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Spooktober: They Built It On a Haunted Burial Ground - Ep 110
229 Plays4 years ago
For decades, American horror has been haunted by the specter of the "Indian Burial Ground." This week, we look at the roots of the phenomenon, the history behind some of the most famous instances, and Indigenous responses to the trope. Plus, Amber serves the worst Maine accent while trying to explain the plot of Pet Sematary, and bullies you all into checking out her Book Club recs.
Links
- Why Every Horror Film of the 1980s Was Built On ‘Indian Burial Grounds’ (Atlas Obscura)
- The Indian Burying Ground (Poetry Foundation)
- The Suburban Horror of the Indian Burial Ground (The National Review)
- Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (via WorldCat)
- ‘Winchester’ Continues Hollywood’s Tradition of Mining Native American Suffering for Ghost Stories (Wear Your Voice Magazine)
- Bury My Guilt in an Indian Burial Ground (Medium)
- Horror Older Than America: Whitewashing Native Tales For A Mass-Market Audience (Northwest Public Broadcasting)
- This Essay Was Not Built On an Ancient Indian Burial Ground (Off Screen)
- Twisting Conventions: A Feminist Indigenous Perspective on the Horror Genre (Off Screen)
- Jeff Barnaby on Blood Quantum and colonialist zombies (Seventh Row)
- Podcast Ep. 39: Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls & Blood Quantum (Seventh Row)
- Blood Quantum (2020) Official Red Band Trailer HD (via YouTube)
- Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film (via WorldCat)
Contact
- Email the Dirt Podcast: thedirtpodcast@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction to The Dirt Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to The Dirt, a podcast about archaeology, anthropology, and our shared human past. I'm Anna. And I'm Amber, and Spooktober rolls on.
Transition to Spectral Topics
00:00:30
Speaker
Last week we discussed the very tangible topic of hands, but this week we move on to something decidedly less corporeal.
00:00:39
Speaker
Well, before we get too spectral, we have a review to read and a new patron to welcome. Oh my gosh. Thank you, Christine, for your Patreon pledge.
Listener Support and Patreon
00:00:48
Speaker
Everything we get from Patreon from folks like Christine goes right back into making content for you, our listeners. So if you'd like to support the show with a small monthly amount,
00:00:57
Speaker
You can do that at patreon.com slash The Dirt Podcast. And if you're not able to do that, please don't worry. You can also support us by telling folks to subscribe to our show and by leaving reviews on Apple Podcasts. Make sure you're taking care of yourselves, friends. And speaking of reviews, here is one from Von Von Cake. I listen to some podcasts to be entertained. I listen to others to learn something new. The Dirt has it all.
00:01:26
Speaker
I'm fairly widely read and I still learn something every episode. I laugh every episode because Amber and Anna are so funny. It's really an all in one podcast and you're missing out if you're not listening. But, but, but how would you know? It's like an aching. An undefinable yearning. It's very metaphysical. Moving on. Les spook. Don et moi les spook. I think we're probably on informal terms, right?
00:01:56
Speaker
Okay. I can two-twy-ay you. Niche, French joke. Yeah. So Anna, I think because we are so familiar, I think I know the answer to this question, but humor me.
Opinions on Horror Films
00:02:12
Speaker
Are you a fan of horror films? I am not.
00:02:16
Speaker
Okay, so the script says, even if you're not. I have bonkers nightmares all the time enough. I don't need to fuel them. Yeah. So, but just to confirm, have you seen the shining? I am aware of the plot of the shining. I have not seen it. Okay.
00:02:36
Speaker
Have you seen the Amityville horror? In the same way, I am in like a cultural touchstone kind of way. I vaguely know about it. Hot take? That's not great. The original one? That's not great. Didn't miss much? Have you seen Pet Sematary? They spelled it wrong, so I rejected on principle.
00:03:00
Speaker
No, I haven't seen it, but again, I... Yeah, that went, yeah. Again, so great. No, I know lots of people are fans of Stephen King. Yeah, sure. Who is originally responsible for two of those three movies. He did hate Stanley Kubrick's film version of The Shining. Interesting. Which says something. Yeah, I would argue without having seen any of them that it's the best of those three.
00:03:29
Speaker
Yeah, I like Stanley Kubrick's movies. The things that I found to be weak about The Shining are things that I know to be hallmarks of Stephen King's work. No, tell us what you think about Stephen King. Tell us more. I have some notes. But so I picked those three examples specifically. And do you know what they all have in common? Am I supposed to say no? No, I can just... I do, but go ahead.
00:03:59
Speaker
That one was a rhetorical question, I know I'm going to say.
Indian Burial Grounds in Horror
00:04:04
Speaker
So yeah, in each of these classic horror films, as well as many others throughout the 1980s and beyond, they all feature haunted spaces that generate and inspire heinous acts. And at the root of these hauntings is the disturbance of Native American burial grounds.
00:04:23
Speaker
So in the past 30 years, the so-called, longer, oh my gosh, 40. Sorry. The so-called Indian burial ground trope, and a trope is a cliche or a motif that literary or film works can lean on as sort of a creative crutch, has really come into its own in the United States. Anna, question? I was raising my hand. Do you know where the word cliche comes from?
