Phantom Pasts and Native Ghosts
Phantom Pasts and Native Ghosts
Phantom Pasts and Native Ghosts
Contents
List of Illustrations vi
List of Tables
vi
vii
part 1. me thodologi es
1. Sherman Alexies Indian Killer as
Indigenous Gothic 3
michelle burnham
geneva m. gano
54
coll thrush
117
151
colleen e. boyd
victoria freeman
9. Shape-shifters, Ghosts, and Residual Power:
cynthia landrum
10. Ancestors, Ethnohistorical Practice, and
280
c. jill grady
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Index
301
303
305
Illustrations
1. Portion of Map of the Province of Upper
Canada 119
127
128
Table
1. Chart of Perpetrators
143
vi
Introduction
Bringing Ghosts to Ground
c o l l e e n e . b oy d a nd c o l l t h ru s h
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Indeed, early social theorists such as Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry
Morgan, grandfathers of the discipline, based their findings on
surveys and information recorded by missionaries, among others,
who were stationed around the globe. A classic example of the
Victorian eras comparative method, so favored by Tylor, Morgan,
and others, was James Frazers astounding twelve-volume work The
Golden Bough. Published first in 1890, and abridged to a single vol
ume in 1922, Frazers encyclopedia of cross-cultural beliefs, customs,
and practices attempted to present a broad comparison of the beliefs
and institutions of all humankind, from magic and religion to human
sacrifice and fertility rites and beyond. Not surprisingly, among the
beliefs and customs covered at length in The Golden Bough are
those related to impulses and anxieties, providing a framework for
locating the irrational, including superstitions concerning ghosts
and the afterlife, in social others, whether they be the underclass
at the core of empire or the savages at its margins. It became
commonplace for early ethnographers to include sections devoted to
superstitions and beliefs that marked Indigenous peoples as savage,
mysterious, and less sophisticated.
In the twentieth century, holdouts of primitive folk belief
or, more accurately, persistent vernacular epistemologiescombined
with the narrative structures of colonialism such as Indian hauntings,
new theories of self such as collective memory and psychoanalysis,
and new haunted media such as radio and film to ensure that
the past and the unreal survived into the present and disturbed the
real.37 In fact, it is the atemporality of hauntings, their out-of-time
ness, that has made them such powerful constellations of story and
experience throughout linear time. Buse and Stott go so far as to
say that anachronism might well be the defining feature of ghosts,
now and in the past, because haunting, by its very structure, implies
a deformation of linear temporality: there may be no proper time
for ghosts.38
And in this respect, ghosts are very much like Indigenous peoples:
neither was expected to survive modernitys ascent. The notion that
Indigenous peoples were incapable of, or even incompatible with,
modernity was manifested through diverse means by settlers, colo
xviii
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the ways that scholars work with communities in which the dead
(and in a more general sense, the past) are a dominant force in the
present. Colleen Boyds contribution begins with a foul smell and
a veiled reference to Sasquatch on the banks of the Elwha River
in Washington State, and then continues as an examination of the
ways in which supposedly marginal or irrational things such
as ghosts and spirits are not only central to Indigenous communi
ties lived realities, but can also have dramatic effects on the aspira
tions of settler society. In the case of the Lower Elwha Klallam, a
Coast Salish community into which Boyd married and where she
has conducted anthropological fieldwork since 1992, ghosts and
spirits of diverse kinds are part of everyday life, just as everyday
life is part of the spirit world: one elder noted in the early twentieth
century, for example, that the land of the dead now had cars and
storefronts. Such realities came to the forefront when Tse-whit-zen,
a Klallam village more than two millennia old, was uncovered, along
with more than three hundred ancestral burials, during construction
along the Port Angeles waterfront. Boyd shares in detail the experi
ences of Elwha Klallam people, many of whom became involved
in the recovery of their ancestors remains. These included both
ritual measures such as smudging and the wearing of red ochre, in
addition to encounters that can be described only as uncanny; how
a living Native fisherman came to find the grave of a dead Native
fisherman, for example, is one of the most startling images in this
volume. Drawing on her own familys Irish Catholic traditions and
superstitions, Boyd suggests that we rethink the hard line that
previous generations of scholars have drawn between knowledge
and belief and self and other. She ends with thoughts on the ethics of
collaboration between Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous
scholars, providing a perfect segue to our final set of essays.
