“Why Would They Bury Her When She Can Still Walk Around” : Examining an Indigenous Gothic

Abstract

In “Why Would They Bury Her When She Can Still Walk Around” : Examining an Indigenous Gothic, Tatiana Rosillo adapts the genre conventions of the literary Gothic to examine Indigenous genre media and analyze what an Indigenous American Gothic typically entails in three central texts: Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes For Young Ghouls, Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild, and Stephen Graham Jones’ Only Good Indians. Rosillo proposes that these three texts reveal a spectrum of an Indigenous Gothic with specific commonalities. By focusing her analysis on common aspects of the Gothic — atmosphere, protagonists, and cultural anxieties — Rosillo seeks to complicate the traditional Euro-American Gothic and Horror conventions. Rosillo asserts that acknowledging the relationships and culturally-specific ways of knowing which appear in these texts brings much needed diversity to the Gothic tradition.