The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects

by Renèe L. Bergland

Although spectral Indians appear with startling frequency in US literary works, until now the implications of describing them as ghosts have not been thoroughly investigated. In the first years of nationhood, Philip Freneau and Sarah Wentworth Morton peopled their works with Indian phantoms, as did Charles Brocken Brown, Washington Irving, Samuel Woodworth, Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others who followed. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Native American ghosts figured prominently in speeches attributed to Chief Seattle, Black Elk, and Kicking Bear. Today, Stephen King and Leslie Marmon Silko plot best-selling novels around ghostly Indians and haunted Indian burial grounds. Renée L. Bergland argues that representing Indians as ghosts internalizes them as ghostly figures within the white imagination. Spectralization allows white Americans to construct a concept of American nationhood haunted by Native Americans, in which Indians become sharers in an idealized national imagination. However, the problems of spectralization are clear, since the discourse questions the very nationalism it constructs. Indians who are transformed into ghosts cannot be buried or evaded, and the specter of their forced disappearance haunts the American imagination. Indian ghosts personify national guilt and horror, as well as national pride and pleasure. Bergland tells the story of a terrifying and triumphant American aesthetic that repeatedly transforms horror into glory, national dishonor into national pride.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

211 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[JJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most astonishing books of literary criticism that I have read in the last five years. Most good books I end up writing down one or two quotes in my little book; this one I had to switch over to adding tabs instead because I hit memorable quotes once or twice a page. I ended up purchasing a second copy for the express purpose of lending out to my friends.

[Katherine Addison · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, fair warning, what Bergland is interested in is not so much GHOSTS as it is the rhetorical trope of, as she puts it, "spectralizing Indians." This is a trope that is EVERYWHERE in American discourse about Native Americans, first from white writers & speakers imagining that Indians are vanishing (or have vanished), and then from Native writers & speakers, turning the trope right back around at the whites. Bergland's evidence is lying around on the ground to be picked up, and she does a good, solid, persuasive job of making her argument about 18th and 19th century authors. (She talks only briefly about 20th century authors and then only about Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony and The Almanac of the Dead) and Stephen King (Pet Sematary).) But she's really not interested in stories, except insofar as they demonstrate the trope (she spends a lot of time, for example, with Fenimore Cooper). Which---it is not her problem that what I was hoping for was an analysis of ghost stories, or at least some interest in the ghost as a figure rather than just the specter as a trope.

[Sharon A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was OK. Not quite what I was expecting. Instead of a more historical look, this was literary criticism. It focused on a few works in great detail outlining the plot and interpretation. I found this uninteresting and skimmed a lot. The conclusions for these would have been more useful to me in an article format instead of a full-length book.

I would have preferred a chronology of the way the subject has been handled from early American authors to the present. With the exception of Pet Sematary, there was nothing modern and I do not feel I have a good understanding of the modern trope of Native legends that appear as part of the narratives for many fiction and nonfictional paranormal stories.

[Katrinka]

Really intriguing.