Phantom past, Indigenous presence : native ghosts in North American culture and history / edited and with an introduction by Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Boyd, Colleen E.

Thrush, Coll-Peter, 1970-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Indian mythology--North America.

Indian mythology.

Indians of North America--Religion.

Indians of North America.

Ghosts--North America.

Ghosts.

Ghosts in literature.

Indians in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (360 p.)

Place of Publication:

Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, c2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The imagined ghosts of Native Americans have been an important element of colonial fantasy in North America ever since European settlements were established in the seventeenth century. Native burial grounds and Native ghosts have long played a role in both regional and local folklore and in the national literature of the United States and Canada, as settlers struggled to create a new identity for themselves that melded their European heritage with their new, North American frontier surroundings. In this interdisciplinary volume, Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush bring together scholars from a variety of fields to discuss this North American fascination with "the phantom Native American." Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence explores the importance of ancestral spirits and historic places in Indigenous and settler communities as they relate to territory and history-in particular cultural, political, social, historical, and environmental contexts. From examinations of how individuals reacted to historical cases of "hauntings, " to how Native phantoms have functioned in the literature of North Americans, to interdisciplinary studies of how such beliefs and narratives allowed European settlers and Indigenous people to make sense of the legacies of colonialism and conquest, these essays show how the past and the present are intertwined through these stories.

Contents:

Introduction : bringing ghosts to ground / Colleen Boyd and Coll Thrush

Sherman Alexie's Indian killer as indigenous gothic / Michelle Burnham

Violence on the home front in Robinson Jeffers's "Tamar" / Geneva M. Gano

Hauntings as histories : indigenous ghosts and the urban past in Seattle / Coll Thrush

The anatomy of a haunting : Black Hawk's body and the fabric of history / Adam John Waterman

The baldoon mysteries / Lisa Philips and Allan K. McDougall

Haunting remains : educating a new American citizenry at Indian Hill Cemetery / Sarah Schneider Kavanagh

"We are standing in my ancestor's longhouse" : learning the language of spirits and ghosts / Colleen E. Boyd

Indigenous hauntings in settler colonial spaces : the activism of indigenous ancestors in the city of Toronto / Victoria Freeman

Shape-shifters, ghosts, and residual power : an examination of Northern Plains spiritual beliefs, location, objects, and spiritual colonialism / Cynthia Landrum

Ancestors, ethnohistorical practice, and the authentication of native place and past / C. Jill Grady.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-283-14643-6

9786613146434

0-8032-3618-2

OCLC:

792742291