Indigenous horror against settler colonialism: M.I. Angenent, Weaponizing the Non-Human How Buffalo Kinship and Vampirism Shape Counternarratives to American Settler Discourses in Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, graduate dissertation, Radboud University, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous horror against settler colonialism: M.I. Angenent, Weaponizing the Non-Human How Buffalo Kinship and Vampirism Shape Counternarratives to American Settler Discourses in Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, graduate dissertation, Radboud University, 2026

26Aug26

Abstract: Indigenous horror studies have highlighted the genre’s potential to foreground counternarratives to settler discourses. Close readings of Indigenous literary narratives may establish new imaginings of Indigenous cultures in our past, present, and future. They may therefore dismantle colonial hierarchies, and counter dominant settler-colonial narratives that continue to permeate contemporary American society. This thesis investigates representations of the non-human, specifically buffalo kinship and vampirism, in relation to the nineteenth-century buffalo genocide and North American colonialism in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by American Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones. It foregrounds Indigenous horror frameworks and Indigenous (Blackfeet) ways of knowing, specifically kinship and the Four R’s. I argue that the non-anthropocentric Blackfeet values are weaponised to oppose buffalo hunters and antagonistic settlers on the American frontier. Additionally, the narrative’s nuanced representation of a Blackfeet protagonist defies settler-dominated discourses, which challenges the marginalised positions of Indigenous peoples in current conversations concerning colonial and environmental conflicts.

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