There are a couple of indie horror games about 'night driving.' I can't really remember any of their names right now but one has you as a delivery person on a bike who encounters (and is chased by) a ghost; one starts as a night driving game but turns into a game about being stuck in a hotel room with a stalker fucking with you; and one is about driving from place to place at night trying to solve a mystery of some kind without being got by the perpetrators.
Something that is scary and commonplace in real life but few stories cover is night driving. It is pitch black and you're going down dark and desolate roads in the middle of nowhere, and god help you if you need to stop or if your car breaks down. Throw in a fast-moving monster that never gives up and you have a great and simple horror story right there. I'm amazed there hasn't been a game or a film about this concept.
Interesting, because "driving at night and/or down isolated roads" is a very common ghost story premise, in urban legends, creepypasta and even in literary ghost stories like those of Robert Aickman. But then, ghost stories are not quite the same thing as what's usually meant by horror in a film context — cinematic horror tends to imply thriller!
There are a couple of indie horror games about 'night driving.' I can't really remember any of their names right now but one has you as a delivery person on a bike who encounters (and is chased by) a ghost; one starts as a night driving game but turns into a game about being stuck in a hotel room with a stalker fucking with you; and one is about driving from place to place at night trying to solve a mystery of some kind without being got by the perpetrators.
Found 'em. The first one I mentioned is called Burger & Frights, the second one is part of a horror anthology game called Fears to Fathom (and the night driving segment is much shorter than I remembered), and the third is called Beware.
Runs into Leila Hann's paradox of urban fantasy, if the supernatural beings and forces of native mythologies actually exist, how come the history of their human allies played out the way it did?
You know, this is something that always hurts my suspension of disbelief in orientalist fantasy type stories (and to an extent, in urban fantasy in general). Western civilizations are typically portrayed as true to life, while traditional eastern, African, and native American ones are full of magic and powerful ancient secrets. And yet, despite this, the dynamic between these societies is exactly the same as IRL: colonizer and colonized. If native societies have magic and Europeans don't, though, how are the latter able to conquer them so easily? Why didn't the Asiatic people the old man learned necromancy from call upon their dead to counsel them in how to defeat the invaders? Why don't Native American medicine men unleash plagues or other curses against the settlers? Why don't Egyptians unleash the undead lurking in the pyramids against the armies of Napoleon? Even if Europeans have a secret cabal of wizards of their own, I'd at least expect magic to be something of an equalizer. And even if the magic isn't powerful or reliable enough to make a real difference, I'd STILL expect knowledge of it to become commonplace as the desperate natives use every trick they have.
The functional, offensive nature of the Old Man's power brings me back to my problems with urban fantasy. Whatever foreign land it was the Old Man got his power from, why didn't the locals use these highly deadly ghost warriors against the British? Why didn't their Terrible Old Men do the same thing to the invaders that this one did to the robbers? Even if they still lost, it should have made headlines. Gotten international attention. Changed the appearance and historical course of the setting.
The best examples of nativist urban fantasy horror are those that deliberately subvert this. Two examples:
Earthdivers: Kill Columbus by Stephen Graham Jones
In the near future, a group of native American activists have acquired a time machine and sent one of their number, Ted, back in time to attempt to change history. Then everything changes when Black Phillip shows up. Initially, he seemed to be a goat brought along by the Mayflower colonists with other livestock. Then, without any prior warning, when alone with a captured and restrained Ted whose mission seems on the brink of failing, he starts talking and undergoing a Cronenberg-tier transformation into something capable of cutting the ropes. There are multiple in-universe theories as to what he actually is:
Another time traveler, from further down the timeline, with drastically better technology. With worrying implications about what happened to humanity and that he might be trying to change history in favor of whatever he is.
Some kind of langolier/hound of tindalos style time monster.
A hallucination caused by Ted's recent head injury and dehydration, but then what broke the rope?
Or, exactly what he's claiming to be, Satan in the personal corrupter and patron of witches sense that the puritans all around him would've seen him as. And he's helping, because he wants to prevent the spread of Christian evangelicalism to the Americas and corrupt Ted from his well-intentioned goal to increasingly murderous means, sinking ships with anachronistic explosives, recreating the corpses-as-floats raft from Watchmen, finally killing the first actual native Americans he encounters in a desperate attempt at quarantining European plagues, and so forth and so.