00:04:50
Speaker
Please tell me. It's onomatopoeia. So a cliche is something that has been repeated so often that it's sort of like, yes, yes, yes. Cliche in French is an onomatopoeic word for the kind of squishing noise that an ink press made, like a printing press made as the ink separated from the paper and cliche. Oh, that's fun. Yeah, I really like that one, which is why I apologize for interrupting, but I hope to make it up with fact.
00:05:19
Speaker
Oh, that one's good. Thank you. Not that others are bad, but that one's good. Nice. So what's behind this cliche? We're not going to talk about whether ghosts are real or what reasons people have for believing in them. There are plenty of other podcasts for that. Instead, let's talk about why Americans, so
Critique of Cultural Insensitivity
00:05:42
Speaker
those who are Americans, settler-colonist Americans, landed on Native Americans being the ones haunting our houses and hotels and house cats. Is that last one? Is that a pet cemetery reference? Um, yeah. So the cat comes back. So in pet cemetery, they, um,
00:06:00
Speaker
Nope, at no point elsewhere did I say what happens in Pet Sematary. So Pet Sematary is about a family that moves to Maine. Right what you know. So they move to Maine and there is a road that goes in front of their house that has like a lot of trucks that go through. And so there is a Pet Sematary that the children made and that's why it's spelled incorrectly. Now I feel bad for being a pedant.
00:06:28
Speaker
to bury their pets that have been hit by the trucks. Early on, the cat gets hit by the truck. And then they bury it. They go beyond the pet cemetery to what they say is the place beyond. And so it's a
00:06:49
Speaker
magical place where it comes back to life, but it's not right. So the cat comes back and the cat just like, the cat reminds me a lot of like my neighbor's cat, Spice growing up, who like looks like this cat and also it was like rude AF. And so like, Spice.
00:07:04
Speaker
Spice because they're also with sugar. Oh, but because spice was a dark kitty cute like kind of a peppery kitty and Sugar was a white kitty. Gotcha. Yeah, but Yeah, he's peeing in God's shoes now I'm sorry. That was my that tangent was my fault. Please continue
00:07:26
Speaker
sort of what happens in Pet Sematary is their toddler is hit by a truck. And then he bear it cause he's like bereft. So he buries cause again, it's Stephen King. So there has to be a dead kid and a car, a car accident. This is something else that has to happen.
00:07:43
Speaker
It's, it's obligatory. Um, and so they bury the kid in this sort of like unholy, um, like ground. And so then the kid comes back, but is not right. It comes back. I know a pay with me and just like, Oh, spooky. So that's what happens in pet cemetery. So now you don't have to watch it. You're welcome. You don't have to. So houses and hotels and house cats.
00:08:09
Speaker
So within 10 years of the Amityville horror, the Indian burial ground, abbreviated as IBG, became kind of played out as a horror device and became kind of a joke, the go-to cheesy horror reference that creators can cleverly invoke. It comes up in Buffy, it comes up in Parks and Recreation, it came up in The Simpsons, it just sort of as kind of hokey.
00:08:37
Speaker
Um, but far beyond major movies and bestselling novels, the trope has wormed its way into the public consciousness and serves as the backdrop for personal ghost stories that people call into shows to tell, and then I listened to, um, or over the table at potlucks that I have personally attended back home.
00:08:54
Speaker
This is something that I've thought about often, and while I do like thinking about hauntings and the haunted, what's always stuck with me is how folks in the U.S. can be like, oh yeah, it's built on a Native American cemetery, as if A, that's not completely wack to just like casually mention it, and B, there's no thought given to like the genocide and like what actually had to happen between an indigenous community burying their dead somewhere and your suburb being on it.
00:09:20
Speaker
It's just sort of like glossing over like everything that happened in the middle. Obviously, I'm not the first person to have thought about this. And I'm certainly not like the smartest or most eloquent person to have written about this. So let's talk about some writers and historians and what they have to say about it. But first, Anna.
00:09:38
Speaker
Would you please read us a poem?
Philip Freneau's Poem Analysis
00:09:41
Speaker
Yes. In spite of all the learned have said, I still my old opinion keep. The posture that we give the dead points out the soul's eternal sleep. Not so the ancients of these lands, the Indian, when from life released, again is seated with his friends, and shares again the joyous feast.
00:09:59
Speaker
His imaged birds and painted bowl and venison for journey dressed bespeak the nature of the soul, activity that knows no rest. His bow for action ready bent and arrows with a head of stone can only mean that life is spent and not the old ideas gone. Thou stranger that shalt come this way, no fraud upon the dead commit. Observe the swelling turf and say they do not lie, but here they sit.
00:10:27
Speaker
Here still a lofty rock remains on which the curious eye may trace, now wasted half by wearing reins the fancies of a ruder race. Here still an aged elm aspires beneath whose far projecting shade and which the shepherd still admires the children of the forest played. There oft a restless Indian queen pale sheba with her braided hair, and many a barbarous form is seen to chide the man that lingers there.
00:10:54
Speaker
By midnight moons or moistening dews inhabit for the chase arrayed, the hunter still the deer pursues, the hunter and the deer a shade. And long shall timorous fancy see the painted chief and pointed spear, and reason self shall bow the knee to shadows and delusions here.
00:11:13
Speaker
There was a lot about that that I did not like. So that poem, The Indian Burying Ground, was written, as you might have been able to tell by the subject matter and the language used, was written in 1787 by Philip Freneau, an American poet, sometimes described as the poet of the American Revolution.
