Indigenous Screen Sovereignty in the Genre Films of Lisa Jackson, Elle - Máijá Tailfeathers and Danis Goulet

This article argues that Lisa Jackson’s Savage (2009), Elle -Máijá Tailfeathers’ Bloodland (2009) and A Red Girl’s Reasoning (2012), and Danis Goulet’s Night Raiders (2021) exemplify an Indigenous feminist cinema that has rapidly gained traction by innovatively mobilizing genre to frame specific historical injustices and their residual challenges in the present. These filmmakers’ considerable successes attest to the visibility of a transnational collective of Indigenous women filmmakers currently supporting each other to take advantage of unprecedented industrial opportunities. Their films are distinctly feminist in that they draw attention to Indigenous women’s experiences in heteropatriarchal and colonial social systems. Moreover, Jackson, Tailfeathers and Goulet harness recognizable conventions of genre, in particular horror, to express Indigenous feminist concerns in a visual and narrative language legible to a wide range of viewers. Analysis reveals the overhaul of well-worn storytelling devices to restore pride of place in decolonial authorial maneuvers that the article links to a network of concepts that Indigenous film scholars and practitioners have developed to assert and defend narrative sovereignty, which has evolved considerably from its “nothing by us without us” origins. Provocative examples of the new terrain of Fourth Cinema, Savage, Bloodland, A Red Girl’s Reasoning and Night Raiders demonstrate the vitality and diversity of Indigenous feminist genre cinema’s strong claim to narrative sovereignty.