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rushthatspeaks) wrote2013-04-12 04:22 am
rushthatspeaks) wrote2013-04-12 04:22 am
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The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects, Renée L. Bergland
By the time you finish reading this review, I intend to convince you that you have seen a ghost. I believe that in the majority of cases I will be successful.
Yes, I do mean you, whoever you are, reading this now. And yes, by ghost I do mean a spectre raised from an untimely grave to torment the guilt of the living and deny the peace of the dead, and by seen I mean seen, with your eyes, or possibly in some circumstances heard with your ears; I mean these things absolutely literally.
Having said that, I will now proceed to tell you that this slender little book of literary criticism, The National Uncanny, is one of the very best books I have read in an extremely long time, one of those books which makes the inside of the reader's head a different and a better place. It is a study of the figure of the Native American as ghost in American literature, but it contains wildly impressive theoretical insights on a variety of different topics at the rate of slightly more than one insight per paragraph. I found myself trying to quote some of the better bits to my wife a while ago and discovered I was literally just reading out loud without being able to skip anything. This is not the way I am accustomed to academic criticism working, although it is the way I would always like it to work.
What Bergland has done here is to look at the figure of the Native American as ghost from the very beginning of writings by and about Native Americans in English in what is now the United States, and then proceed through history to note changes in the tropes involved, up until the late twentieth century. In order to do this, Bergland has had to define what the figuring of Native Americans as ghosts in American literature is, what purposes it serves in literature and in culture, who has used the trope, and for what reasons they might have used it. All of this she has done, clearly and concisely and with beautifully complete documentation.
So let's start with ghosts, what is a ghost? What was a ghost in Europe? What was a ghost to the Northern Europeans who came to colonize North America?
A ghost, in pre-Enlightenment Europe, Bergland answers, is: a), a public phenomenon. It is visible to many. It may not be visible at all times, but if one person in a group sees it, all will, because the ghost is present on public business-- it is, b), the evidence of a crime. A ghost may haunt because of murder, or the theft or concealment of property, or fraud, or rape, or the illegal transfer of power in a kingdom, all of which are public affairs, crimes which it is in the public interest to have solved. Look at the ghosts in Shakespeare. It was a revolutionary dramaturgical gesture at the end of the nineteenth century to have Hamlet's father's ghost played as an offstage voice and to make it obvious to the theatre-goers that only Hamlet saw him. For generations before that, everyone on stage had seen him, and had been seen by the audience to be frightened. There is some question as to whether this sort of ghost is physically tangible, but there is no doubt of its being audible, if it speaks. It demands resolution for the crime that created it, either via selfish revenge or unselfish justice. It is also, c), a legacy handed down from ancestors. If Hamlet had decamped for Paris suddenly in the night, his father's ghost would have haunted Elsinore over the generations, until something was done by somebody to appease it, if indeed anything ever could. And a lot of the ghost stories one gets, in old Europe, are stories of ghosts which are signs of crimes generations or centuries old. They are part of both common and familial inheritance, manifesting as public scandals and as family curses and birthrights. Elsinore, haunted thusly, would have to be exorcised by Hamlet's descendants.
But in America and in modernity, we get a different kind of ghost. The characteristics of the post-Enlightenment ghost, and of the American ghost from the time of colonization, are as follows: a), the ghost is a private phenomenon. It appears to one person exclusively, or to a small group of beleaguered people, who are generally far away from society or who cannot get anyone to believe them. Sometimes, one person in a group may see it, or touch it, in the presence of others who do not know or believe it is there. There is generally no public acknowledgement of the haunting beyond dark and disbelieved rumor (whereas back in Europe you can take a tour to see the Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe). The new ghost is still, b), the evidence of a crime, but the crime may be murkier. The motivations of the ghost are less clear. There are a lot of vampire legends in New England, or there's that Rhode Island ghost of a young lady who may or may not have thrown herself or been thrown into a river. Suicide, infanticide, ghosts of incest, ghosts which do not speak, or which when they speak do not tell the hearers what must be done to let them rest. They do not call for the solving of the crimes of which they are symbolic. And, c), these ghosts are not ancestral to their viewers. They are strangers, and there may not even be local folklore which is clear on the subject, as with the Rhode Island young lady (suicide? murder? what was her name again? there are several distinct versions of it, which do not sound alike). To exorcise one, you do not need to be linked by blood, or by birth in the area. But it is much harder to tell if you have gotten rid of one, because their appearances are so limited, so subjective. They are not a force which produces societal justice; they are a force which produces individual madness.