00:11:36
Speaker
Some might say that the Anglo-American preoccupation with sacred native lands began with J. Anson's book, The Amityville Horror, but Franot's work suggests it had already been peaked two centuries earlier.
Amityville Horror Myth Debunked
00:11:49
Speaker
Anson wrote what he described as a true story, which isn't inaccurate, in that it's the true story of a group of people that concocted a lie and later confessed to it.
00:11:57
Speaker
The true story of the Amityville Horror is that in the house in question, a young man murdered his entire family in 1974, the house was sold, and then a couple named George and Kathleen Lutz moved in. As historian Colin Dickey writes in Ghostland, an American history in haunted places,
00:12:15
Speaker
According to Anson, while George and Kathleen Lutz were trying to find out why their new home was so haunted, a member of the Amityville Historical Society revealed to them that the site of their home had once been used by the Shinnecock Indians as an enclosure for the sick, mad, and dying. These unfortunates were penned up until they died of exposure."
00:12:37
Speaker
Anson further claimed that, quote, the Shinnecock did not use this tract as a consecrated burial mound because they believed it to be infested with demons, end quote. But when paranormal researcher Hans Holzer and psychic medium Ethel Johnson Myers investigated the Amityville House, Johnson Myers channeled the spirit of a Shinnecock Indian chief, who told her the house stood on an ancient Indian burial ground.
00:13:00
Speaker
None of this has held up under any kind of scrutiny. The Shinnecock lived some 50 miles from Amityville, and according to writer Rick Osuna, who spent years unearthing the facts about Amityville, the nearest- Which is on Long Island in New York State. Okay.
00:13:17
Speaker
Thank you. That's just to let folks know. The nearest human remains that have been found to date are over a mile from the house. Nor would the Shinnecock or any other native people have treated their sick and dying in such a callous, brutal fashion. But then, the entire Amityville horror narrative was, it now seems likely, an elaborate hoax. In 1978, the Lutz's sued two clairvoyants and several writers working on alternative histories of the house, alleging invasion of privacy. In the course of the trial, William Weber
00:13:47
Speaker
Ronald DeFeo's defense attorney testified that the entire story had been concocted by him and the Lutzes and that he had provided the couple with salient details of the DeFeo murders to substantiate their account. End quote.
00:14:00
Speaker
Yeah, so I love this book, Ghostland. I love it, love it, love it. So there is an excerpt published in the New Republic that I'm including in our show notes, but I highly recommend the book, the overall book. Dickie is a great writer. And as I texted Anna, it's like having a conversation over a beer with a really smart person you just met. Remember when you could do that?
00:14:25
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It's so like, I say that because it's laid back, it's accessible, and it's really fascinating. Dickie uses hauntings in different places all over the United States, including West Virginia, as an entry point to how people have understood life, death, and navigating the two over time. Like major, major, major book club wreck, especially for American listeners.
00:14:50
Speaker
Not because we want to exclude anybody else, but because you might have a sense of where these places are and you might. Yeah. Well, and it also is something that will make you think differently about other aspects of perhaps the place you live or places that you visited.
00:15:06
Speaker
And so something else about Colin Dickey is he's part of the order of the good death. And we've mentioned people who are affiliated with that a couple of times. And so the order of the good death is like a, it's a nonprofit and it's like a death acceptance association. And so they talk about, they involve like academics and mortuary professionals and they want to talk about death as part of life.
00:15:35
Speaker
And so that kind of perspective comes through in Ghostland 2 of this is something that helps us understand the world that we're in and the world that we occupy and how our environment and our conditions and material circumstances affect that. So highly recommend.
00:15:57
Speaker
But...
Pet Sematary and Land Disputes
00:15:58
Speaker
It sounds great. Yeah. So he has more to say about the reality behind the fiction when he addresses Pet Sematary, which I very lovingly recapped for you above, saying, quote, At the time the book was published, it was quite topical, as scholar Renee Berglin points out. During the years that King was writing Pet Sematary, the state of Maine was involved in a massive legal battle against the Malasite, Penobscot... Penobscot, yeah.
00:16:26
Speaker
Penobscot? Penobscot Bay is up in Maine. Penobscot and Passamaquity. I got no help for you there. I think it's Passamaquity. I don't know where the emphasis goes. Passamaquity bans of the Wabanaki Confederacy. Beginning in 1972, the tribe sued Maine and the federal government over lands to which they were by federal law entitled, which amounted to 60% of the area of the state.
00:16:57
Speaker
Long inhabited by non-Native Americans in Maine, the land in dispute was home to over 350,000 people who would have needed resettlement had the tribes been successful. Once it became clear that their claim had merit, the government scrambled to find a settlement that wouldn't involve the displacement of large amounts of non-Indigenous residents, ultimately rewarding the three tribes more than $81 million.
00:17:21
Speaker
much of that earmark to purchase undeveloped land in Maine, along with other federal guarantees. All this history lies in the background of King's novel. Early on, Creed, the father of the protagonist, is exploring the wilderness that his backyard with his family and his neighbor, Judd Crandall, when his wife, Rachel, exclaims, honey, do we own this? A question that will become fraught as the novel progresses. Crandall answers Rachel.
00:17:52
Speaker
It's a part of the property. Oh yes. That's the only part of the main accent that matters.