The horror being that of an approving God. That history might've actually played out for the best, at least compared to the alternatives. That there is a supernatural force, or a post-singularity entity on par with one, it's not yours and it's explicitly hostile to your goals, or worse, helping you cause it knows something you don't about how your "victory" would actually play out for you.
Dark Reflections Trilogy by Kai Meyer
The Europeans may have their Guns, Germs and Steel, but the Egyptians have magic. There's imperialism and colonialism all right, but it's the side whose sorcerer-priests can resurrect the dead as mindlessly loyal puppets capable of laboring and soldiering and grinding down the collective military forces of the entirety of the rest of the planet in what's basically WW1 on steroids since they can just reanimate both sides' dead after every battle doing it, not the Europeans.
I really fucking hate how people ignore the complicity of Natives in the Colonial era. Indigenous people? As a single unified culture in America? Or any other colonial system? What the fuck are you on about?
In both the American Revolution and the American Civil War Native/Indigenous/First Nations fought for whichever side would help them with their local conflicts and suffered for it in both victory and defeat.
The hacienda, encomienda and repartimiento systems were systems of slavery that abused and consumed entire native populations, but were also used by the Natives themselves as one of the few political levers left to them to defend themselves and also to attack their own political enemies.
The El Dorado myth was originally El Hombre Dorado or El Ray Dorado which referred to Mansa Musa and the belief of the Spanish colonizers that there was another one of him somewhere in South America. It evolved over time into the Seven Cities of Gold myth because the various colonizers kept hearing about so many different locations that in the 16th century they actually thought there were seven different locations where there would be large amounts of gold found.
Then there was the whole Russian colonization of the various Slavic people during this period of time. Just look at the example of the colony of Slaveno-Serbia in the 18th century which became the Donbas/Donetsk Coal Basin and is now know as the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts.
Serbian migrants fleeing Ottoman oppression were used as colonizers supported by Russia to maintain a border regions between the Zaporizhian Sich and the Don Cossack Host and then the language that developed in that colony called Slavonic-Serbian was used in the attempt to culturally colonize Vojvodina in the late 18th and for the most of the 19th century.
Australia? The Aboriginal natives were so known for their revenge attacks that the Colonial government organized Native Police units, drawn from other distant regions of Australia to specifically avoid both sympathy for the local Aboriginals and to direct any reprisals towards other Aboriginal groups, to use in genocidal attacks against the native populations so that the White Settlers could have Lebensraum to expand into.
Imperialism doesn't fucking work without local native support which is either coerced in some way or if coercion fails imported in some way.
You want an unusual horror setting?
Try a native tribe trying to decide what to do in a colonial war: Pick a side? Stay out of it and hope they are missed by/able to ressist the rowing gangs of millitia killing anyone not on their side? Flee and abandon their ancestral lands?
Try a native enslaved by the Colonial government trying to free themsevles either trough buying their freedom or trough deserting their designated colonial position.
Try a native group having to have dealings with missionaries of various sorts because the colonization has left them on hard times and taking in a missionary seems to be the least bad of a lot of bad options. And how over time the colony mission vipes and assimilates their culture into the general colonial culture.
All of these are horrors of colonization that are seldom portrayed in horror fiction.
I thought that horror was kind of supposed to be contemporary by it's nature. I'm now imagining a War of the Worlds style narrative where people are trying to get justice for historical harms by siding with a seemingly benevolent colonizer.
I'm not agoraphobic, but I am unsettled by the concept of infinity. The idea of being trapped somewhere infinite and open beneath the sun, without the hope of an exit or anywhere to hide? Scares me a little.
I refer you to this post in general, but to borrow its tldr: the concept of "punching up" and "punching down" also applies to cultural-historical outreach.
I refer you to this post in general, but to borrow its tldr: the concept of "punching up" and "punching down" also applies to cultural-historical outreach.
Your argument is deeply flawed. For starters I can point to your reply and @Thesaurus Rex's post you linked to which was a reply to another one of your posts and just ask: Did you read the rest of my post? Or just that first sentence you quoted?