At this point Bergland made an entire set of things come together in my brain by explaining the difference between the American and the European Gothic in fiction. In the European Gothic, the uncanny, whatever it is, is attempting to tear down a previously constructed edifice (building, society, family) from which it has come, while the non-uncanny elements of the story are trying to preserve the edifice. In the American Gothic, the non-uncanny elements of the story are trying to create such an edifice (building, society, family), and the uncanny, coming from outside, is trying to destroy it. Suddenly everything from Poe* to Shirley Jackson to Anne Rivers Siddons' The House Next Door made infinitely more sense. The difference in Gothic traditions is of course at least partially because of the difference between types of ghost.
Why the change in the American ghost? Well, partly because of the rise of the modern scientific method, and the development of ways to test the empirical validity of the supernatural. And partly because colonists in the Americas could not take their ancestors with them, moving from a built-up landscape full of folklore and traditions they understood to a landscape they could not see as fully settled, full of folklore and traditions they did not know. And partly because of the rise of interiority and subjectivity as useful societal concepts, and the intersection of interiority and subjectivity with the newly-minted American Dream. Bergland is literally the first writer I have seen mention that the United States began as a colonized country and became a colonial power, and that the second required systematic repression of the knowledge of what it had been like to be the first. This repression was produced at least partially via the myth of American exceptionalism: we won the American Revolution because we are just so gosh-darn special. Therefore, if we keep winning things, we keep on being special. A widespread mythology on both a national and a personal level-- and this is where that intersection of interiority with national myth comes in, that particular Puritan-Calvinist slant which says that if you won you must deserve to win, and if not, not. The awareness that no one can win everything all the time, and that those who do not win are not worthless, remains despite its repression. The American Dream as a system for judging self-worth is a false consciousness, and therefore, as are all false consciousnesses, it is haunted. You see, then, why the new ghost is so nebulous: it cannot be entirely banished until the false consciousness is banished, but the pervasive national mythology does not allow societal awareness of the falsity. Nameless crimes, nameless shames, nameless fears of not living up to a value system which is beyond human capabilities.
Which dovetails nicely with the fact that in the process of establishing their colonies the American colonists in fact committed a great many crimes, horrible ones, genocide and attempted genocide and murder and theft and fraud and rape and the illegal transfer of power in many kingdoms, so many crimes they have not been and cannot be documented in their entirety. Just the milieu in which one would expect an Old World ghost, publicly crying for justice. Just the milieu in which an Old World ghost, with its public exposure of crime and call for action, cannot be societally acknowledged.
Consequently white settlers have seen Native Americans as ghosts, and represented them as such in literature, from pretty much the first, and the new style of American ghost emerged out of this. The results of this process have even become on some levels reassuring: the train of thought goes, they're haunting us, so they serve as surrogate ancestors (Old World ghost-style), which gives our claim to the land a certain legitimacy, but they're not haunting us publicly enough to demand we do anything about it (subjectivity!).
And of course haunting, and the Native American as a ghost, implies something else very reassuring to the white settler too, doesn't it? It implies that all the Native Americans are dead. Or will be soon. It relegates them to the past. You don't have to pay as much attention, in some ways, to the crimes shown you by a ghost, as you do the crimes being committed against a real, living person with whom you have to coexist. Seeing the living person as a ghost means that on some level there's nothing you can do about the crime, that the crime has already been committed. This allows you to go on committing the crime with only that nagging sense that something deeply under the surface is wrong... which comes from being haunted in the first place, you can tell yourself. Seeing the Native American as a ghost actually served as a justification for the continuing removal of Native Americans from their land, because they were 'doomed', because 'their extinction was inevitable', the 'vanishing Indians'. This rhetoric is all over three-and-a-half centuries of American public speech, despite the fact that it is not remotely based in actual physical realities.
This is where we come to something else very interesting. As I have mentioned, Bergland describes the history of the trope of Native American as ghost in American literature, and the changes of that trope. Who uses the trope?
In every single instance-- from the very first usage through every significant change in trope that Bergland can find-- the Native American as a ghost appears first in work by Native American or otherwise culturally marginalized authors, and is then appropriated and changed in meaning by subsequent mainstream writers. Every time.**
The body of Bergland's scholarship is her list of examples of this appropriation. Her examples range freely through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries and describe in fascinating detail the work of a number of writers I now wish to read, such as the Pequot and Mashpee activist William Apess, whose policies of civil disobedience were a demonstrable influence on Thoreau, and whose rhetoric Hawthorne appears to have almost precisely inverted, intentionally or otherwise, in amazingly twitchy ways. (Hawthorne and Apess lived in the same small town at the same time.) One does not really need another addition to that portion of American letters composed of brutal takedowns of James Fenimore Cooper, since it is already such a well-respected art form, but Bergland's evisceration of the politics of interracial romance between Native American men and white women in Cooper's work as compared to the politics of interracial romance between Native American men and white women in previous best-selling works by female authors is breathtaking.