00:18:02
Speaker
Though Lewis thinks to himself that this is not quite the same thing. Wait, who's Lewis? I'm sorry, Lewis Creed, yes. I'm sorry, I thought it was his first name, like Creed from The Office. No, no, no. The tension between holding the deed to a piece of property and true ownership of the land continues throughout the book. A theme.
00:18:28
Speaker
Judd repeatedly invokes the very real land disputes happening in Maine at the time, though in King's book it is the Micmac people fighting for the land in Maine, an odd distortion. The Micmac people were never part of the Wabanaki Confederacy and live primarily in Canada, not Maine. I wonder why he did that.
00:18:45
Speaker
That wasn't sarcasm. I just was like, huh. He says at one point, quote, now the Mic Max, the state of Maine and the government of the United States are arguing in court about who owns that land. Who does own it? No one really knows Lewis, not at all. Man, I should have been doing the main accent. Not anymore. Different people laid claim to it at one time or another, but no claim has ever stuck.
00:19:11
Speaker
end quote. Judd stresses that the power of the land predates the former owners saying quote, the Mic Max knew that place, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they made it what it was. The Mic Max weren't always here. Yeah.
00:19:23
Speaker
The narrative of the haunted Indian burial ground hides a certain anxiety about the land on which Americans, specifically white middle-class Americans, live. Embedded deep in the idea of homeownership, the holy grail of American middle-class life, is the idea that we don't, in fact, own the land that we've just bought.
00:19:42
Speaker
Time and time again, these stories, perfectly average, innocent American families are confronted by ghosts who have persevered for centuries, who remain vengeful for the damage done. Facing these ghosts and expelling them in many of these horror stories becomes a means of refighting the Indian wars of past centuries. That is very insightful. I really like that.
00:20:03
Speaker
Yeah. So you can read more of the excerpt online, but also ghostly. Yeah. So discussion of refighting the Indian Wars. And so for those who don't know, the Indian Wars is a kind of blanket term used to describe the like 400 years of
00:20:22
Speaker
genocide, yeah, of like military action taken against Native groups in what is now the U.S. and Canada. But talking about that is very relevant to something that Sharonda J. Brown wrote for Wear Your Voice magazine a couple of years ago when the movie Winchester, the house that ghosts built, starring Dame Helen Mirren, came out.
00:20:51
Speaker
If you're not, that's a movie I missed, but I am familiar with the Winchester House.
00:20:57
Speaker
Okay. Well, are you familiar with, um, Sharonda J. Brown? No. Okay. So if you're not like Anna listener, um, and you're enjoying this subject so far, I cannot recommend highly enough that you seek their writing out. Um, Brown writes a lot about, uh, media and culture through the lens of black feminism. Um, so they have some like really great essays about, um, sort of like,
00:21:21
Speaker
like monstrosity and like blackness and things that come up in like horror and sci-fi. So in Where Your Voice, the essay Winchester continues Hollywood's tradition of mining Native Americans suffering for ghost stories. I mean, that gets right to the point.
00:21:41
Speaker
Yup. Brown points out that in Winchester, the house that ghosts built, the owner of the Winchester Mystery House, which is in San Jose, California, right outside of San Jose, California, was plagued by the ghosts of those who died at the end of the Winchester rifle for which her family was responsible. So it's the eponymous Winchester. And so the Winchester rifle is known as the gun that won the West. Yikes.
00:22:08
Speaker
Yeah, so Brown says, quote, with this feature, Hollywood continues the tradition of sensationalizing and distorting the reality of Native American suffering in order to tell horror stories that center white characters.
00:22:21
Speaker
This is the same is true of narratives with black ghosts that use racialized US chattel slavery and antebellum violences. Rarely are the lives or deaths of black and native people explored in horror films unless they are done so in this way. These racialized violences are used as nothing more than plot devices rather than as a means to interrogate and condemn the white supremacy and colonialism that necessitates them.
00:22:45
Speaker
End quote. See also, Stephen King. They go on to cite native writer, Terry Jean, author of the essay, Another Indian Burial Ground, Please.
Karma and Guilt in Ghost Narratives
00:22:57
Speaker
So that was the intonation was good.
00:23:01
Speaker
Yeah. Cause it ends with an ellipsis. Um, so try as I might, I cannot find a working link to the full essay. It seems to have been published. Um, if not published, definitely made available in a Yahoo group. Oh, okay. And so I, I can't access it restricted, but yeah. So, um, if anybody does have a copy or cause everywhere I've seen that that sites, it links to that Yahoo page and you can't get to it. And it might not exist anymore.
00:23:30
Speaker
If you do have a copy of it, please send it to us, thedirtpodcastatgmail.com. So I will, however, read Brown's quote from it, which I've seen other people quote this passage. So Brown contextualizes it saying,
00:23:47
Speaker
In this piece, Jean presents five theories about why it had persisted for so many years, including the, quote, bad Indian, end quote, stereotype that reifies the, quote, savage mythos and the white fear of perceived Native American mysticism. Lastly, there is theory five. So she's she's got like her and now and now it's quoting this.
00:24:09
Speaker
Yeah, so there are four others and then the big one is theory five. This is quoting from Terry Jean or perhaps Terry Jean, I'm not sure. Quote, karma and guilt. Americans know that atrocities were committed and hundreds of nations were obliterated or nearly obliterated. Retribution is feared and some people may believe that the ghosts of those who died due to this nation's invasion and European takeover will someday come back to get their revenge. End quote.
