bleak and well-shot, and the visual effects do not in any way shy away from a shocking level of blood and gore. It bears mentioning that Barnaby’s use of horror as a vehicle for social protest does not eclipse what seems to be a sincere appreciation for the style and language of the genre. Symbolism aside, Blood Quantum is a moving and delightfully blood-thirsty effort in a populated genre. Curiously, it feels simultaneously familiar and novel: it tells a story that is (woefully) unique for non-Indigenous audiences, in the tradition and visual language of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
A preoccupation with apocalypse fantasies is not unique to any particular race or ethnicity. Humans have always been fascinated with their own inevitable end. What is interesting is the way this differs from culture to culture. White storytellers (a clumsy designation) will typically set their annihilation somewhere in the near or distant future, but for American Indian cultures their apocalypse has already happened, and it was facilitated by White conquerors.
Blood Quantum, broadly speaking, could be read as a tribute to Barnaby’s embattled sense of pride at the continuation of Native life and culture against enormous odds: “We can survive an apocalypse. We can exist after the world has ended.” Barnaby sets his story, tellingly, in the near past—a traceable reaction to the violence of colonizing forces. But there is a small and unmistakable pearl of hope buried in the tragedy and bloodshed of Blood Quantum that should not be ignored.
White audiences and allies would do well to acknowledge the crimes of the past, but they would do even better not to dwell too long in some shame-ridden dystopia of Indigenous destruction. Those ghosts of North American colonization have sons and daughters and grandchildren, and there is hope to be found in the ongoing story of Native life and culture, a mosaic which means many different things across many far-flung places.
When you meet a Native person do not ask them to prove their authenticity with a number, or anything else for that matter. We can honor the victims of genocide by lifting up their descendants—no qualifiers needed. Stories of trauma should, for functional reasons alone, lead to tales of amelioration and redress. Blood Quantum messily subverts the methods of settler colonialism and acknowledges a way forward that will be inherited by our children. Killing zombies is messy work but it must be done. The same is true of decolonization.
Blood Quantum is streaming on Shudder and is available for digital rental on Amazon Prime, iTunes and Google Play.