Victoria Freemans interviews with Indigenous people living in
Toronto provide the basis for a contribution that challenges many
of the more facile ideas about Native relationships with territory,
which assume a static historical and geographical presence, and
illuminates the relationship between perceived historical absence
and the very real presences of ancestors in the landscape. She shows
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All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.46 And yet, as the
Australian Indigenous studies scholar Peter Read has noted, the
most common response to his own work on hauntings and land
scape has been, We are all for free speech, as long as you dont get
weird on us.47
In fact, most scholars writing on ghosts and the supernatural
generally dismiss specters as little more than anti-colonial metaphors
and psychological manifestations of the repressed, or evade alto
gether the question of whether spirits are real. Buse and Stott, for
example, write that proving or disproving the existence of ghosts
is a fruitless exercise, going on to say that it is more rewarding to
diagnose the persistence of the trope of spectrality in culture.48 In
her work on British spiritualism, meanwhile, Alex Owen inquires
into her own subjectivity vis--vis the supernatural: What was I
to do about the spirits? Should I research the social implications of
womens spiritualist beliefs and leave it at that, or should I grasp the
nettle and try to make sense of the fact that thousands of individuals
firmly believed that they saw, touched, and spoke to the real thinga
discarnate entity, a commentator upon, and survivor of, the dark and
fearful travails of the dead? Mostly, however, Owen avoids grasp
ing the nettle and leaves her own questions unanswered, offering
three possible explanations for spiritualists experiences with the
dead: deliberate fraud, unconscious production and projection, and
causal mechanisms which fall outside our current understanding
of the workings of natural law. On this last point, however, Owen
disclaims that it remains mere conjecture on [her] part and plays
no theoretical role in the book.49 In these statements, Buse, Stott,
and Owen, like the majority of scholarly writers working on ghosts
and hauntingsand interestingly, like most of the popular writers
who compile collections of ghost stories for wider audiencespunt.
They avoid taking a stand on their own belief systems and, we might
imagine in at least some cases, their own subjective experiences.
This demurral regarding the dead, when considered in the con
text of Indian ghosts and hauntings, is squarely at odds with the
increasingly compelling consensus regarding the need for academic
scholarship to take Indigenous epistemologies and ways of knowing
xxxi
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Introduction
of colonialism, for one thing, and just as important, the places and
territories they inhabit.
Perhaps nothing symbolizes this grounded, embodied, emplaced
interpenetration of past and present, and the survival of both Indig
enous peoples and ghostly narratives, than the image on the front
cover of this volume. In 1998 the Canadian artist Marianne Nicol
son, a member of the Dzawadaenuxw Tribe of the Kwakwakawakw
nation, gained international attention when she rappelled down a
sheer rock cliff in Kingcome Inlet on the central British Columbia
coast to paint an enormous pictograph on the stone. The image, the
first of its kind painted in the region for more than half a century,
symbolized the survival of her people in the territory around their
ancestral community of Gwayi.57 Ten years later, Nicolson created
a site-specific installation in downtown Vancouver, transforming the
faade of the Vancouver Art Gallery with Kwakwakawakw imagery.
At night, orcas, the two-headed sea serpent Sisiutl, and other totemic
figures are projected in stark red and white onto the columns and
lintels of the neoclassical structure, surrounding a skeletal human
figure. During the day, this ghostly image is framed by a prayer in
Kwakwala and in English translation:
Giga, Lilolinuxw! Sumaas ganutl-ida nala dl-uwi nalida
ganutl-e, lax gad Walas Gukw.
Wosida gaxanuxw Hayal-iligas kas waxidageos ka
kwaligalitl-esa naxwa!
Come, Ghosts! You, whose night is day and whose day is
night, in this Great House.
I beg you, Great Healer, to take pity on us and restore us to
life!
