Indians must be ghosts.1
Richard Rodriguez.

1When analyzing the presence of ghosts in Canadian literature, it seems almost inevitable to consider the two final lines of Earle Birney’s poem ‘Can. Lit.’, ‘it’s only by our lack of ghosts/we’re haunted’, a much-quoted paradoxical statement in which the twentieth-century poet echoed Catharine Parr Traill’s 1833 complaint about the total banishment of ghosts and spirits from a ‘too matter-of-fact country for such supernaturals to visit’.2 While endorsing the nineteenth-century pioneer’s pessimistic views about the development of literature in an uninspiring cultural milieu, Birney was not merely lamenting the absence of ghosts and, by extension, the absence of a Canadian mythological framework. Additionally, he was verbalizing the current mood of his time and emphasizing that the majority of his fellow citizens in the early 1960s were still obsessed with this supposed absence. However, not all Canadians would agree with him. Margaret Atwood raised her voice in protest long before scholars acknowledged that Canadian literature is rich with narratives of haunting, and she spoke out many years before academic critics began to scrutinize the politics and poetics of Canadian textual spectrality by applying the principles of the much welcomed Derridean ‘hauntology’ which now pervades this area of Postcolonial Studies.

2In a 1977 essay, Atwood explicitly opposed Earle Birney’s assertion by denying that their country had ever been ghostless.3 She repeated the same argument in her 1991 Clarendon lectures, where she affirmed that ‘hordes of ghosts and related creatures populate Canadian fiction and poetry’, and underscored that ‘Birney’s “lack of ghosts” line is even less true of that non-physical border, that imaginative frontier, where the imported European imagination meets and crosses with the Native indigenous one’.4 Atwood focused her third lecture on the ubiquitous presence of the frightful Wendigo (the gigantic and voraciously cannibalistic snow-monster of the Algonquian-speaking peoples) in non-Native Canadian poetry and fiction. Although writers in Canada, either Native or non-Native, have also envisioned many other kinds of haunting by Native spectral figures, there is an understandable tendency to presume a certain homogeneity among such mythological creatures, picturing all of them as equally fearsome. Yet, one of the examples to prove that Canadian literature offers genuinely divergent uses of Native spectralization is to be found in the ‘non-physical border’ or ‘imaginative frontier’ indicated by Atwood, precisely the particular section in which Thomas King’s fiction is placed.

3Textual hauntings in the works of Thomas King, an American-born author who has described himself as both a Canadian writer and ‘a Native writer of Cherokee, Greek, and German descent’,5 deserve special critical attention because his ghosts exemplify exactly the opposite of what we would expect from ghosts in general, and in particular, from Native ghosts devised by Native people. King’s ghosts are not horrific, malevolent, macabre, vindictive, sorrowful, melancholic, monstrous, or repulsive. They may end up causing serious trouble, but they do not give rise to panic; instead, they produce unsettling effects, because their primary goal is to challenge us, rather than frighten us. Even if they do not exclusively embody the positive and life-affirming aspects of spectralization (because they may cause harm or bring about death inadvertently), they are not intrinsically gloomy. They do not lurk in the dark, but emerge in full light. They do not come out of the cellar, or roam the dim rooms of isolated houses, but show themselves in the open air and in the morning sun. Although these ghosts are playful rather than solemn, they are far from being trivial. They have an important ethical function, since they possess transformative power, at least for King’s readers, if not for his fictional characters. After bringing us initial uncertainty or absolute confusion, such ghosts ultimately provide us with some kind of enlightenment, an awareness which is enhanced by the realization that their appearances are often misunderstood by the characters they are supposed to impress. King’s ghosts have a fixed purpose regarding the author’s audience: their main function is to express the frictions arising from the coexistence of Natives and non-Natives in contemporary Canada, and to mediate the cultural collisions between peoples who live dramatically different social realities.