I can see where the OP is coming from. There is...sort of a trend, in pophistory's indigenous narratives (but not really actual academia, as Pixel said), to give a near-infantilizing praise of some indigenous polity's surface-level achievements, where we wouldn't do the same to an Old World polity. In my head, I've called it something like a "fridgemagnet narrative" (rough translation from Brainese), because it carries the implication that, like a child's drawing you stick on the fridge, these surface-level achievements -- especially the overly simplistic way they're presented to us -- represented the best anyone could expect them to do. You're supposed to be amazed at this because usually, they can't do anything 'civilized'! Or so it ends up coming across. The more detailed elements about their culture that actually would be interesting and deserving of praise, as is more common in Old World narratives are omitted. As an example, the museum at Cahokia has a documentary showing, in which a gruff, Nimoyesque voice hypes you up that THEY BUILT...HOUSES. and FARMED. They don't mention how the builders at Cahokia radically revamped both the settlement plan (complete with an immense flattening project that became the Grand Plaza) and the architectural style, introducing wall-trench architecture that allowed structures to be mass-produced from prefabricated wall segments and causing an apparent revolution in housing styles all the way down to Alabama. They just built houses. They don't mention how they essentially pioneered intensive maize agriculture in the Eastern Woodlands* or that Mississippian farmers probably had a lot of agency, they just farmed.
And that's been my problem with it, not really because it ignores the negative parts -- because I don't really think that's being done on a significant scale -- but that it's just patronizingly simplistic.
On the other hand...there IS a simple reason popular narratives go for the apparently simple praise. New World cultures are still, very obviously, significantly stereotyped as backward and barbaric. The Cahokia doc had to hype up houses because the mainstream understanding is still that Native Americans were wandering nomads who roamed aimlessly in search of food to hunt or gather (as Andrew Jackson's verbal depiction of the sedentary, plantation-owning, 'modernized' Cherokee would tell you, it's a long held belief). People talk about Aztec art and architecture because the overpowering narrative of human sacrifice has blinded people into stereotyping them as cruel jungle barbarians without any kind of critical lens. And it often comes with a sense of finality that suggests nothing more needs to be learned about a people that needed to be replaced. Those opinions end up being reflected in elected and appointedpolicymakers and their constituents, which either inadvertently or consciously leads to exclusion from institutional thought, and of course to ignorance and racism-fueledconsequences on modern indigenous communities as well as their heritage. And it's not just a problem in the U.S. and Canada, but especially bad in Latin America, where despite people of indigenous descent making up a significant or majority demographic percentage, the colonial narratives against indigeneity are still murderously strong.
I myself can barely talk about what I do or what I study with non-academics without someone asking/talking about how fierce and bloodthirsty Indian warriors were or why I'd be so engaged in superstitious people who sacrificed a million zillion babies a picosecond. Assuming I don't get some BS about the Egyptian pyramids.
In the face of unrelenting downsizing and denigration, people who actually have an interest in decolonizing history and promoting indigenous rights try to offset that with a counter-narrative; one that includes reasons why we shouldn't see American Indians as irredeemably backward. Thing is, as seen in OP's case, when you look from the sidelines and see a bunch of people pushing, but don't realize what they're pushing back against, you might see all the pushing as excessive and unnecessary; not actually understanding what's going on. See: Conservative reactions to the George Floyd protests. Ahem.
Does talking about all the 'bad' parts of an indigenous culture's history help decolonization? It certainly can, but the context has to be considered and you're going to have to throw a little bit more detail in than "they conquered and killed people". If it doesn't help you understand the Hittites, it won't help you here. And, just like when you're talking about the good in history, and just like when you're talking about the good and bad and Old World history, you have to consider why and how you're bringing it up. Because every history has a narrative and thesis, whether it's explicitly stated or unconsciously assumed. You're ALWAYS choosing what information, what perspective to include and which ones to exclude. Forced to, often. There's just too much stuff, and it's impossible to escape ones' own biases. If you think history is just a retelling of obviously objective facts, or that it should be, you're neither a self-aware nor diligent historian.