This is a powerful assertion of Nicolsons cultural heritage and its
traditions regarding the ancestral dead. More pointedly, though,
House of Ghosts claims place: before it became the Vancouver Art
Gallery, the building on which the prayer is projected was once a
courthouse and jail, where Nicolsons own Kwakwakawakw people,
like other First Nations people in British Columbia, were tried and
xxxv
Introduction
5. For Canadian ghost stories, see John Robert Colombo, The Big Book
of Canadian Ghost Stories (Toronto: Dundurn, 2008), and Marlene Goldman and Joanne Saul, Talking with Ghosts: Haunting in Canadian Cultural
Production, University of Toronto Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2006): 64555.
6. Alfonso Ortiz, Some Concerns Central to the Writing of Indian His
tory, Indian Historian (Winter 1977): 20. Quoted in Peter Nabokov, A
Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 13132.
7. Judith Richardson, Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in
the Hudson Valley (Cambridge ma : Harvard University Press, 2003), 4.
8. Cole Harris, How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an
Edge of Empire, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94,
no. 1 (2004): 16582.
9. Bergland, National Uncanny, 4.
10. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, Introduction: A Future for Haunt
ing, in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. Peter Buse and
Andrew Stott (London: MacMillan, 1999), 5.
11. Bergland, National Uncanny, 34.
12. Gerald Vizenor, Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2008).
13. Michael Mayerfeld Bell, The Ghosts of Place, Theory and Society
26 (1997): 832.
14. Haunted Places of Indiana, http://www.angelfire.com/theforce/
haunted/hauntedplacesofindiana.htm, accessed December 2, 2008.
15. C. Boyd, Anonymous Informant, personal communication, Ball State
University, 2004.
16. Haunted Places of Indiana.
17. Barbara Smith, Ghost Stories and Mysterious Creatures of British
Columbia (Edmonton: Lone Pine, 1999), 2224; Robert C. Belyk, Ghosts:
True Stories from British Columbia (Ganges bc: Horsdal & Schubart,
1990), 1069; and Jo-Anne Christensen, Ghost Stories of British Columbia
(Toronto: Hounslow, 1996), 14548. Contemporary accounts of this haunt
ing appeared in both of Vancouvers daily newspapers, the Sun and Province,
on December 23, 1976.
18. Belyk, Ghosts, 13536.
19. Smith, Ghost Stories, 18586, and Belyk, Ghosts, 91.
20. Smith, Ghost Stories, 193.
21. Smith, Ghost Stories, 6366; John Robert Colombo, Ghost Stories
of Canada (Toronto: Dundurn, 2000), 17172; Belyk, Ghosts, 1020; and
Christensen, Ghost Stories of British Columbia, 9294.
22. Belyk, Ghosts, 13435.
xxxvii
Introduction
23. Smith, Ghost Stories, 6162, and Christensen, Ghost Stories of British
Columbia, 2122.
24. Belyk, Ghost Stories, 6975.
25. Colombo, Ghost Stories of Canada, 17779; Smith, Ghost Stories, 84;
and Belyk, Ghosts, 9496. The original source for this story is Jack Scott,
The Night I Began to Believe in Ghosts, Vancouver Sun, August 28, 1971;
reprinted in Great Scott!: A Collection of the Best Newspaper Columns (Vic
toria bc: Sono Nis, 1985).
26. The basic storyline of the curse is provided in Smith, Ghost Stories,
12830. For a scholarly analysis of the curse and its legacies, see Leslie A.
Robertson, Imagining Difference: Legend, Curse, and Spectacle in a Cana
dian Mining Town (Vancouver: u b c Press, 2005).
27. Nabokov, Forest of Time, 148.
28. For two examples from Australia, see Peter Read, Haunted Earth
(Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2003), and Ken Gelder and
Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolo
nial Nation (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998).
29. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scrib
ner, 1971).
30. Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to
Modern (Stanford c a : Stanford University Press, 1999), 118.
31. Darren Oldridge, Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking
Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds
(London: Routledge, 2007), 6770.
32. For a recent encyclopedic treatment of the subject, see Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson, The Lore of the Land: A Guide to Englands
Legends, from Spring-Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys (New York:
Penguin Books, 2006).
33. Bergland, National Uncanny, 89; and Terry Castle, The Female Ther
mometer: 18th-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995).