4Ghosts are useful agents to undermine dichotomous thinking, since they juxtapose seeming opposites. They blur any sharp distinctions between the living and the dead, between the past and the present, between the natural and the supernatural, between the normal and the paranormal, between the earthly and the spiritual, between the material and the abstract, between the corporeal and the incorporeal, between the rationally knowable and the inscrutable or incomprehensible. If we take into account that ghosts have the power to break all these categorical boundaries, we will gather that Thomas King’s having recourse to the empowering literary trope of spectrality makes sense, because his intensely political novels and short stories often question such differences by crossing borders, by blending elements drawn from those binary oppositions and by providing fruitful links between them.

5If humor and fantasy are Thomas King’s most common tools for subversion, it follows that his subversive ghosts should bear traces of both. In one of his 2003 Massey lectures, he remarked that he needs what he calls ‘saving stories’, that is, stories that make him laugh and help keep him alive.6 Perhaps one of such stories—surely one that makes him laugh—is ‘A Seat in the Garden’, a brief narrative originally published in the periodical Books in Canada in 1990, and later collected in King’s first volume of short fiction, One Good Story, That One (1993).7

6The theme of ‘A Seat in the Garden’ is the spectralization of the Indian by mainstream North-American culture, a theme approached by King with the typical wittiness of an author who rejects gravity and embraces comedy to deal with serious subjects.8 The protagonist of the story is Joe Hovaugh, who is weeding his garden when he suddenly sees a big Indian, naked to the waist, with braided hair and wearing ‘a single feather held in place by a leather band stretched around his head’ (83). The big Indian says one single phrase, ‘If you build it, they will come’, repeats it two more times, and mysteriously disappears before Joe has a chance to get a shovel to expel the intruder.9 When Joe tells his friend Red Mathews about this strange episode, the latter relates the incident to a movie scene (tacitly alluding to Field of Dreams), but Joe insists that it was a real Indian he saw standing in his cornfield. The big Indian comes back in the same guise to deliver exactly the same message, and as the police offer no help, Joe continues to confide his troubles to his friend Red, who at this point connects the occurrence with a film about a housing development built on an ancient Indian burial mound, thus implicitly referring to another popular 1989 movie, Pet Sematary, based on Stephen King’s homonymous bestseller.10 Unable to decipher the enigma, Joe and Red suppose that only an Indian could interpret the cryptic sentence and explain the odd circumstances. Yet, the closest to an Indian they can find in their area is a group of three old men who come around on weekends to pick up empty cans and carry them away in a grocery cart. The three local Indians neither see nor hear the ghost, but are clever enough to take advantage of the situation, and consequently, they give an answer that suits their practical needs. They put forward a logical explanation: the big Indian is tired of standing, and wants a bench to sit on. So, finally, Joe yields to their wishes and builds a seat in the garden, a measure which satisfies the three old men, but does not solve the problem that afflicts him and Red, because the big Indian continues to haunt the place.

7King’s account of the circumstances that prompted him to write the story illuminates some of the relevant subtleties of his deceptively simple text. When interviewed by Helmut Lutz and by Constance Rooke shortly after the incident, the author explained that, at the 1990 Annual Convention of the Canadian Learned Societies in Victoria, he had been attacked for not ‘picturing Indians realistically as drunks, and down-and-outers, suicides, and whatnot’ (Lutz 111). Although King did not name Robin Mathews, those who attended the meeting provided additional details about the confrontation, and identified this poet, playwright and academic as the source of inspiration for the fictional character of Red Mathews.11 Converting his initial anger into productive humor, King drafted ‘A Seat in the Garden’, alluding in his title to the bench which Robin Mathews had ‘supposedly built’ in his own garden ‘so that drunk or stoned Indians could sit on it’ (Lutz 113) and including in the story an actual remark which the Marxist Canadian nationalist had made about ‘Indians sitting around drinking Lysol’.12

