Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture & History ed. by Colleen E. Boyd, Coll Thrush (review)

Native ghosts are an inescapable part of the American landscape. They remind us of a not so distant past when the land we call “ours” really belonged to others, from whom it was taken by not altogether fair means. That past haunts us, and the specter of indigenous ghosts as a memory of past injustice marks the landscape and our experience of it. This is the premise of the book Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture & History. The authors and editors are North American anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars, and they each address the notion of a haunted landscape from the perspectives of their own disciplines. The result is a fascinating collection of essays addressing ghost lore from a variety of approaches, some of which will be of great interest to folklorists.

The 10 essays are arranged in three sections: Methodologies (including two good literary analyses), Historical Encounters, and The Past in the Present. Several of the authors live on the West Coast—Seattle and Vancouver—and work with vibrant Indigenous communities there, which enables them to compare the imagined past and the present from insider viewpoints.

The introduction by editors Boyd and Thrush sets the theoretical parameters of the collection with their statement that native ghosts have “shaped and informed colonizing encounters [becoming a] powerful trope of terror and lament” (pp. viii–ix). They suggest that stories of Indigenous ghosts fill several functions: they express moral anxieties about the displacement of native peoples, they harness “real Indigenous beliefs about the power and potency of the dead which in turn are cast as ‘irrational’ superstition which must give way to ‘rational progress,’” and finally the stories “disrupt the dominant and official historical narrative” (p. ix). The authors also routinely call on Freud’s immensely useful idea of the unheimlich, the uncanny—a concept folklorists have somehow generally overlooked. A theme that consistently emerges from all of the essays is the way that “the histories of actual Indigenous peoples are routinely displaced . . . by narratives of Indian ghosts” (p. xxv).

While there are many good essays in this collection, several of them are outstanding; they will be of special interest to folklorists. Michelle Burnham’s essay on “Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer as Indigenous Gothic” was informed both by literary analysis and a sensitivity to issues affecting native peoples. Burnham calls on contemporary literary theory, theories of the Gothic, and Freud’s notion of the uncanny to produce a thoughtful, radical, and enormously useful reading of Alexie’s sometimes disturbing novel.

Coll Thrush’s essay on “Hauntings as Histories: Indigenous Ghosts and the Urban Past in Seattle” is excellent. A historian, Thrush is also an outstanding writer. His essay insightfully uses stories of Indian ghosts to map the historical presence of Indigenous people just beneath the surface of modern Seattle. He writes of examining the ghost story as a “place-based methodology in which hauntings gesture toward salient conflicts and patterns in the history of conquest. A ghost, in effect, is a place’s past speaking to its—and our—present” (p. 58). He uncovers a “geography of Seattle’s ghosts” that is “largely congruent with the Indigenous geographies that predated the city” primarily near places where the Indigenous presence was “most dense and storied” (p. 62). He draws from the stories a pattern where Indian ghosts are used as “markers of urban disorder—poverty and prostitution” (p. 66). In compelling ways, they help us to make sense of the past. “Indian ghosts,” he claims, “are not so much metaphors drawn from the imaginary of conquest as they are metonyms for the actual material processes by which that conquest took place” (p. 76).

Another essay, by historians Lisa Philips and Allan K. McDougall, “The Baldoon Mysteries,” should interest folklorists. The authors examine nearly two hundred years of “iterations...