00:24:39
Speaker
And so when we come back from the break, Anna's going to tell us about some other contemporary native voices who have weighed in on the IBG, the Indian burial ground trope and its impact.
00:24:53
Speaker
We're back! Writer and comedian Jana Schmeding tackles the IVG in a medium essay, which is to say an essay on the site medium, not referring to its length. Bury My Guilt in an Indian Burial Ground, which she penned after subjecting herself to a couple episodes of the Netflix series, Hounted. The full article is linked in the show notes, and we highly recommend you read it because she's both funny and informative.
00:25:19
Speaker
Oh, our favorite combination. Yeah. And in it, she says, quote, wow, this is a long quote. It's great. Yeah. I'm excited, but whoa. I know it is like a paragraph, but it's also like a chunk of text, but it's great. Here we go.
00:25:36
Speaker
Quote, in the case of the Indian burial ground trope, the threat of hauntings from pissed off Native American ghosts works to victimize white homeowners to spook the settler colonial guilt right out of them, sometimes with the helpful prayers and sage burning, see our episode on warding off evil, of a white psychic medium, parentheses, our role, close parentheses.
00:26:00
Speaker
When I see the IBG trope used, it brings me back to the image of white settlers in the era of Manifest Destiny and in Westerns. These hapless victims are depicted as frightened families vulnerable to the untamed landscape and swarms of wild savages ever encroaching on their rightful homesteads. And so are the terrified homeowners of the 1970s and 80s horror flicks invaded by an evil unknown. Could it be that this pristine new property we just acquired is tainted by vexed spirits of those who came before?
00:26:30
Speaker
There was definitely a prevalent level of white guilt relative to native issues at this time. As an urban native child of the 1980s, I think back upon the ways in which the small community of inter-tribal indigenous people living off of reservations in Oregon were together going through the process of post-AIM community organizing with an emphasis on traditional practices and education. Post-AIM, post-American Indian movement. It was a civil rights movement.
00:26:57
Speaker
Oh, yeah, that group took over Alcatraz. That's a really cool story. My own grandparents and parents worked very diligently within their local governments and the school districts to educate the populace about native existence and ways of life. All the while, I thought you were still like, and I was like, oh my God, they did. And then I was like, no, you're reading. No, my parents and grandparents are great, but they did not do this.
00:27:25
Speaker
all the while raising their family to speak proudly about our heritage. Yeah, not my heritage. I do not claim anything of that nature. And to embody the values and traditions of our indigeneity. They battled the yearly onslaught of pilgrim Indian pageants at our schools, all with an understanding that reservation living still came with exceptional disadvantages. The removal of a people from their land proving to be an injustice that haunted one generation after another.
00:27:55
Speaker
Indeed, one of the most baffling parts of the Indian burial ground philosophy in TV and film is the ridiculous way in which the haunting manifests. It never appears as the ghost of an actual Native person. Can you imagine? No, writers would never take it that far. It almost always appears as a poltergeist, a psychotic break, or a possession.
00:28:13
Speaker
For the sake of research, I continued to watch episode 2 of Haunted, and spoiler alert, the storyteller regales us with disturbing accounts of her father, a psychopath and serial murderer, being possessed with what she believes to be a demonic spirit. The Indian burial ground doesn't even come up again in the episode.
00:28:31
Speaker
Are we to believe then that the literal foundation of this woman's childhood home in rural upstate New York disturbed the ancient Anadanga or the Oneida spirits so much that they took time away from ancestoring to devilishly possess this already disturbed man, taking the form of what is very clearly a demon from Roman Catholic lore?
Jana Schmeding's Critique
00:28:51
Speaker
Whatever, I'm confused. All I know, from the point of view of one Lakota native who enjoyed The Shining as much as you did but with one eyebrow raised, is that the only ghost stories I've ever heard from my own people are that of ancestors who carry wisdom, who aim to protect, who are considered sacred and powerful, and whose manifestations as malevolent only occur when they're not talked about.
00:29:12
Speaker
when their story isn't told. There's a moral here that I hope you're grasping. When someone tells you that their house is built on an Indian burial ground and it makes the hair stand up on your arms, ask yourself, what am I really afraid of? Am I afraid of indigenous people because of pop culture's portrayal of them as unholy spurned beasts of the underworld? Or am I afraid of my own willful ignorance of settler colonialism and modern native issues? Am I afraid that native stories haven't actually been told?
00:29:41
Speaker
I'll go ahead and assume it's a mix of all. But until native filmmakers and television writers get a chance to scare the shit out of mainstream audiences with our own stories, we're all stuck with supernatural microaggressions and embarrassingly coded displays of white guilt.
00:29:56
Speaker
end quote. This extends beyond stories of just hauntings, as comes through in the following excerpts from Horror Older Than America, colon, whitewashing native tales for a mass market audience by TJ Tranchel for Northwest Public Broadcasting. Quote, monster stories may hold very different associations in native stories,
00:30:16
Speaker
end quote, said Tiffany Midge, a Moscow, Idaho poet and Standing Rock Sioux member, quote, In some traditions, the different monsters are deities, but there's certainly a great many so-called horror elements to a great many different native legends. But imposing Western interpretations on them flattens and diminishes them to some extent, end quote.