But the discussion I find most interesting is the late twentieth-century one, because it demonstrates so clearly the effect that this kind of appropriation can have on public life.
In 1977, Leslie Marmon Silko published Ceremony (another book I now intend to read). Ceremony is centered on Laguna Pueblo traditions. In it, there are a lot of ghostly figures, which for Bergland fall into two categories: the protagonist and his family, who are Laguna (the protagonist is a shellshocked veteran, ghostly in his own life; other family members and his lover are more or less supernatural figures); and white people, who were literally created in a witchcraft contest held centuries ago between Native Americans. White people are the deathly and fearful ghosts the Native Americans brought forth, who exist mostly in Native Americans' minds but who can do real, physical damage. They do not have agency in themselves, having been produced in a way that was a manifestation of evil, but also therefore cannot prevent themselves or necessarily be prevented from continuing to do great evil. This is a literal reversal of the usual discourse. Whites are seen here the way that white authors have represented spectral Indians. The arc of the protagonist is an emergence from marginalization and ghostliness in his own life via embrace of his culture and his cultural ideals, in ways which echo traditional Laguna stories. Eventually, for his own spiritual good, he even learns to transcend his hatred of white people, a vital step for him because he is part-white. Again, this is something of a trope-reversal-- just picture the sort of book this would be with the races reversed, well-meaning, naive, and probably out there somewhere. Ceremony received a lot of critical acclaim and is a famous novel of which I have heard all my life. I have not, however, had it directly suggested to me that I should read it, had it assigned to me in school, etc.
Also in the late 1970s, the Native tribes of Maine were on the verge of winning a suit they had brought to reclaim land which was theirs by treaty. The suit went on for a decade and could have threatened the land title of most of Maine's white residents. Tensions ran high, and there was significant public outcry against the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes in the Maine press and elsewhere. The suit was settled in 1980.
In 1982, Stephen King, a Maine novelist, published Pet Sematary, a horror novel in which the protagonist and his family move into a house which is in front of a Micmac burial ground. (The Micmacs, note, used to be in a cultural confederacy with the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies, speak a similar language, and have similar customs.) The ghosts in the burial ground, and a cannibal god-figure represented as a version of the Wendigo, soon haunt the protagonist and his family, deathly, fearful ghosts who may have been created by the family's own dreams and hopes (specifically for the resurrection of the dead), but who have plenty of capacity to do real, physical damage. We are not really told how much agency they have, but we are told that they do great evil. Meanwhile the protagonist and his family attempt to cling to their traditional ways of life, settling and establishing themselves firmly against the Micmac menace and not in any way going and asking anyone from the tribe what they ought to do about the ghosts or how they could be respectful to the burial ground, until they are all eventually pulled down into a morass of ghostly loss of identity, zombiehood, possession and madness. Silko's protagonist's arc in reverse, and a re-reversal of the tropes she took and changed from the previous American cultural dialogue. Pet Sematary is a very best-selling novel of which I have heard all my life. I had read it by the time I reached high school and had seen the also very popular film before I entered college.
I do think the difference in levels of popularity is noteworthy and was not merely my experience, the difference between 'critically-acclaimed' and 'massive movie-producing bestseller'. Which book took deeper hold of pop-cultural imagination? Whites as ghosts, or Native Americans as ghosts? Well, when I described the circumstances above to several people in my daily life after reading Bergland's book-- that King wrote Pet Sematary in the context of a real lawsuit-- every single person I described it to made the same assumption when I asked them what they thought the outcome of the lawsuit would have been.
They assumed the tribes lost.
In actual fact, the tribes won approximately eighty million dollars and three hundred thousand acres of land, plus various things involving tribal sovereignty. Everyone I asked the question was delighted to hear this, but also genuinely shocked, astonished. Really, really surprised, because that's not how the narrative goes. Sure, in King's book the Indian ghosts win, but you know it's temporary, and also it's described as a terrible thing. They remain ghosts. Uncanny. Separate. Over there somewhere. Disruptive to the community. And that's the pop-culture narrative that remains about Maine and Native Americans from that time period. Pet Sematary. Which was way more popular than Ceremony...
