Haunted Prairie: Aboriginal 'Ghosts' and the Spectres of Settlement

Although the red men have vanished from many of their haunts, their ghosts are everywhere. Nothing could be more natural, for the Indians were the only inhabitants of the land for countless generations. The rivers and the lakes were their familiar friends, and they named them. Only some of these names have we replaced; the others we have taken over with the country.

Burt, 8

Thus begins the chapter on 'The First Inhabitants' of the prairies in A.L. Burt's 1930 history, The Romance of the Prairie Provinces. For Burt, the omnipresence of Native ghosts on the prairies is a natural consequence of the historic and prehistoric omnipresence of the Indians themselves. The fact that they no longer inhabit some of these 'haunts' is what effectively turns them into ghosts, and Burt is very blunt about the mechanism that has effected this removal of Native people from their country: it has been 'taken over' by European settlers. The logic of Burt's associations here suggests that the settlers' takeover of places and place-names has created the conditions for this haunting. In this context, it seems likely that these ghosts are haunting more than the prairie landscape – they are also haunting the very project of colonialism which has displaced Native people from their land.

Of course, spectral Native figures have long been a part of the iconic vocabulary of Euro-American Gothic romances, but it seems that in recent years there has been a resurgence of the Aboriginal ghost motif in descriptions of land on the prairies.¹ This reflects a widespread and perhaps growing anxiety suffered by settlers regarding the legitimacy of their claims to belonging on what they call 'their' land. This fear can be described in Freudian terms as a kind of neocolonial uncanny, a lurking sense that the places settlers call home are not really theirs, and a sense that their current legitimacy as owners or renters in a capitalist land market might well be predicated upon theft, fraud, violence, and other injustices in the past.² The driving psychological force behind these Aboriginal hauntings as they are imagined by non-Native writers, then, is as in most ghost stories the return of the repressed.

This phenomenon is evident in another, more recent romance of the prairies, Sharon Butala's The Perfection of the Morning, in which the author visits a circle of stones on 'her' land and is confronted there by the ghostly figure of a Native man whom she describes as 'a shaman in full dress – a long robe, I think, a feathered headdress – standing in the circle, facing out over the landscape, arms raised in an attitude of prayer or invocation' (185–86). She is repelled from the spot by an insistent voice which speaks inside her head, saying, 'Because you are not worthy' (185). We are never told exactly what she is not worthy of, but Butala herself interprets this to mean that she is unworthy of being in that particular place. She says, 'I knew then that I had trespassed on what had been a sacred site' (186). She has experienced what must be the particular nightmare of every property owner: to be found a trespasser on her own land. Like A.L. Burt, Butala is very aware that her own place has once belonged to someone else: in fact she dedicates her book 'To Those Who Knew This Land in Ancient Times.' This Native ghost, presumably one of the aforementioned ancient denizens of the land, provides a reminder that the legitimacy of her belonging on the prairie is open to challenge by prior claims. The charge of unworthiness that she is confronted with is not so much a personal accusation as a condemnation of the entire settler tradition. However, it also has personal implications for Butala's sense of belonging. In her Edenic version of the prairie, she is not allowed to forget that there has already been an expulsion of sorts, under the auspices of the Indian Act. There is no talk of redress here, perhaps because there are no living Native people present...