At its worst, talking about indigenous history in a "fridgemagnet" way can do damage in very similar ways as a Wild Indian narrative, and be just as finalizing and curiosity-limiting. Especially since there's ample opportunity to blend the two together. But I personally feel that it's not too terribly bad of a problem right now, because except for documentaries they're usually in places where you'd expect a shallow amount of information to be transmitted. But even in those places, they can still go a lot further than they do already. The reason they don't is because colonial-settler ideology has affected what information these people decide to choose and how accessible it is, so you get a presentation that's much more diluted than what you'd expect of a European history. All in all, I'm really just adhering to a more or less obvious opinion: You need to know enough about your subject for your thesis to carry weight. And you should be able to demonstrate that with some level of nuanced detail.
--
Thing is...OP seems to be guilty of everything I've called out already. He wants the "other side" shown just because he thinks it's asymmetrical. And the way he presents the "good and bad" of his examples shows he doesn't actually know enough about his subject matter to give any kind of informed praise or criticism. It's literally the basic, surface level pophistory fluff combined with the basic, surface level colonialist justifications for conquest. He just manages to stereotype them twice on both ends of the spectrum and then calls it equal. And for many of his "criticisms", it's clear he doesn't even know enough about those to understand the whole story behind it or even to make sure he's got it right.
What exactly does he know about the nature of the Inca's "violent conquest" as such a unique marker? Does he know how much the dualistic reciprocal concepts of yanantin and ayni permeated the Andes to the point the Incas not only maintained their empire but were even able, reasonably frequently, to expand diplomatically with that philosophy? Does he think every village that resisted was resettled after conquest? And what about the good stuff? I would consider their complex statecraft and sheer administrative ability, at levels that put Europe to shame, a better call to fame than "exquisite architecture". I bet he doesn't even know about the transgender artisan beer nuns. Or the teleporting mountain lightning wizards.
Same with the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois, does he know how the confederacy's territorial expansion during the Beaver Wars was set on by the geopolitical landscape of the fur trade, and not simply because they formed a confederacy? In fact...is that really a thesis he has? People that are politically unified fight other people instead of themselves? Like...yeah, that's how political unification works. Not rocket science. What might be though is his insinuation that they are automatically inclined to start expanding and conquering because of it, giving a whopping total of...3 "tribal confederations" that can just barely be called such (Iroquois, Zulu and the Mongol Empire) as exemplars. Not included: The Anishinaabeg confederacy, which didn't go on a conquest spree, the Wabanaki, who didn't either, the Illini, the Creeks, early medieval Ireland and a fair chunk of Celtic (and some Germanic) confederations, also in the Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia...y'know. A lot of confederations form to protect themselves from external threats, not always from a plan to conquer and gain power, although it didn't stop the individual members from performing business-as-usual military activities from before they confederated. The Iroquois didn't really do a lot of straight-up conquering before the Beaver Wars.
And my God, he actually thinks chinampas were literally floating. Should that tell me everything I need to know?
Lashing back against the "one with nature" thing is, in theory, a great way to resist the Noble Savage archetype, but like OP you can swing the other way entirely and make it seem like Native Americans were completely blind and unaware of how they were affecting their environment, which is just as infantilizing and almost as dehumanizing. It was a common trope in the 2000s-2010s to talk about how, ackshyually, Native Americans like the Maya, Chacoans and Cahokians were unsustainably deforesting their landscape and environmental degradation was their downfall!† In reality, they all had cultural practices, some incredibly complex, relating to maintaining landscapes, orchards and coppices, or whole forests. They knew there was a relationship to their own community's survival and the survival of the non-human community and adapted their own needs and its needs accordingly, and that's the opinion you see reflected in indigenous religions and philosophies. It's also how California got to be one of the most population-dense regions in North America. It's not some stereotypical druidic nature worship (the Celts are also unfairly stereotyped like this), but they're attuned to the needs of the environment they use in the same way a shepherd is attuned to his sheep. He can't read their minds, and nor does that mean he considers himself a sheep (the sheep don't consider him a 'leader sheep' either, actually), but he knows both parties need each other and so he's gotta employ a few techniques to take care of them. And that's not unique to Native Americans, either. It's just that settler-colonials around the world tended to break tradition and adopt a "fuck around and take what you want" mindset that created the dichotomy.