34. E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 17621800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
35. Elton E. Smith and Robert Haas, eds., The Haunted Mind: The Super
natural in Victorian Literature (Lanham md : Scarecrow, 1999), viii.
36. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism
in Late Nineteenth Century England (London: Virago, 1989); Alex Owen,
The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 78; and Ann Braude, Radi
cal Spirits: Spiritualism and Womens Rights in Nineteenth-Century America
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
37. Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and
xxxviii
the Return of the Dead (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and Marina
Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the
Twenty-first Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
38. Buse and Stott, Ghosts, 1.
39. See Colleen Boyds contribution to this volume for more on this tradi
tion.
40. Barry Holt, A Cultural Resource Management Dilemma: Anasazi
Ruins and the Navajo, American Antiquity 48, no. 3 (1983), 59499.
41. Louise Erdrich, Tracks (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 13.
42. Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent
American Literature (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 4,
27, 3060.
43. For two recent studies of Indigenous writers use of connections to ter
ritory, see Lee Schweninger, Listening to the Land: Native American Literary
Responses to the Landscape (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), and
Lindsey Claire Smith, Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders
of American Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
44. For some of the best discussions of Indigenous cultural hybridity
across the past three and a half centuries, see Richard White, The Middle
Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics on the Great Lakes, 16501815
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Paige Raibmon, Authentic
Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century North
west Coast (Durham n c : Duke University Press, 2005); and Philip J. Delo
ria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
2004). For two histories examining the imposition of racial categories on
Indigenous peoples and families, see Bonita Lawrence, Real Indians and
Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), and Claudio Saunt, Black,
White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
45. See Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural His
tory in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2006).
46. From the April 3, 1778, entry in James Boswells oft-reprinted Life of
Johnson.
47. Peter Read, Haunted Earth (Sydney: University of New South Wales
Press, 2003), 29.
48. Buse and Stott, Ghosts, 23.
49. Owen, Darkened Room, xviiixx.
50. For some of the best examples of this scholarship, see Devon Abbott
Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson, Indigenizing the Academy: Transxxxix
Introduction
forming Scholarship and Empowering Communities (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2004), Rauna Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University:
Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift (Vancouver:
u bc Press, 2007); and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies:
Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed, 1999).
51. For examples, see Edith Turner, with William Blodgett, Singleton
Kahona, and Fideli Benwa, Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of
African Healing (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992);
Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience, ed. David
E. Young and Jean-Guy Goulet (Peterborough o n: Broadview, 1994); and
Extraordinary Anthropology: Transformations in the Field, ed. Jean-Guy
Goulet and Bruce Granville Miller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2007).
52. Goulet and Miller, Extraordinary Anthropology, 7.
53. Read, Haunted Earth, 41.
54. Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds Peo
ple Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005), 150.
55. Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, The Postcolonial Ghost Story, in
Buse and Stott, Ghosts, 181.
56. Buse and Stott, Ghosts, 14.
57. For an account of Nicolsons commemoration of Gwayi, see Judith
Williams, Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time: Kingcome Inlet Pictographs,
18931998 (Vancouver: New Star, 2001).
58. Read, Haunted Earth, 58.
59. Rowe, Dead Hands, 117.
xl
Contributors
received her PhD from the State University of New York, Buffalo.
Victoria Freeman is in the final stages of completing her PhD dissertation on
the historical memory of the Indigenous and colonial past of Toronto and is
the coordinating director of the University of Toronto Initiative on Indige
nous Governance.
Geneva M. Gano is a visiting assistant professor of American studies and
Latino studies at Indiana University. She received her PhD from the Univer
sity of California, Los Angeles.
C. Jill Grady is a research associate at the Laboratory of Anthropology/
Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a tribal
consultant. She received her PhD from the University of Washington.
Sarah Schneider Kavanagh is currently completing graduate studies in educa
State University. She received her PhD in history from Oklahoma State Uni
versity.
Allan K. McDougall is a professor emeritus and adjunct research professor of
political science at the University of Western Ontario. He received his PhD
from the University of Toronto.
Lisa Philips is a professor and the chair of the Department of Anthropology
at the University of Alberta. She received her PhD from the University of
Texas.
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Contributors
304