Pandemic, the next
The "opening up of the West" - for white America it is a heroically glorified success story, for the indigenous population it is a trauma. A trauma that is closely linked to deadly epidemics. In Europe and the USA, the corona pandemic was compared to the medieval plague and the Spanish flu - the great death of the Native Americans was rarely thought of. This gap in memory is now revealed by a horror film of all things. "Nobody wants to fully acknowledge their colonial past," says director Jeff Barnaby in a Skype interview from his home in Quebec. "Epidemics have helped determine how we Native Americans live today." 90 percent of the indigenous people lost their lives due to imported diseases
Barnaby grew up on a reservation of the Mi'kmaq people in the Canadian province of Quebec and has just landed a surprise success in Canada with his horror film "Blood Quantum". It is not only the first film to tell a zombie apocalypse from the perspective of the North American natives, but also the first whose main characters are mainly Native Americans or members of the Canadian First Nations. The starting point is classic B-movie horror. But Barnaby has added a sociopolitical twist: In his film, the natives are the only ones immune to the zombie bite. Only the white "townies" become infected and greedily eat everything that gets in their way.
It is estimated that in the first 150 years after the arrival of white settlers, up to 90 percent of Native Americans lost their lives to diseases such as measles, smallpox, influenza, or typhus. The introduced diseases contributed to that the colonial rulers were able to conquer the country so quicklyLike a vanguard, the viruses and bacteria were often on site even faster than the settlers and traders themselves. This was one of the reasons why the newcomers were able to justify their land theft by saying that they were dealing with an "empty land" or an "unproductive desert". Quite a few even claimed that the extermination of the Native Americans was "God's will" because the whites were more or less spared.
Each new wave of disease was followed by hunger, flight and bitter fights for resources. Numbers cannot depict the horror and misery so impressively. A horror film, on the other hand, can. "They died like miserable sheep," wrote a British governor in the 1630s after a smallpox epidemic broke out in the colony of Plymouth. "When they turn over, a whole side peels off at once, and they are one single blood-crusted wound." The Natives called smallpox the "rotting face."
Despite a right to health care guaranteed in exchange for land rights, the Natives have never received the same medical care as the white population - to this day, as the Corona pandemic shows. Hardly any minority is as defenseless against the virus as the indigenous population. Poverty and chronic undersupply still prevail in most reservations in America and Canada. There are too few doctors and too little education. Often the residents do not even have clean running water to wash their hands regularly. When the president was still denying the virus, the tribes were already declaring a state of emergency
The Navajo Nation has been hit particularly hard. Spread across three states, it is the largest reservation in America and also the place where the virus has struck hardest. 350 Navajos have died from the virus. This means the death rate is twice as high as in New York. "We are still suffering from the neglect and ignorance of minorities that have shaped Western culture for 500 years," says Barnaby, whose wife grew up in Navajo territory. "In that sense, the epidemic was no surprise to us."
And that is also one of the bitterly ironic messages of his film: Those who have survived the epidemics, the exclusion, the poverty, the violence and the forced assimilation can also survive such an absurdly brutal test as the zombie apocalypse. The immunity of the indigenous people in "Blood Quantum" results in a shift in power that attempts to rewrite history once again: those who were once so decimated by disease that a fight for independence was unsuccessful are now the ones who must save humanity from extinction by an invasive, exponentially growing threat.
This gesture of self-protection and self-empowerment has parallels in reality in the Corona crisis: Because they did not trust the government, many communities acted proactively. While Donald Trump was still casting doubt on the dangers of the coronavirus, 53 of the 574 officially recognized tribes in the USA had already declared a state of emergency. 39 sealed off their reservations completely or imposed curfews, including the Sioux in South Dakota, who set up checkpoints on their own initiative - against the will of the governor, who declared the roadblocks illegal.
Barnaby hopes that his film, which will be released on DVD in Germany in autumn, can help to raise awareness of the situation of the Natives. "The virus helps viewers understand even better what it means to live in constant fear like we do."
This text was published under the license CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0-DE. The photos may not be used.