00:30:34
Speaker
Even Stephen King, perhaps the most mainstream writer of horror fiction, used the desecration of sacred lands and the subsequent burial ground cliche as the site of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining and as the place Lewis Creed—there's the first name—as the place Lewis Creed buries his son Gage in Pet Sematary. But in the later book, King added another native-based aspect, the Wendigo, which we talked about last year for Spooktober—oh wait, was that year one or was that last year?
00:31:04
Speaker
I think it was year one. I think it was our first year. That was the first time that I was like, I'm going to tell a scary story. And then I'm like, oh no. The spook isn't what I thought it was. Yeah. Wendigo stories appear in several places throughout North America and are often warnings against cannibalism. In some stories, the Wendigo is even responsible for wiping out the Donner party in 1846 as they were stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains and resorted to eating the flesh of their dead.
00:31:31
Speaker
The relationship between flesh-eating monsters and natives has recently taken on a new aspect. In comparing attitudes seen in the show The Walking Dead and attitudes toward the native experience, scholar Kutcher Reisling Baldy asked the question, can we come back from this? In her 2014 article, Why I Teach the Walking Dead in My Native Studies Class. Let me take that class.
00:31:54
Speaker
She compares the zombie apocalypse scenario to the real-world realities faced by indigenous people during the California Gold Rush and Indian hunting sessions. And she wrote, quote, What those who survived experienced was both the apocalypse and post-apocalypse. It was nothing short of zombies running around trying to kill them. End quote.
00:32:17
Speaker
Like the zombie hordes of the Walking Dead, Riesling Baldy points out that the people trying to kill natives and desecrate their lands weren't necessarily strangers. She writes, quote, the atrocities of genocide during this period of time were not committed by monsters. They were committed by people, by neighbors, by fathers, sons, mothers and daughters. End quote.
00:32:37
Speaker
Riesling Baldi is one of a handful of native scholars and artists approaching the horror genre. Writers such as Stephen Graham Jones and Owl Going Back are from native backgrounds and have used the stories to influence their work. While not a horror writer, Midge also has an interest in the genre, saying, quote, I can't 100 percent say that these movies are based on any actual stories originating in native communities, but they totally capture a lot of the general idea with regards to ghosts and visitations.
00:33:05
Speaker
And Midge cites the films Imprint and Older Than America as native-driven and produced films that deal not only with horror tropes, but also the realities of native issues such as life on reservations and the history of boarding school traumas.
Comparing Memorial Exhibits
00:33:20
Speaker
Knowing how these stories entered Western thought and then into the tales of horror is important too.
00:33:25
Speaker
And she writes, quote, if you visit the Smithsonian American Indian Museum, there's a room of moccasins on display, their art, beauty, celebratory relics from the 19th century. Where'd they originate, though? I see it as funeral and objects of genocide, but of course they're not displayed as such, end quote. Comparing the atrocities and monsters of different people and times remains a complicated topic, Mitch said.
00:33:49
Speaker
Quote, and then if one visits the Holocaust Museum in DC, there's this huge plexiglass box structure full of shoes taken from the concentration camps. That message is 100% clear, Midge says. It's such a disparate portrait, isn't it? That really is, and it's something that I've never thought about, but that's a gut punch of an image. So let's take one more break, and then when we're back, we will wrap up with some final examples of indigenous stories on the screen.
00:34:19
Speaker
All right. We're back. And I know this week is like kind of dense. It's like very heady. It's a heady topic. Um, but I can't, I just, I can't help, but like go long with this. No, it's great. This is, this is really, really interesting stuff in it. Yeah. I'm glad we're doing this. Yeah. And so this topic is at the intersection of a few things that I personally love to think about and learn about. Um, and as I was coming up with, with Spooktober topics, you know, like for the past four months, um,
00:34:47
Speaker
I knew this was something that I wanted to talk about. And there are still two questions that I asked as I prepared the script that I've not touched on yet. And those are, is this just a thing in the Americas? And where might I find some indigenous voices in horror? So it's something that is recognized in, and so it's just, we can say American in the more like general sense,
00:35:14
Speaker
Like, so it's in like the Americas, like this idea of like. Disturbing sacred ground. Sacred then become like desecrated lands that haunts you. And so I was trying to think of examples of like, where else this might be a case? Like, is this something that we've exported? And so something that I found when I was looking is I found a movie from 1988
00:35:44
Speaker
It's an Australian movie and it's called Kataicha, which we have talked about. We have. Kataicha before. I remember. Another Spooktober. Yeah. And so the alternate, like the alternative name, why did I say it like that? The alternative
00:36:02
Speaker
The alternative nami. Yeah. So it was also marketed as, I think, stones of death, because I guess Kadaita didn't have a lot of currency for folks outside of Australia. But you can find it on YouTube, so you don't have to pay anyone to watch it.
00:36:24
Speaker
which like there are times that I want to make sure that like an artist is compensated, but also I found it on YouTube and it's like this like really cool channel that's like full of like B movies. Oh fun. Not B movie, but B movies. Not the Jerry Seinfeld item. Yeah. So, um,
00:36:47
Speaker
It's so yeah, so kadaicha is about a So it's also I think I had texted you about this I was like remember the days when like real estate developers were the villains He did I thought you were talking about the movie now. I can't remember what it's called. Never mind that Nathan Lane movie It's like Mouse Hunt or something
00:37:09
Speaker
Do you know what I'm talking about? Where he's like trying to sell this house and a mouse keeps foiling all his plans through increasingly elaborate scenarios. And he just like hurts himself. Is this a movie based on the board game? I don't know. Mouse trap? I think it might be. Is it mouse trap? I don't know. He gets hurt repeatedly in ways that suggest it's based on a board game. This sounds like the game mouse trap. I mean, I know I didn't hallucinate this.