8In the two interviews mentioned above, apart from venting his indignation at Robin Mathews’s attitude, King also expressed his disagreement with W.P. Kinsella, objecting to his tendency to ‘pit Indians against whites’ (Lutz 111), describing most of his Hobbema stories as ‘poor writing’, and qualifying some of his images of Natives as ‘offensive’ (Rooke 70). King’s position in the well-known controversy over Kinsella’s stereotyped representations of Native people in his ‘Indian’ stories clarifies the satirical intention that pervades ‘A Seat in the Garden’.13 His parodic allusions to both Shoeless Joe and Field of Dreams make sense, in spite of the fact that there are no Indians in Kinsella’s first novel nor in the film based on it, and there is no baseball in ‘A Seat in the Garden’. Indeed, in King’s revisionist short story, the weaving together of fact and fantasy is intended as a deconstructionist rewriting or alternative version of a canonical tale about how a farmer’s dreams and long-buried desires can come true in a magic cornfield.

9‘A Seat in the Garden’ foregrounds a number of central issues regarding how Natives are simplistically conceptualized as ‘Indians’ by non-Natives, in other words, how non-Natives have invented or construed the concept of Indianness.14 Contrary to the expectations of some readers, and perhaps due to his acknowledged lack of strong tribal ties with the Cherokee community (Lutz 109), King respectfully avoids presenting a ghost whose origin may be in ancestral Native spiritual figures. Instead, the big Indian in his story springs from modern popular culture, right from Hollywood. Both in his critical writings and in his fiction, King has frequently made his readers aware of the damaging impact of the American film industry, which has disseminated false images of Native people, thus committing, among other sins, the unethical fraud of mixing the genuine and the fake. Red Mathews reports that the big Indian ‘looks a little like Jeff Chandler’ (85), a white actor famous for playing Indian roles in Broken Arrow (1950) and other celebrated Western movies which spread incongruous media representations of ‘Indian warriors’. Apart from Jeff Chandler, the Indian in Joe’s garden also reminds Red of the Hollywood stars Ed Ames (87), Sal Mineo (93), Victor Mature, and Anthony Quinn (94), all of them renowned non-Native actors whose habit of playing Indian roles in B-grade Westerns Thomas King has satirized in his novel Green Grass, Running Water and openly criticized in several interviews.15

10Linked to the contention over Hollywood’s distorting portrayals of Native people is the controversy about the practice of photographing actual Natives. In ‘A Seat in the Garden’, King asserts his viewpoint deftly and convincingly while avoiding any lengthy discussion of the hot topic of ‘shadow catching’, which he has discussed elsewhere.16 Although Red Mathews tries to capture the image of the big Indian with his camera, he fails in his attempt to offer photographic evidence of what he and his friend are convinced they clearly see. Certainly, Red takes a picture of Joe whacking the big Indian with a shovel, but when the film is developed at a photo store, the big Indian is not in the photograph. These details, together with the description of Joe and his shovel traversing the big Indian’s body without encountering any tangible resistance and crashing into a compost mound, reinforce the idea that the body has no flesh and bones, and therefore the big Indian is, without a doubt, a ghost.

11The fact that the big Indian is only visible and audible to Joe Hovaugh and Red Mathews highlights another crucial question: the spectral figure only exists in the two white men’s minds, and becomes the manifestation of an internalized struggle. Both of them project their prejudices, frustrations, repressed desires, fantasies, guilt and psychic anxieties onto an imagined wild man by whom they feel threatened, even though they have never been attacked verbally or physically. On their part, the three old men—two of whom are Nootka while the third identifies himself as Cree—do not perceive the imaginary Indian, probably because they do not share the white men’s experience. The three old men are relegated to ‘a dry, scraggly wedge that Joe had never bothered to cultivate’ (88), an allusion to the areas where the Indian reservations were established. These men do not possess any estate, unlike Joe, who conceptualizes the big Indian basically as a trespasser on his private property, as an intruder who returns again and again to claim back a space which the landowner wants to retain for his sole use. Therefore, rather than being a personal ghost that persistently visits one individual, the big Indian is a communal or shared ghost that simultaneously haunts Joe and Red. The Indian spectre constitutes an emblematic representation of the unsettling legacy of colonization, whereas the two white men symbolically embody the colonizers, for they are the descendants of the European settlers who dispossessed the inhabitants of the territories they considered unpeopled. In this sense, the Indian ghost does not merely exemplify Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny, defined as ‘something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light’.17 The uncanny in this story has developed into the postcolonial or the neocolonial uncanny, that is, the collective guilt and anxiety which afflicts a whole settler-invader community when the shameful historical events that were barred from consciousness are remembered.

