ABSTRACT
Chapter 4, “The Dead Can’t Dance and Blood Quantum: Contrasting Indigenous Visions of the Zombie Apocalypse,” examines human consumption by reconfiguring the comic eco-hero and evolutionary narrative through readings of the indigenous comic zombie film and focusing on two divergent examples nearly a decade apart: Rod Pocowatchit’s The Dead Can’t Dance (2010) and Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum (2019). Although varied in their sub-genres, both The Dead Can’t Dance and Blood Quantum begin with the same question: What if a zombie virus infected everyone but Native people? In The Dead Can’t Dance, Pocowatchit takes a comic approach to the question, but in Blood Quantum, Jeff Barnaby chooses a more tragic, if sometimes darkly comic, response. The films aptly illustrate conflicts between comic and tragic eco-hero types and evolutionary narratives. But they also complicate these evolutionary visions by building them on the backs of environmental and colonial history. Although Blood Quantum illustrates a tragic eco-narrative, in the eco-comedy The Dead Can’t Dance, comic eco-heroes promote communal rather than individual pioneering exploitation of others and their environment, showcasing Joseph Meeker’s assertion that “it is the community itself that really matters” (Meeker 163). With their comic answers to colonial exploitation, the films also condemn environmental injustice and racism.