Bergland's book came out in 2010, but I have another relevant anecdote about the way this kind of narrative takes over in pop culture from more recently. Do you all remember the 'Mayan Apocalypse' stuff that just wouldn't stay out of the media throughout 2012? Where it was stupid, and many people knew it was stupid, and yet it kept coming up, and a small number of people kept being frightened about it no matter how often they were told that that wasn't actually what the Mayans, you know, said or how their calendar actually works? I was on a messageboard, and I wish I had a citation for this but it was almost a year ago now, and someone said approximately the following: "If the Mayans came back and saw we were being like this about it, what do you think they'd say? Man, they'd sure think we were stupid... unless they really meant it was the end of the world." And after face-palming for approximately three separate reasons, I paged later in the thread, to find that someone else had said approximately this: "What do you mean, came back? We never went anywhere. I, personally, am full-blooded Maya, and on behalf of myself and my few hundred thousand closest neighbors, I have this to say to you and the entire internet about the so-called Mayan apocalypse: CUT IT THE FUCK OUT. Thanks." Which, exactly. Just about everybody you meet in the Yucatan is at least partially Maya.
You see how this is a similar discourse to the one in Pet Sematary? They're coming back (even though they never left) to do something unspecifiedly horrible (which wasn't actually in their cultural traditions, ever). And everyone in American pop life will think it is stupid and unlikely and not genuinely threatening, and also not be able to shut up about it, out of a vague sense of guilt and of maybe deserving something along those lines when you get right down to it.
I told you at the beginning of this review that I would convince you you have seen a ghost. Every time you saw someone or heard someone discuss the 'Mayan Apocalypse' last year? That is the ghost.
Compare the apocalypse discourse to the qualities of the new American ghost, as I described them: fear of this apocalypse is a private phenomenon, in that it demands no public action, is not a public concern although sometimes publicly discussed, is not widely publicly believed. There is the sense of a murky and confusing crime about it, that somehow the world deserves this specific apocalypse, and yet no insistence that that crime be given redress, or even that anyone understand what the crime was. The apocalypse is not ancestral to the people who fear it, but is a force from the outside coming to destabilize a structure supposedly newer and younger than itself. It is certainly raised from an untimely grave, because it kept coming back over and over and over again despite its widely-acknowledged total stupidity. It torments the guilt of the living, or else denies their existence entirely by relegating the very real and living Maya entirely to the past. It denies the peace of the dead by completely fucking misrepresenting them in ways which make them seem malevolent and occult and confusing. Unless you were so lucky as to be living under a rock last year, you saw it with your own eyes and/or heard it with your own ears.
That was a ghost, and a ghost in full daylight but still unrecognizable. That was a ghost which haunted and harmed, or rather, it was one small aspect of a ghost. There have been others.
The spectralization of Native Americans is a genuine ghost which haunts America. Do not think for one second that the ghost has been laid. It will turn up again in pop culture soon enough. The question is what harm it will do next time, and whether anyone will recognize it as it haunts.
* Bergland's book overreaches itself in precisely one sentence: I do not think it is reasonable to consider 'The Masque of the Red Death' in any way an example of racialized fear against Native Americans. The ghostly black and white polar inhabitants in 'MS. Found in a Bottle', sure, absolutely, that's racial anxiety right there. 'Red Death', not so much, and in order to convince me otherwise Bergland would have had to demonstrate the symbolic linkage of fear of Native Americans with fear of plague. Not only does she not do this, but in my experience it isn't a trope-- because Native Americans are figured as ghosts, not as contagions.
** A side-note: those of you who remember the controversy over Patricia Wrede's The Thirteenth Child a few years ago, a book in which there simply weren't any Native Americans at all, even as ghosts-- here is an additional explanation as to why that was so problematic. Denying the existence of people who in reality have been historically marginalized and badly hurt is bad enough. Denying their very existence as ghosts-- well, firstly, as Bergland amply demonstrates, Indian self-representation as European, Old-World-style ghosts seeking justice is one of the major rhetorical arguments used by Native American writers in American cultural discourse. So the absence of those ghosts removes one of the main avenues real, live Native Americans have into popular rhetoric. Secondly, the removal of the ghosts implies that America doesn't even need to have a guilty conscience anymore, that somehow the haunting is over, although the book's setting in other ways resembles the colonization of North America. It's an argument, albeit unconscious on the part of the book's author, for the truth of the false consciousness of American exceptionalism. To those aware of the crimes which have been committed against Native peoples, it comes off therefore as an almost Orwellian level of insulting. It is a double denial of the crime which does not even admit the possibility of guilt.