12In the contemporary context of King’s short story, it seems appropriate that the Indian ghost should not haunt the wilderness, as the former generations of colonizers had feared, but a modern garden cultivated by one of their descendants. Furthermore, it also seems suitable that the Indian ghost should regularly appear amidst the corn stalks, whereas the two whites always walk around the beets, the zucchini, the carrots, and the tomatoes. Thus, the author plays with the elements conventionally associated with each ethnicity, although he also switches roles in a carnivalesque manner so as to expose prejudice and to ironically counter stereotypes. For instance, while the two whites drink beer and litter the garden with their empty cans, the three Natives abstain from alcohol and actively contribute to the preservation of nature by helping to recycle garbage. The strange visions of the ghost make the two whites suspect of drunkness and insanity whereas the three Natives confront the situation by exhibiting common sense and a much more civilized and mentally-balanced behavior. Actually, the insistent visitations of the Indian ghost in this short story unsettle the established order because they undermine widely accepted preconceptions of racial difference.

13Apart from the big Indian in ‘A Seat in the Garden’, other Indian figures that mysteriously appear and disappear are to be found in King’s 1993 novel Green Grass, Running Water, where one of the characters is also called Joe Hovaugh, like the protagonist of the 1990 story. The echo of the name of Jehovah is more evident in the novel, because in this case the character is described as god-like in unmistakably biblical terms.18 Dr. Joe Hovaugh cultivates an orderly English garden, which brings to mind the Judeo-Christian Garden of Eden in the following scene: ‘Dr. Hovaugh sat in his chair behind his desk and looked out at the wall and the trees and the flowers and the swans on the blue-green pond in the garden, and he was pleased’ (16). The conceptual association between Dr. Joe Hovaugh’s garden and the Garden of Eden is strengthened by their affinity to the doctor’s perception of the New World, which has no room for its indigenous people. When he declares that his great-grandfather ‘came out here from the Old World’ in 1876, and ‘bought this land from the Indians’, ‘from a local tribe’ that Dr. Hovaugh believes ‘are extinct now’ after being ‘all killed by some disease’ (95-96), he denies any kind of permanence and continuity for the Native population, except as ghosts.

14Dr. Joe Hovaugh is the director of the American mental institution in which four old Indians have been interned for over one hundred years, because they were first admitted in 1891 and the novel is set in 1992. But there is something even more bizarre about these extraordinarily aged patients, a recurrence that puzzles and worries Dr. Joe Hovaugh. He has managed to connect their periodical disappearances (thirty-seven according to the hospital records) with a number of catastrophes, including the 1883 Krakatau eruption,19 the 1929 Stock Market crash, the explosion of Mount Saint Helens in 1980, and the burning of Yellowstone in 1988 (46-47). Other magical interventions of the four old Indians result in the temporary reversal of the outcome of Hollywood Westerns so that the Indians are not killed, but massacre John Wayne, Richard Widmark and their soldiers instead (321-22, 330).20 The Columbian quincentennial year, 1992, calls for a new venture for these mischievous old Indians ‘to fix the world’ with their supernatural powers. On this occasion, the escapees from the asylum decide to travel to a reservation in order to destroy a dam that will flood ancestral Blackfoot lands in the province of Alberta, a task they perform with disastrous effects, for it causes the death of Eli Stands Alone, the heroic man who has been blocking the completion of the dam single-handedly.

15In Green Grass, not only people display ghostly features. There are also ghost-cars or car-ghosts, which King uses to lampoon the historical voyage of Columbus in 1992. A blue Nissan, a red Pinto, and a white Karmann-Ghia suddenly vanish, leaving an inexplicable puddle of water in each empty parking space. When the three lost vehicles reappear, floating across a lake, they have been transformed into replicas of Columbus’s three ships: the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María (406-7).

