Blood Quantum, whilst not very favorable for a lot of IMDB critics with a 5.6/10 rating and a 90% of Rotten Tomato rating, it is still worth watching in my opinion due to its insights. Despite all its flaws, lackluster performance, the zombie film offers much as a historical fictitious film.
Blood Quantum, directed by Indigenous director, Jeff Barnaby whobelongs to the Mi’kmaq people, started this project as he wished to create a horror film purely from an Indigenous standpoint but for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people as Jeff Barnaby remarked:
“It’s meant to give you a complete total power shift. If you’re a non-Native person in that audience, looking at that, you don’t get it. Because you don’t really know the history.”
For him, he wanted to make a film which represented a shift in the dynamics between the white colonizer and the Indigenous people.
The title Blood Quantum has a very historical meaning and value, in reference to Blood Quantum policies adopted by the United States and Canada to evaluate who can enter and be given tribal status/citizenship and who cannot be. The purpose for this policy is one used to diminish the sovereignty of Indigenous tribes under US/Canadian governmental policy. But also, a way of constructing a racially essentialist ideal to benefit the settler society so that in the hopes through new policy, they may “dilute” the blood of Indigenous people, and thus any legal obligation to protect these tribes.
Jeff Barnaby literally and figuratively flips the script of this power dynamic between settler and the Indigenous through this alternative historical film. The premise of Blood Quantum, is that due to their Indigenity, their blood, Indigenous people are protected from being infected by the zombie virus. But, to quote the movie, “immune to the plague doesn’t mean immune to being eaten alive.” So, while their very blood protected them, they still saw it necessary to enact actual actions to protect themselves such as creating barriers and security to ward off non-Indigenous people who may be at risk of infecting others within their own communities and camps.
Through this immunity however, Indigenous people were given power over their settlers. While Indigenous people were immune, white people were infected. A sort of jab at the colonizers for bringing in their infections and diseases from Europe and infecting the Indigenous populations of the Americas.
What is also quite fascinating is how Jeff Barnaby presents his understanding of survivance within the reservations. Often, as outsiders to Indigenous communities, we are given conceptions of reservations as horribly managed in decrepit conditions due to governmental policy and unequal reallocation of resources. Within Blood Quantum, reservations are shaped into centers of resistance and survival against the zombie infection and a warding off of their settlers to protect themselves.
While overall, I must say that the film is pretty enjoyable from an alternative historical perspective, there are some problematics (other than the horrible acting and writing). While it is literally and figuratively a “flipping of the script”, Jeff Barnaby is under a paradox when he tries to shift the power dynamics. In shifting these power dynamics regarding the idea of blood quantum, Jeff Barnaby still manages to reinforce this racial essentialism of seeing Indigeneity as something innate and genetic rather one that is historically and materially defined by centuries of oppression and resistance. I’d give it a 85% rotten tomato rating to be honest.
This movie sounds really interesting, I did not know that there were any horror genre films out there that would tie in with topics from this class, so I’ll have to get around to watching it in the near future since I’m always up for a zombie horror movie. I think turning the tables on the idea of blood quantum makes for a great movie concept, and I will have to look out for points in your analysis such as the paradox regarding power dynamics to see what you mean in context.
I like how you talked about the policies adopted by the US and Canada and how it diminished the sovereignty of Indigenous tribes and constructed a racially essentialist ideal to benefit settler society.