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Yes, I do mean you, whoever you are, reading this now. And yes, by ghost I do mean a spectre raised from an untimely grave to torment the guilt of the living and deny the peace of the dead, and by seen I mean seen, with your eyes, or possibly in some circumstances heard with your ears; I mean these things absolutely literally.
Having said that, I will now proceed to tell you that this slender little book of literary criticism, The National Uncanny, is one of the very best books I have read in an extremely long time, one of those books which makes the inside of the reader's head a different and a better place. It is a study of the figure of the Native American as ghost in American literature, but it contains wildly impressive theoretical insights on a variety of different topics at the rate of slightly more than one insight per paragraph. I found myself trying to quote some of the better bits to my wife a while ago and discovered I was literally just reading out loud without being able to skip anything. This is not the way I am accustomed to academic criticism working, although it is the way I would always like it to work.
What Bergland has done here is to look at the figure of the Native American as ghost from the very beginning of writings by and about Native Americans in English in what is now the United States, and then proceed through history to note changes in the tropes involved, up until the late twentieth century. In order to do this, Bergland has had to define what the figuring of Native Americans as ghosts in American literature is, what purposes it serves in literature and in culture, who has used the trope, and for what reasons they might have used it. All of this she has done, clearly and concisely and with beautifully complete documentation.
So let's start with ghosts, what is a ghost? What was a ghost in Europe? What was a ghost to the Northern Europeans who came to colonize North America?
A ghost, in pre-Enlightenment Europe, Bergland answers, is: a), a public phenomenon. It is visible to many. It may not be visible at all times, but if one person in a group sees it, all will, because the ghost is present on public business-- it is, b), the evidence of a crime. A ghost may haunt because of murder, or the theft or concealment of property, or fraud, or rape, or the illegal transfer of power in a kingdom, all of which are public affairs, crimes which it is in the public interest to have solved. Look at the ghosts in Shakespeare. It was a revolutionary dramaturgical gesture at the end of the nineteenth century to have Hamlet's father's ghost played as an offstage voice and to make it obvious to the theatre-goers that only Hamlet saw him. For generations before that, everyone on stage had seen him, and had been seen by the audience to be frightened. There is some question as to whether this sort of ghost is physically tangible, but there is no doubt of its being audible, if it speaks. It demands resolution for the crime that created it, either via selfish revenge or unselfish justice. It is also, c), a legacy handed down from ancestors. If Hamlet had decamped for Paris suddenly in the night, his father's ghost would have haunted Elsinore over the generations, until something was done by somebody to appease it, if indeed anything ever could. And a lot of the ghost stories one gets, in old Europe, are stories of ghosts which are signs of crimes generations or centuries old. They are part of both common and familial inheritance, manifesting as public scandals and as family curses and birthrights. Elsinore, haunted thusly, would have to be exorcised by Hamlet's descendants.
But in America and in modernity, we get a different kind of ghost. The characteristics of the post-Enlightenment ghost, and of the American ghost from the time of colonization, are as follows: a), the ghost is a private phenomenon. It appears to one person exclusively, or to a small group of beleaguered people, who are generally far away from society or who cannot get anyone to believe them. Sometimes, one person in a group may see it, or touch it, in the presence of others who do not know or believe it is there. There is generally no public acknowledgement of the haunting beyond dark and disbelieved rumor (whereas back in Europe you can take a tour to see the Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe). The new ghost is still, b), the evidence of a crime, but the crime may be murkier. The motivations of the ghost are less clear. There are a lot of vampire legends in New England, or there's that Rhode Island ghost of a young lady who may or may not have thrown herself or been thrown into a river. Suicide, infanticide, ghosts of incest, ghosts which do not speak, or which when they speak do not tell the hearers what must be done to let them rest. They do not call for the solving of the crimes of which they are symbolic. And, c), these ghosts are not ancestral to their viewers. They are strangers, and there may not even be local folklore which is clear on the subject, as with the Rhode Island young lady (suicide? murder? what was her name again? there are several distinct versions of it, which do not sound alike). To exorcise one, you do not need to be linked by blood, or by birth in the area. But it is much harder to tell if you have gotten rid of one, because their appearances are so limited, so subjective. They are not a force which produces societal justice; they are a force which produces individual madness.