16Haunting by non-human entities recurs in ‘Totem’, a 1988 story collected in Thomas King’s first volume of short fiction, One Good Story, That One (11-30). In this case, it is a museum that becomes haunted by totem poles, which the curators are unable to control. Nobody knows how the first totem pole turned up in the current exhibition, but they are certain that it does not belong there. The pole is not registered in the museum’s records, but there it is, gargling, chuckling, laughing, and chanting. As it is stuck, going right through the floor, the employees cut it off with a chainsaw, and put it in the basement. Then, a second totem pole emerges in the same place, disturbing everyone with its grunts. They put it in the basement along with the first one, but when they come back after lunch, they find another totem pole, shouting. Once the third totem pole is removed and stored with the other two, the fourth appears, singing. This time the curators resign themselves to a peaceful coexistence with the animated totem poles that continue to show signs of life.

17The debate over the display of Native sacred implements in museums is also evoked in King’s third novel, Truth and Bright Water (1999). One of its main characters is Monroe Swimmer, a self-declared ‘famous Indian artist’21 who removes ancestral bones and other exhibits from museums in order to take them back to the reserve where they rightfully belong (250-51). Swimmer explains how he ‘went around the world fixing paintings’ with his magic brushes (129). Once, he restored a canvas of a lake at dawn, and as soon as he finished, the images began to bleed through the layers of paint until an Indian village took shape, thus repopulating the land (130). Swimmer purchases an abandoned Methodist church and paints the outside with landscape scenes of such mastery that he makes the derelict building vanish into the prairies and the sky, thus symbolically obliterating the visible signs of colonization (43- 44). His next project involves applying the same procedure to an old nearby residential school so that it may also disappear from view (248). The ‘restoration work’ of this eccentric artist includes other remedial acts of creation, such as bringing the real buffalo back by scattering iron buffalo sculptures across the prairies (130-36). Reversing Aristotle’s mimetic theory of art as imitation of nature, Monroe Swimmer is convinced that nature will eventually imitate art, and so he exclaims: ‘Each day, the herd will grow larger and larger.... Before we’re done, the buffalo will return’ (135). This fictional character resists the erasure of history, and conjures up the ghosts that will reindigenize the prairie, a task he shares with his creator, Thomas King, who makes provocative use of the trope of haunting in order ‘to recreate the world along more Native lines’, as he observed in one of his interviews (Gzowski 70).

18As Warren Cariou has rightly pointed out, ‘Swimmer is a ghostly figure in many ways, a being of erasures and sudden disappearances, a mysterious man who is setting about to right the misrepresentations in the world of visual symbolism’.22 Nevertheless, Swimmer’s attempts at redress are far from being innocuous. The violence inherent in any decolonizing act manifests itself early in the novel, albeit not too severely, when the young Tecumseh, while helping Swimmer, cracks his shin a few times on the steps of a church which is no longer visible but in fact remains well in place, and thus retains its capacity to injure (44, 125-26, 248). Yet, the most traumatic consequences of Swimmer’s ceremonies materialize later on, when poor Lum falsely assumes that the artist in female guise is his dead mother who has come home (226, 252). The seemingly casual phrase uttered by Tecumseh’s father in a mysterious exchange with Aunt Cassie, ‘If you want to chase ghosts, go right ahead’ (222), suddenly gains an ominous overtone when Lum’s pursuit of his mother’s ghost precipitates his suicide (258). Although Swimmer never intended to harm Lum, his part in causing the wretched Native boy to plunge to his death cannot be overlooked. This poignant scene reminds readers of the essential tragic elements of Thomas King’s comic fiction, which avoids any naïve triumphalism and is free from utopic fantasies. In the stories he makes up ‘to try to set the world straight’ (2003: 60), being haunted does not always involve a positive development of consciousness, or invariably lead to an acknowledgement of guilt followed by authentic repentance. Indeed, his ghosts know that they will not change the world, but nevertheless they come back again and again in the hope that they will.23