His sources section is also...peculiar. When a guy links to Wikipedia as "further reading", something might be amiss. Now, I'm normally a big proponent of Wikipedia and recognize its importance and value, but because of a lack of readily accessible materials and enough accomplished, dedicated editors, pre-Columbian America is one area it REALLY, REALLY sucks in. I mean, shit, the article for Mississippian culture is essentially a glorified stub that goes on for a bit without actually telling you anything. And the rest of the articles are weird in that they aren't directly relevant to his blog post's thesis. The first one's a..."deeply in-depth"...dissertation that I doubt he's read all the way through, one's just the HistoriaCivilis video about the Iroquois, on his JSTOR reading list is a 1983 journal article about Aztec warfare even though Ross Hassig published an entire cornerstone book literally titled "Aztec Warfare" that came out 5 years later, and he's apparently stuck having to Google Translate Portuguese articles about Aztec cannibalism?
I'd say get the poor man some book money, but it also just feels like he Googled a bunch of shit and slapped it in just to make his blog post look like there's scholarly weight behind it.
I mean, I'm looking through OP's page and he honestly doesn't seem all that bad. There's one post about historians and LGBTQ that seems kinda straw-manny, but overall he just comes across as a genuine guy. I was actually pretty entertained by the African history polemic on his feed. Stuck it right to em'. But seeing those and seeing this gives me the impression the latter was a different person entirely, and I'm concerned about where they stand on the Dunning-Krueger chart.
Cmon, bro, what the hell?
Overall, I agree with winelover1989's assessment. And Pixel's, too, mine's just the wall of text version. In their words, "no one being entirely unproblematic" isn't the "piping hot take" OP thinks it is. We know. Everyone who studies history even close to professionally knows. But there's folks out there who still think the Roman Empire was the ideal government we should all strive towards, and Mr. Walrus doesn't seem to mind them. Yet if anyone tries to say that Native Americans DID in fact do some cool stuff, whoa, teach the controversy pal. There's folks who are willing to latch onto anything, anything to justify colonialism and conquest, even if they themselves can be judged by those standards. And so places that try to promote history to laypeople, or are using history to promote indigenous rights, will of course try to tell you about the more positive things first because of the situation we find ourselves in where people either don't think natives have a history, or that it's all violence and despair. Can those places do more to present the history in more detail and in mature tones, like how we talk about "our" history? Sure, but most of these places aren't run by professional historians or anthropologists, and so a lot of their ability or inability to do that has been affected by colonialism. As it stands, the positive perspectives being put out by some pophistory sources (as there's still plenty that go the BWAHAHAHA BRUTAL SACRIFICE route), or held by a fraction of the public, are far from being problematic right now.
Except, apparently, to people like rudjedet who, despite being outside the U.S. and thus outside and ignorant of the problems it has with indigenous people and the power dynamics concerning their history, thinks that people who put out positive-only views of Native Americans are a big problem, who do it solely because they're not white (not at all reminiscent of a right-wing "ohh white people have it rough because we don't have it all!" narrative), and that if they're not left unchecked, they could..."repeat the mistakes of the past". Like, <jfjfftrtt>? What mistakes? I'd love to know. Are the Oglala Lakota planning a fascist takeover of the United States, their arms supplied by yoga moms nationwide? What the hell is she talking about? Does she actually realize the social situation many tribes are in? I can't wrap my head around this. God, I hate tumblr.
Also, guess what? Historical revisionism isn't bad. Not automatically. It's not automatically good either. At its heart, it's just how we change our understandings as new perspectives and information are added. It's no different from how science updates and sometimes refutes itself with the progression of time. It doesn't always mean denying atrocities or making ones' government appear gloriously flawless. In fact, a lot of revisionism comes from the undoing of those established histories to present something more inclusive and orthodox-challenging. In most cases, it's a necessary act. Every new work a historian puts out is, one way or another, revising the established pool of historical knowledge. Like I said before, if you think history is nothing more than collecting facts without even attempting to put it all together, you're a bad historian. And a couple of pophistory sources trying to tell folks that indigenous people weren't irredeemably barbaric is hardly historical revisionism in the first place. At most, it's just awareness raising.
It is true a society need not be "squeaky clean" to be worth studying and remembering, but when a society's history is barely taught at all outside of negative elements used to justify their subjugation, all because the powers that be decided no parts of them were worth admiring, then it's important to remind people that there are such parts.