At this point Bergland made an entire set of things come together in my brain by explaining the difference between the American and the European Gothic in fiction. In the European Gothic, the uncanny, whatever it is, is attempting to tear down a previously constructed edifice (building, society, family) from which it has come, while the non-uncanny elements of the story are trying to preserve the edifice. In the American Gothic, the non-uncanny elements of the story are trying to create such an edifice (building, society, family), and the uncanny, coming from outside, is trying to destroy it. Suddenly everything from Poe* to Shirley Jackson to Anne Rivers Siddons' The House Next Door made infinitely more sense. The difference in Gothic traditions is of course at least partially because of the difference between types of ghost.
Why the change in the American ghost? Well, partly because of the rise of the modern scientific method, and the development of ways to test the empirical validity of the supernatural. And partly because colonists in the Americas could not take their ancestors with them, moving from a built-up landscape full of folklore and traditions they understood to a landscape they could not see as fully settled, full of folklore and traditions they did not know. And partly because of the rise of interiority and subjectivity as useful societal concepts, and the intersection of interiority and subjectivity with the newly-minted American Dream. Bergland is literally the first writer I have seen mention that the United States began as a colonized country and became a colonial power, and that the second required systematic repression of the knowledge of what it had been like to be the first. This repression was produced at least partially via the myth of American exceptionalism: we won the American Revolution because we are just so gosh-darn special. Therefore, if we keep winning things, we keep on being special. A widespread mythology on both a national and a personal level-- and this is where that intersection of interiority with national myth comes in, that particular Puritan-Calvinist slant which says that if you won you must deserve to win, and if not, not. The awareness that no one can win everything all the time, and that those who do not win are not worthless, remains despite its repression. The American Dream as a system for judging self-worth is a false consciousness, and therefore, as are all false consciousnesses, it is haunted. You see, then, why the new ghost is so nebulous: it cannot be entirely banished until the false consciousness is banished, but the pervasive national mythology does not allow societal awareness of the falsity. Nameless crimes, nameless shames, nameless fears of not living up to a value system which is beyond human capabilities.
Which dovetails nicely with the fact that in the process of establishing their colonies the American colonists in fact committed a great many crimes, horrible ones, genocide and attempted genocide and murder and theft and fraud and rape and the illegal transfer of power in many kingdoms, so many crimes they have not been and cannot be documented in their entirety. Just the milieu in which one would expect an Old World ghost, publicly crying for justice. Just the milieu in which an Old World ghost, with its public exposure of crime and call for action, cannot be societally acknowledged.
Consequently white settlers have seen Native Americans as ghosts, and represented them as such in literature, from pretty much the first, and the new style of American ghost emerged out of this. The results of this process have even become on some levels reassuring: the train of thought goes, they're haunting us, so they serve as surrogate ancestors (Old World ghost-style), which gives our claim to the land a certain legitimacy, but they're not haunting us publicly enough to demand we do anything about it (subjectivity!).
And of course haunting, and the Native American as a ghost, implies something else very reassuring to the white settler too, doesn't it? It implies that all the Native Americans are dead. Or will be soon. It relegates them to the past. You don't have to pay as much attention, in some ways, to the crimes shown you by a ghost, as you do the crimes being committed against a real, living person with whom you have to coexist. Seeing the living person as a ghost means that on some level there's nothing you can do about the crime, that the crime has already been committed. This allows you to go on committing the crime with only that nagging sense that something deeply under the surface is wrong... which comes from being haunted in the first place, you can tell yourself. Seeing the Native American as a ghost actually served as a justification for the continuing removal of Native Americans from their land, because they were 'doomed', because 'their extinction was inevitable', the 'vanishing Indians'. This rhetoric is all over three-and-a-half centuries of American public speech, despite the fact that it is not remotely based in actual physical realities.
This is where we come to something else very interesting. As I have mentioned, Bergland describes the history of the trope of Native American as ghost in American literature, and the changes of that trope. Who uses the trope?
In every single instance-- from the very first usage through every significant change in trope that Bergland can find-- the Native American as a ghost appears first in work by Native American or otherwise culturally marginalized authors, and is then appropriated and changed in meaning by subsequent mainstream writers. Every time.**
The body of Bergland's scholarship is her list of examples of this appropriation. Her examples range freely through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries and describe in fascinating detail the work of a number of writers I now wish to read, such as the Pequot and Mashpee activist William Apess, whose policies of civil disobedience were a demonstrable influence on Thoreau, and whose rhetoric Hawthorne appears to have almost precisely inverted, intentionally or otherwise, in amazingly twitchy ways. (Hawthorne and Apess lived in the same small town at the same time.) One does not really need another addition to that portion of American letters composed of brutal takedowns of James Fenimore Cooper, since it is already such a well-respected art form, but Bergland's evisceration of the politics of interracial romance between Native American men and white women in Cooper's work as compared to the politics of interracial romance between Native American men and white women in previous best-selling works by female authors is breathtaking.