00:37:36
Speaker
Okay. I don't know. But, Kataicha, 1988. So, it's a movie about a group of teens that dies.
00:37:49
Speaker
That's it, that's the movie. So it's based in, so it takes place in a fictional suburb of Sydney where there was a planned subdivision and these like, you know, sexy teens. I don't, I don't know, I'm assuming that's what they're- Bruce and Sheila, yep. No, they're all named like Tamsin.
00:38:22
Speaker
I'm sorry to our Australian listeners, but you do know Tamsins and Lockies. They have these dreams in which they see shadowy figures and then there's a skull face.
00:38:37
Speaker
And then they push a crystal into their hands and they wake up and there's a cadaisha stone next to them. And so like that is like, and so one by one, they are marked for death. And so they find out that they find out from the only Aboriginal Australian in the movie who like
00:38:58
Speaker
man, what's his name? Steve something. But he had like a 70 year career, like an insane film career. Yeah, a career of being the only Aboriginal Australian in white people movies. I did get that sense. I did get that sense, but also he was in some like iconic Australian films. He warns, so the smart girl, like the, you know, the final one goes and like, he like confronts her and she goes to her dad and was like,
00:39:27
Speaker
You didn't tell me that it was on a burial ground. And so what it was, was this was built on the site of a massacre of young Aboriginal Australians. And so that's why they're like taking out the teens. And so I got a quote from the real estate villain. Take notice of that crowd. This is when she says like,
00:39:52
Speaker
But there were people that didn't want this to happen. And they were like- This massacre, you mean? No, no, no. Sorry. There were people who were protesting the construction of the suburb, saying that this was like- Sacred land. Sacred land. And he says, take notice of that crowd and every piece of dirt in this country is a sacred site of some kind. Which is a great example of the
00:40:20
Speaker
them accidentally getting it right. It's like, yes. Yeah, it is. But it was really interesting to see a like the like classic Indian burial ground in the Australian context, which there are a lot of parallels. And so it's so it was really interesting to see like, like white middle class anxiety about being like on
00:40:46
Speaker
about retribution for. And so I'm not saying I recommend it.
00:40:52
Speaker
Um, but also I'm really interested if like, if folks can think of other examples. Yeah. Again, the dirt podcast at gml.com. We really do like to hear from listeners. Yeah. And so I would also like to hear like other contexts where there would be parallels in this because it's, it's, it's a big part of sort of the, the canon of how many movies did you watch for this episode? I watched a lot of movies for this episode. Okay.
00:41:19
Speaker
How many movies have we talked about? Fair. So, if we've got some horror nerds listening, which I think that we do, you probably also love, like I do, but one of the great things about the genre is that it gives the artist a chance to really say something or to push back or to make a scathing critique of some force or entity in real life. A lot of times,
00:41:44
Speaker
whether it's intentional or unintentional, horror says a lot about what we are afraid of and like how we view ourselves and sort of our discomfort if the world around us. So through horror, we can confront our fears, we can identify villains, and we can explore what might be. So Ariel Smith is a Nehiya Jewish artist and writer who tackled the subject of horror in indigenous cinema for the online magazine Offscreen.
00:42:14
Speaker
opening her essay with, quote,
00:42:18
Speaker
By providing dominant culture audiences with their primary source for visual representation of indigenous peoples, Hollywood narrative cinema has long informed white viewers' notions of the Aboriginal other. Arguably, the American Western has produced some of the most obvious examples of pan-Indian stereotypes. However, images of Indians created for the benefit of colonial gaze are hyper-visual within other types of genre cinema, such as horror films.
00:42:45
Speaker
Specifically, North American horror films belonging to the supernatural subgenre have made frequent use of the popular ancient burial ground convention. In what follows, I will address what I see as a paradoxical nature of the burial ground trope and will also discuss the ways in which indigenous filmmakers such as Jeff Barnaby have used the horror genre to examine the true horrors of colonization and violence against indigenous women's bodies."
Indigenous Filmmakers and Horror
00:43:13
Speaker
So in the rest of this essay, as well as in a few others, I'll include in the show notes. So we don't spend like another hour with me being like, and then, and then there's this one. And then there's this person who does this. Um, there are several, several, several, several films and filmmakers who work reframes and responds to colonial violence and kind of re
00:43:35
Speaker
like seizes the narrative and takes control of it again. And thanks to Ariel Smith, I am now familiar with the work of Jeff Barnaby, who she mentions above. And his second movie, Blood Quantum. That is a cool title. I don't know anything about the movie, but it's just really cool. So are you familiar with like the concept of blood quantum? Nope. So Blood Quantum deals with the like minimum
00:44:05
Speaker
blood that you have that would that in this case would make you indigenous. Oh, okay. So blood in the sense of heredity. Yeah. Okay. And blood quantum also is something that applies to like, like blackness. And really what it is is like,
00:44:22
Speaker
not whiteness. Right. I understand the subtext. I thought it might have something to do with like quantum traveling, but no different. No, this is horror. Not sci-fi. So blood quantum came out this year and it's on shutter. So in shutter is like a streaming service. That's like all like horror stuff. Shutter with two D's, not like the thing you put over your windows. Yeah.