To reiterate, fridgemagnetting, uwu-washing, whatever you call it can be problematic in public outreach, either by professionals or especially by non-scholars whose hearts are in the right place, but the biggest problem I have with it is that the "promotion" is often pretty shallow and superficial, sometimes infantilizing in its own right by where they choose to point their praise, especially when you contrast it against how, say, a Roman or British documentary is done. And a lot of that is simply out of the immediate control of the promoters. I don't have a problem with them "failing" to include the negative aspects, because as with any thesis, you don't include things that are outside the point and scope. It would be an issue if people were doing an assessment of total "morality", but no one is trying to do that here. And once you get into the real academic sphere, not the pophistory public outreach one, none of this even applies. It's like baby jabber.
Finally, even what makes a society worth "studying and remembering" to someone can be problematic (see: wehraboos vs. any other reason you'd be interested in WWII). Why do you enjoy this part of history so much? Do you enjoy reading about the Mongols not just because of the way they were able to quickly set up an empire, but because of their literature, their effects on economics and freedom of religion, their mail system, patronage of arts and sciences, even just the way their families work or what they valued, or are you a fan just because "wow cool horse warrirs! klingon dothraki horde haha so badass".‡ Or if peoples' only interests in African history all involve "fierce tribesmen" versus, say, the intricate political and religious institutions and relationships of sub-Saharan Africa. One cause for fascination, at its worst, is just a dehumanizing warrior fetish that doesn't really lead anywhere useful (except to supplement some right-wing strength/fear-based agenda) and doesn't really do a service to their descendants either, especially if they're on the socioeconomic boot end. The other is born out of a genuine desire to learn about worlds so different, yet in many cases the same; it sees the subject matter as real people who lived, laughed and died, whose lives could produce literal libraries' worth of content, and who deserve to have their stories told. That's all we want.
TL;DR people don't understand the concept of "punching up" and "punching down" also applies to cultural-historical outreach.
* Recent research shows that apparently the large influx of immigrants to Cahokia meant they were also still farming a lot of EAC crops like sunflower, squash, and goosefoot! † Which is honestly just another episode in using indigenous history to project a cautionary tale on the modern world. In the 1920s, soil degradation alone killed the Maya. Then it was disease, or invasion, or revolution, or mutually assured destruction, and then climate change along with a resurgence of environmental overuse.
‡ Imagine that was almost all you were able to readily access about the Mongols. That the Internet barely had anything on their non-militaristic parts of culture. Imagine our timeline's Inner Mongolia was the best they could hope to be treated, and modern Mongolians were frighteningly badly disenfranchised and mistreated from centuries of conquest, and no one wanted to help them because they were a barbarian afterthought of the past. And imagine you did put in the research and tried to talk about the really admirable parts of the empire, but people would instantly reply "Nuh uh. Stop trying to romanticize the hordes, they're not squeaky clean just because they're not white! Remember, they catapulted heads into citiessss~". You know they did, of course, but it's neither here nor there. That's the kind of shit we deal with sometimes.
my post is more shallow and with less of a deep cut, but my post isn't trying to tell the full story of how to talk about indigenous people being colonized. My post is trying to point to unusual horror settings in fiction portraying colonialism.
The post above my post is yours also and talks about how Candyman (2021), which is story about an adopted lightskin African American coming to a darkskin African American neighborhood to do research for his art/history project, is somehow from an insider's perspective when what it is actually about is an outsider who was forcibly adopted out of the inside group coming back to his roots and being consumed by them. It's just that most people are not familiar with the lightskin, mainstream and darkskin divide in African American culture so they think that when a lightskin decides to shit on darkskins it's all good because it is all African American culture.
For a more basic take on this from a black woman:
Article:
Short history lesson: Mulattos in the US have historically enjoyed multiple benefits over Black people without any white heritage. They formed exclusive clubs wherein you needed to pass the paper bag test to be allowed in, and through those clubs helped each other gain access to education and money. This goes all the way back to the field negro vs the house negro; the children of white slave owners who raped their slaves were given better jobs (in the master's house) and dominion over field slaves. They were often given more education as well, and after slavery was over, being mixed or part-white became a mark of status for Black people. This is still true today.