But the discussion I find most interesting is the late twentieth-century one, because it demonstrates so clearly the effect that this kind of appropriation can have on public life.
In 1977, Leslie Marmon Silko published Ceremony (another book I now intend to read). Ceremony is centered on Laguna Pueblo traditions. In it, there are a lot of ghostly figures, which for Bergland fall into two categories: the protagonist and his family, who are Laguna (the protagonist is a shellshocked veteran, ghostly in his own life; other family members and his lover are more or less supernatural figures); and white people, who were literally created in a witchcraft contest held centuries ago between Native Americans. White people are the deathly and fearful ghosts the Native Americans brought forth, who exist mostly in Native Americans' minds but who can do real, physical damage. They do not have agency in themselves, having been produced in a way that was a manifestation of evil, but also therefore cannot prevent themselves or necessarily be prevented from continuing to do great evil. This is a literal reversal of the usual discourse. Whites are seen here the way that white authors have represented spectral Indians. The arc of the protagonist is an emergence from marginalization and ghostliness in his own life via embrace of his culture and his cultural ideals, in ways which echo traditional Laguna stories. Eventually, for his own spiritual good, he even learns to transcend his hatred of white people, a vital step for him because he is part-white. Again, this is something of a trope-reversal-- just picture the sort of book this would be with the races reversed, well-meaning, naive, and probably out there somewhere. Ceremony received a lot of critical acclaim and is a famous novel of which I have heard all my life. I have not, however, had it directly suggested to me that I should read it, had it assigned to me in school, etc.
Also in the late 1970s, the Native tribes of Maine were on the verge of winning a suit they had brought to reclaim land which was theirs by treaty. The suit went on for a decade and could have threatened the land title of most of Maine's white residents. Tensions ran high, and there was significant public outcry against the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy tribes in the Maine press and elsewhere. The suit was settled in 1980.
In 1982, Stephen King, a Maine novelist, published Pet Sematary, a horror novel in which the protagonist and his family move into a house which is in front of a Micmac burial ground. (The Micmacs, note, used to be in a cultural confederacy with the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies, speak a similar language, and have similar customs.) The ghosts in the burial ground, and a cannibal god-figure represented as a version of the Wendigo, soon haunt the protagonist and his family, deathly, fearful ghosts who may have been created by the family's own dreams and hopes (specifically for the resurrection of the dead), but who have plenty of capacity to do real, physical damage. We are not really told how much agency they have, but we are told that they do great evil. Meanwhile the protagonist and his family attempt to cling to their traditional ways of life, settling and establishing themselves firmly against the Micmac menace and not in any way going and asking anyone from the tribe what they ought to do about the ghosts or how they could be respectful to the burial ground, until they are all eventually pulled down into a morass of ghostly loss of identity, zombiehood, possession and madness. Silko's protagonist's arc in reverse, and a re-reversal of the tropes she took and changed from the previous American cultural dialogue. Pet Sematary is a very best-selling novel of which I have heard all my life. I had read it by the time I reached high school and had seen the also very popular film before I entered college.
I do think the difference in levels of popularity is noteworthy and was not merely my experience, the difference between 'critically-acclaimed' and 'massive movie-producing bestseller'. Which book took deeper hold of pop-cultural imagination? Whites as ghosts, or Native Americans as ghosts? Well, when I described the circumstances above to several people in my daily life after reading Bergland's book-- that King wrote Pet Sematary in the context of a real lawsuit-- every single person I described it to made the same assumption when I asked them what they thought the outcome of the lawsuit would have been.
They assumed the tribes lost.
In actual fact, the tribes won approximately eighty million dollars and three hundred thousand acres of land, plus various things involving tribal sovereignty. Everyone I asked the question was delighted to hear this, but also genuinely shocked, astonished. Really, really surprised, because that's not how the narrative goes. Sure, in King's book the Indian ghosts win, but you know it's temporary, and also it's described as a terrible thing. They remain ghosts. Uncanny. Separate. Over there somewhere. Disruptive to the community. And that's the pop-culture narrative that remains about Maine and Native Americans from that time period. Pet Sematary. Which was way more popular than Ceremony...
