More Than Horror, Other Than Fantasy: Stephen Graham Jones, Tanya Tagaq, and Decolonial Genre Fiction

In this project, I turn to Chadwick Allen’s (Chickasaw ancestry) trans-Indigenous methodology to consider how two Indigenous North American authors move within Euro-Western genre, or move beyond it altogether, in making fictive texts that advance decoloniality and Indigenous artistic sovereignty. First, I read Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians as a novel that adopts the exterior form of the mainstream slasher genre only to destabilize and indigenize the genre’s interior logic—its standard characters, narrative arcs, and tropes. By indigenizing this literary form, Jones not only undermines its conventions but also shows how it is founded on and perpetuates settler violence, how it serves as an optics for reading settler expansionism in the U.S. as slasher horror, and how it resonates with narratives that authorized the killing of Indigenous peoples as part of the settler project. Next, I turn to Tanya Tagaq’s written text Split Tooth and the music video for her track “Colonizer.” In the ways these texts portray kinship between Indigenous peoples and the other-than-human world, they function as what Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) calls Indigenous wonderworks. Read together, as what I call a trans-media Indigenous wonderwork, they support one another in bolstering Tagaq’s message of decoloniality and Indigenous artistic sovereignty. Allen’s trans-Indigenous methodology shows that, when juxtaposed—or read close together—Jones’s and Tagaq’s texts ultimately act as lenses or tools for interpreting Indigenous cultural production that works within and beyond mainstream Euro-Western genres.