That article talks about both how white people are racist against blacks and how black men are sexist against black women. It's a good article to get people informed on the basics of US racial and color dynamics. Read some of Riley H.'s other articles they are a useful source of reference points and ideas at the very least.
As for The Only Good Indians and My Heart Is A Chainsaw? Both are just plain boring and punching down both as stories and as horror stories.
The Only Good Indians reminds me of nothing so much as a more supernatural I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I'm only using that as a reference because this is an English speaking/reading site so referencing Dylan Dog is not likely to elicit recognition from people here.
My Heart Is A Chainsaw on the other hand is like if someone crossed a Rape and Revenge flick with one of those dark LitRPGs/Isekai stories where the protagonist gets betrayed/forced into by their comrades/family to a horrible fate and then comes back to clown on them with their overpowered skills and then stuffed that mix into a Slasher film happening on a reservation.
What exactly is not punching down about a story about North American first nation youths killing a herd of deer because they disobeyed their elders and then getting systematically killed by one vengeful ex-pregnant spirit of a doe so she could reclaim at least her calf.
Or for that matter what is not punching down in a story about a first nation reservation that gets genocided by the angry ghost of a young first nation woman who was accused of witchcraft, who is then defeated by being dragged below the waters of a lake built over an old christian church by a young first nation woman who is the last girl by the fact that she accidentally killed her father.
The Edge of the Knife I'm not fully certain punches down on first nation traditions and it does actually have a discussion on restorative justice in it and is about preserving an endangered language so I'm not calling it outright bad for what it does while being a horror story.
I'm not okay with any article just unquestioningly accepting the old day/light and night/dark division that got started under the Roman Empire as a piece of propaganda against any and all "barbarians" to justify Imperialistic ambitions.
I'm not capable of fully reading that glossary right now and I can't listen to a podcast for the same reason of getting sleepy. I'll get to those some other day. Good night.
Would quoting the entire post have made a difference? I quoted what I perceived as the main point (that horror media 'ignore the complicity of natives in the colonial era'), because that was what I was trying to respond to.
Though horror media can be very politically & socially conscious it is not a comprehensive history/analysis of colonialism - a field where highlighting the role that indigenous peoples play within colonialism systems would be important - and so 'native folk horror' often avoids such complicated topics in order to avoid muddying its political messaging, especially since addressing this could be very easily perceived as them blaming the colonized for their own oppression instead of the colonizers (e.g. punching down). And of course it doesn't help that 'native horror' is still ultimately being sold to a largely non-native audience, which will affect the way its message is perceived and unfortunately dominate the discourse surrounding it.
If you were trying/intending to critique the article (& podcast) from my earlier post for using a flawed framework the entire time then I'm sorry for missing that.
Try a native tribe trying to decide what to do in a colonial war: Pick a side? Stay out of it and hope they are missed by/able to ressist the rowing gangs of millitia killing anyone not on their side? Flee and abandon their ancestral lands?
Try a native enslaved by the Colonial government trying to free themsevles either trough buying their freedom or trough deserting their designated colonial position.
Try a native group having to have dealings with missionaries of various sorts because the colonization has left them on hard times and taking in a missionary seems to be the least bad of a lot of bad options. And how over time the colony mission vipes and assimilates their culture into the general colonial culture.
Thing is, the various native societies didn't have supernatural powers and protections as demonstrated by their getting crushed like turians in a first contact war spite thread as soon as the european colonial powers showed up with superior technologies and god on their side, specifically, Papa Nurgle. Change this and you completely change history and actually, I'd totally enjoy an alternate history of a war of equals, a successful ghost dance ritual, skinwalker spirit curses panickedly repurposed as supersoldiers, essentially alien isolation with an eighteen hundreds british redcoat protagonist stalked by Anyoto leopard men who actually had the powers their legends claimed, and so forth and so on.
Edit: Warhammer 30k and to a lesser extent 40k are not dramatic settings and are horror settings. I mean at least as far back as Lovecraft, though I can make the argument for as far back as Gothic Horror at the very least, parts of folk horror dealt with those specific topics of colonialism.
Edit: Making my point less aggressive and condescending.