Bergland's book came out in 2010, but I have another relevant anecdote about the way this kind of narrative takes over in pop culture from more recently. Do you all remember the 'Mayan Apocalypse' stuff that just wouldn't stay out of the media throughout 2012? Where it was stupid, and many people knew it was stupid, and yet it kept coming up, and a small number of people kept being frightened about it no matter how often they were told that that wasn't actually what the Mayans, you know, said or how their calendar actually works? I was on a messageboard, and I wish I had a citation for this but it was almost a year ago now, and someone said approximately the following: "If the Mayans came back and saw we were being like this about it, what do you think they'd say? Man, they'd sure think we were stupid... unless they really meant it was the end of the world." And after face-palming for approximately three separate reasons, I paged later in the thread, to find that someone else had said approximately this: "What do you mean, came back? We never went anywhere. I, personally, am full-blooded Maya, and on behalf of myself and my few hundred thousand closest neighbors, I have this to say to you and the entire internet about the so-called Mayan apocalypse: CUT IT THE FUCK OUT. Thanks." Which, exactly. Just about everybody you meet in the Yucatan is at least partially Maya.
You see how this is a similar discourse to the one in Pet Sematary? They're coming back (even though they never left) to do something unspecifiedly horrible (which wasn't actually in their cultural traditions, ever). And everyone in American pop life will think it is stupid and unlikely and not genuinely threatening, and also not be able to shut up about it, out of a vague sense of guilt and of maybe deserving something along those lines when you get right down to it.
I told you at the beginning of this review that I would convince you you have seen a ghost. Every time you saw someone or heard someone discuss the 'Mayan Apocalypse' last year? That is the ghost.
Compare the apocalypse discourse to the qualities of the new American ghost, as I described them: fear of this apocalypse is a private phenomenon, in that it demands no public action, is not a public concern although sometimes publicly discussed, is not widely publicly believed. There is the sense of a murky and confusing crime about it, that somehow the world deserves this specific apocalypse, and yet no insistence that that crime be given redress, or even that anyone understand what the crime was. The apocalypse is not ancestral to the people who fear it, but is a force from the outside coming to destabilize a structure supposedly newer and younger than itself. It is certainly raised from an untimely grave, because it kept coming back over and over and over again despite its widely-acknowledged total stupidity. It torments the guilt of the living, or else denies their existence entirely by relegating the very real and living Maya entirely to the past. It denies the peace of the dead by completely fucking misrepresenting them in ways which make them seem malevolent and occult and confusing. Unless you were so lucky as to be living under a rock last year, you saw it with your own eyes and/or heard it with your own ears.
That was a ghost, and a ghost in full daylight but still unrecognizable. That was a ghost which haunted and harmed, or rather, it was one small aspect of a ghost. There have been others.
The spectralization of Native Americans is a genuine ghost which haunts America. Do not think for one second that the ghost has been laid. It will turn up again in pop culture soon enough. The question is what harm it will do next time, and whether anyone will recognize it as it haunts.
* Bergland's book overreaches itself in precisely one sentence: I do not think it is reasonable to consider 'The Masque of the Red Death' in any way an example of racialized fear against Native Americans. The ghostly black and white polar inhabitants in 'MS. Found in a Bottle', sure, absolutely, that's racial anxiety right there. 'Red Death', not so much, and in order to convince me otherwise Bergland would have had to demonstrate the symbolic linkage of fear of Native Americans with fear of plague. Not only does she not do this, but in my experience it isn't a trope-- because Native Americans are figured as ghosts, not as contagions.
** A side-note: those of you who remember the controversy over Patricia Wrede's The Thirteenth Child a few years ago, a book in which there simply weren't any Native Americans at all, even as ghosts-- here is an additional explanation as to why that was so problematic. Denying the existence of people who in reality have been historically marginalized and badly hurt is bad enough. Denying their very existence as ghosts-- well, firstly, as Bergland amply demonstrates, Indian self-representation as European, Old-World-style ghosts seeking justice is one of the major rhetorical arguments used by Native American writers in American cultural discourse. So the absence of those ghosts removes one of the main avenues real, live Native Americans have into popular rhetoric. Secondly, the removal of the ghosts implies that America doesn't even need to have a guilty conscience anymore, that somehow the haunting is over, although the book's setting in other ways resembles the colonization of North America. It's an argument, albeit unconscious on the part of the book's author, for the truth of the false consciousness of American exceptionalism. To those aware of the crimes which have been committed against Native peoples, it comes off therefore as an almost Orwellian level of insulting. It is a double denial of the crime which does not even admit the possibility of guilt.
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