The Future Is Noir: Alienation, Resentment, and Cyclicality in Indigenous Futurism on Film
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: There is much potential for Indigenous science fiction and futurisms to articulate a decolonized vision of the world. "Indigenous futurisms are narratives of biskaabiiyang, an Anishinaabemowin word connoting the process of 'returning to ourselves,' which involves discovering how personally one is affected by colonization, discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Native Apocalypse world," writes Grace Dillon. If Indigenous futurisms today are the most prominent vehicle for biskaabiiyang—typically understood in roundly positive terms as a healing process—then how curious it is that so many Indigenous filmmakers are also drawing on noir aesthetics and themes of resentment and existential dread as they dramatize biskaabiiyang in the future imaginary. Why noir? And why now? And is there anything inherently anticolonial about noir? In this article I will focus on Night Raiders (2021), Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes) (2018), A Red Girl's Reasoning (2012), and several of Jeff Barnaby's films to illustrate the ways that Indigenous storytelling today draws upon noir stylistics and the themes of imbalance and criminalization of antiheroes within its anticolonial approach to temporality and slipstream. These films, and many others that adopt a bleak tone, resist a phony kind of reconciliation in what I call "Indigenous noir." Themes of alienation and productive resentment pervade the narratives in this new wave of Indigenous cinema as characters attempt to enact biskaabiiyang, that is, to reconnect with their communities and the land. In Canada, Indigenous people might feel like a character in a noir film trying to navigate a world off its axis while also being urged to recognize the "progress" that has come out of Truth and Reconciliation. In the noir world, many obstacles get in the characters' way of attaining mino bimaadiziwin (the good life), but this goal remains an important north star for Indigenous creatives and audiences alike.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".