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

Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture & History. Ed. and Introduction by Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Pp. xl + 360, acknowledgments, illustrations, contributors, index.)Native an inescapable part of American landscape. They remind us of a not so distant past when land we call ours re- ally belonged to others, from whom it was taken by not altogether fair means. That past haunts us, and specter of indigenous as a memory of past injustice marks landscape and our experience of it. This is premise of book Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture & His- tory. The authors and editors North Amer- ican anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars, and they each address notion of a haunted landscape from 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 arranged in three sections: Methodologies (including two good literary analyses), Historical Encounters, and The Past in Present. Several of authors live on West Coast-Seattle and Vancouver-and work with vibrant Indigenous communities there, which enables them to compare imagined past and present from insider viewpoints.The introduction by editors Boyd and Thrush sets theoretical parameters of collection with their statement that native have shaped and informed colonizing encounters [becoming a] powerful trope of terror and la- ment (pp. viii-ix). They suggest that stories of Indigenous fill several functions: they express moral anxieties about displacement of native peoples, they harness real Indigenous beliefs about power and potency of dead which in turn cast as 'irrational' superstition which must give way to 'rational progress,' and finally stories disrupt dominant and official historical narrative (p. ix). The authors also routinely call on Freud's immensely useful idea of unheimlich, uncanny-a concept folklorists have somehow generally overlooked. A theme that consistently emerges from all of essays is way that the histories of actual Indigenous peoples routinely displaced... by narratives of ghosts (p. xxv).While there many good essays in this collection, several of them outstanding; they will be of special interest to folklorists. Michelle Burnham's essay on Sherman Alexie's Killer as Indigenous Gothic was informed both by literary analysis and a sensitivity to issues affecting native peoples. Burnham calls on con- temporary literary theory, theories of Gothic, and Freud's notion of uncanny to produce a thoughtful, radical, and enormously useful reading of Alexie's sometimes disturbing novel.Coll Thrush's essay on Hauntings as Histo- ries: Indigenous Ghosts and Urban Past in Seattle is excellent. A historian, Thrush is also an outstanding writer. His essay insightfully uses stories of to map his- torical presence of Indigenous people just be- neath surface of modern Seattle. He writes of examining ghost story as a place-based methodology in which hauntings gesture to- ward salient conflicts and patterns in 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 Indigenous ge- ographies that predated city primarily near places where Indigenous presence was most dense and storied (p. 62). He draws from stories a pattern where used as markers of urban disorder-poverty and prostitution (p. 66). In compelling ways, they help us to make sense of past. Indian ghosts, he claims, are not so much metaphors drawn from imaginary of conquest as they metonyms for actual material processes by which that conquest took place (p. …

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