00:44:48
Speaker
not. Yeah. So, um, and you know, if,
00:44:56
Speaker
I don't know. Shutter is available. It's something that is... You can stream it. And you can also, if you don't have cash laying around, you can do a trial and watch Blood Quantum. Hey, they're not a sponsor. Go do that trial. Then click cancel. Yeah. People on Amazon, highly rated except for the people who think it's racist against white people.
00:45:19
Speaker
So, huh, it's great. You love to see it. To get a sense of why they might be feeling this way. Let me read a description of it from the opening of an interview Seventh Row did with Barnaby. They also did like a podcast to like talk about his work more. Oh, cool. Yeah. About like his, his overall work, not just this one. Can we look to the, to that episode on the show notes? Already is. Oh yeah. So.
00:45:46
Speaker
This interview opens with, quote, How do you get young people to watch the films of Canadian indigenous documentarian, Alanis Obamsewin? For Jeff Barnaby, the answer is to hook them with a genre film that works as an alternative history to the one recounted in Obamsewin's films, shot largely in the Restiguish Reserve,
00:46:06
Speaker
Blood Quantum repeatedly evoked Obama-Sewin's documentary Incident at Restagush, 1984, about when settler police invaded the reserve to limit their fishing rights without ever placing limitations on commercial fishing. Appropriately, Blood Quantum opens with a dead fish coming back to life, loggerring the zombie apocalypse and harkening back to this important event in Micmac history. Micmac, who are a real people,
00:46:34
Speaker
Not in Maine. No, they're super not in Maine. As an indigenous and specifically Mi'kmaq filmmaker, Barnaby's zombie story is filtered through a native perspective. In this film, if you have blood quantum and are thus indigenous, you are immune to zombification. Barnaby's largely indigenous cast of characters are thus not so much afraid of zombies as they are afraid of white people who turn into them and are trying to invade their safe haven.
00:47:00
Speaker
It's a blunt force metaphor for colonialism. They keep coming and coming to destroy you, forever outnumbering you, until they eat your brains. But it's a solid and original one. In a way, blood quantum allows Barnaby to pose the question, what would have happened at Restogush if we didn't let white police in?
00:47:18
Speaker
or perhaps more accurately, if we didn't let the colonizers in centuries ago, by making Indigenous people immune, they're empowered, but they still have to face this enormous suffocating force. That's a cool approach. Isn't that awesome? It's really cool.
00:47:34
Speaker
So even if you're not a zombie movie fan, like I'm not a zombie person, like there's something that I like actually am scared of. Or you don't have the tummy for like gory horror. It is important to think about how we create and consume stories that involve other people, especially those who have largely been excluded from the process of filmmaking. That's one of the reasons I'm so glad that you've done this, because now I can think about these things without having to watch movies that scare me. Yeah.
00:48:04
Speaker
And so in that spirit, I have a second book club recommendation for the week. Clear your schedules, folks. You have a lot of visual media to consume. And this one is a book entitled Reservation Realism, R-E-E.
00:48:22
Speaker
L-I-S-M, Red-Facing Visual Sovereignty and Representations of Native Americans in Film. And that's by Michelle H. Raheia, and it's published by the University of Nebraska Press. And so I will use the, I'll have the WorldCat link to that in there. And so that one, if you're not so into the spooky and you just kind of come along with me for the month, highly recommended.
00:48:51
Speaker
Awesome. Thank you for putting this together, but it was really, really good. This was fun. Yeah. I mean, again, this is something that I really enjoy thinking about. Yeah, it was, I don't know the right adjective for it, but I enjoyed the journey.
00:49:10
Speaker
And with that, we leave you for another week with something to mull over, like your cider, as you start your Halloween movie marathons. We will be back in your ears next Monday with more of the season's greetings. And if that's not enough, check out Spooktobers from years past, which you can find on Apple's podcast, which you can bob for on Apple's podcasts. Oh my gosh. If that's not enough, check out Spooktobers.
00:49:41
Speaker
If that's not enough, check out Spooktobers from years past, which you can find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you'd like to listen. Yeah, and, as we suggested above, you can leave us a review on Apple Podcasts if you haven't, and you might hear it at the top of the show. And you can also find us on social media, on Facebook, we're the Dirt Podcast, on Twitter, we're at Dirt Podcast, and on the Gram, the IG,
00:50:10
Speaker
You're so hip. Insta. No, I'm not. I know. No, I'm not. We are at The Dirt Pod. We are. And if you want to see that all smushed together in one place on the internet, you can head over to thedirtpod.com where you can also find sweet, sweet merch like mugs and pins and shirts and hats. And you can find the button that lets you sponsor an episode on the topic of your choosing. Yeah. And more. Thank you, everyone. And more. Yeah. And more.
00:50:36
Speaker
And so we'll be back next week with more and the rest of the month it's going to get increasingly scary. Yep.
00:50:42
Speaker
Strap in. Hold onto your pumpkins. How can you resent Jurassic Park and still make a riff off of hold onto your butts? Because hold onto your butts is inherently funny and classic. And I can appreciate funny moments from a script without necessarily loving the whole movie that I was bullied into watching as a grown up human being.
00:51:08
Speaker
Thanks, everybody. We love you. Goodbye. Goodbye.
00:51:23
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.