Paranormal Nation

by Marc E. Fitch

  These contradictions in the American consciousness form an unusual ether—a spiritual limbo—in which the spirits and ghosts of the Native American people exist. George P. Hansen referred to this as the liminal area at the outskirts of rationality where truth and fiction blend; Bergland refers to it as the frontier where two cultures meet and interact. They are both the same in that it is a place for ghosts and spirits; a place of the paranormal where contradictions of fantasy and reality, truth and fiction all blend into a strange soup of belief, tradition, and fear. This is where the Native Americans have been relegated to—the liminal outskirts of the American consciousness, the frontier between man and ghosts. “Europeans take possession of Native America, to be sure, but at the same time, Native Americans take supernatural possession of their dispossessors. It is hard to know who is the victor in such a contest.”5 Because these contradictions concerning the origins of the United States cannot be resolved or buried, they linger as ghosts in the national consciousness. The native haunted-ness of the United States extends further than literature and pop culture and even further than social guilt; it travels to the heart of what it means to be human.

  Despite Tuan’s assertion that the United States should not be a place of ghosts, perhaps our faces turned forward have allowed the past to sneak up on us. Also, early colonists did not stumble upon a fully formed, forward-facing nation; rather they entered into a dark wilderness inhabited by a strange people who were possessed of beliefs in spirits that roamed the land. The early settlers arrived to a land that was virtually uninhabited when compared to the cities and towns from which they had come. They had left the technology and comforts of their homeland and endured several months’ journey across the Atlantic to arrive to a dark, coniferous land, utterly foreign and uncharted to the early Europeans. Even when they had established their colonies, they were still surrounded by the unknown. Early European belief systems incorporated the belief in ghosts, witches, and demons; those beliefs, combined with their surroundings, would naturally lead to myths and stories about ghosts and spirits. Furthermore, the presence of the Native Americans, with their foreign beliefs and practices, contributed to the settlers’ fears and beliefs in the supernatural wandering the forests and occasionally impeding upon the colonies. Malcolm McGrath, in his work Demons of the Modern World, focuses on early European and primitive thought and postulates that it is similar to that of children; there was no disconnect between the mechanical and symbolic worlds. Therefore, a landscape such as the completely undeveloped Americas would naturally inspire fear of ghosts and magical beliefs. While European thought had progressed somewhat from the Middle Ages, it was firmly believed that the mechanical world could be directly influenced through symbolic action and vice versa. “Modern children cannot make this distinction because they are not born with it and must learn it in school, and non-modern cultures cannot make it because the theories that support this distinction are only a relatively recent invention. Thus, both children and so-called primitive cultures see themselves as living in a world where both magic and nonhuman personalities are a real possibility.”6 Hence, even if early European settlers had come from a progressive and scientifically superior culture, the three-month journey across the Atlantic and into the dark, unknown wilderness of the primitive Americas would have symbolically been a regression from modernism backward into a primitive world where the boundaries between reality and magic were broken down and each flowed into the other. The Europeans entered an uncharted world; any notion of the modern world from which they had come was lost in the unknown landscape and the new world inhabited by a strange people with unknown spiritual beliefs. Tuan’s own work, Landscapes of Fear, illustrates how the American landscape itself would have produced a haunting dread and fear in the early settlers, based on early childhood fears and the European mythological tradition. “The forest figures prominently in fairy tales … It spells danger to the child, frightening by its strangeness—its polar contrast to the cozy world of the cottage. The forest also frightens by its vastness, its breadth and the size of its towering trees being beyond the scale of a child’s experience … It is a place of abandonment—the dark, chaotic non-world in which one feels utterly lost.”7 Primitive America was truly vast—a larger country than any experienced by the early settlers—and its wild nature broke down the symbolic barriers between civilization and the chaos.

  The mythologist Joseph Campbell believed that the basis for much of human mythology comes from an innate fear, something reserved in the collective consciousness of the species, which somehow knows to respond with fear to particular stimuli.

  Chicks with their eggshells still adhering to their tails dart for cover when a hawk flies overhead, but not when the bird is a gull or duck, heron or pigeon … The image of the inherited enemy is always asleep in the nervous system, and along with it the well proven reaction. Furthermore, even if all the hawks in the world were to vanish, their image would still sleep in the soul of the chick—never to be roused, however, unless by some accident of art…8

  Thus, according to Campbell, there exists an innate fear in humanity of the lurking unknown—chaos on the outskirts of order. Sigmund Freud also wrote on this subject, which he coined as “the uncanny.” While the early settlers had most certainly seen deep, dark forests in the past, and even though ghosts and other such folklore were a regular part of their European lives, the American landscape presented a world that was both new and familiar; something they recognized, and that recognition aroused fear. Freud uses the example of a haunted house. A haunted house is at once familiar, because we have all seen houses, but simultaneously new and frightening, because it contains an element which renders the familiar unfamiliar and the homey (the literal translation of Freud’s heimlichen) un-homey (unheimlichen). “It would seem that each one of us has been through a stage of individual development corresponding to that animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has traversed it without preserving certain traces of it that can be re-activated, and that everything that strikes us as ‘uncanny’ fulfills the condition of stirring those vestiges of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression.”9 And Bergland plays on the meaning of “un-homey” by replacing it with a more elegant and appropriate English word, “unsettling.” “The sense of unsettledness in the word unheimlich [sic] is important, because it evokes the colonialist paradigm that opposes civilization to the dark and mysterious world of the irrational and savage. Quite literally, the uncanny is the unsettled, the not-yet colonized, the unsuccessfully colonized, or the decolonized.”10 Stephen King defines terror as the sense that “things are in the unmaking”;11 in essence, the world is shedding its veneer of civilization, all the comforts and familiarities that we have come to know, and returning to its primitive and savage state.

  Therein lies the basis for the belief in Native American haunting; it was not something that necessarily arose out of direct experience with the native people, the genocide or the proceeding national guilt (though that is certainly part of it today), but rather it began with the mere setting of foot on this new land. The Europeans had certainly left off the vestiges of their familiar and modern society, and during the dangerous three-month voyage across the Atlantic, realized that they were venturing into new territory, something completely unsettled and unsettling. This journey away from civilization called forth the primitive fears in the modern man; primitive fears that man is born with and relates to on a magical level throughout childhood. America was an unsettled, dark and mysterious place after a three-month voyage from civilization into the unknown, and the native inhabitants of this land were imbued with the same mystery and fear. The natives haunted this landscape; they were of the land, and the land was unsettled and filled with potential danger. Thus, the Native American was already a source of fear, foreboding, and superstition without the Christian and racial guilt that would later become part of the modern United States.

  The subsequent genocide of the Native Americ
ans did nothing more than contribute to the ghostliness of these people. Freud cites dead bodies as producing an uncanny feeling: “Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts.”12 During the colonization of the Americas, “Citizen soldiers laid their own bodies on the line, and they grew intimately familiar with the corpses of conquered Native Americans … only Indian corpses had concrete reality; before they were dead, Native Americans were representative of the great unknown.”13 What occurred during the colonization of America and the Indian Wars was a strange inversion of reality; dead Indians became real, and living Indians became ghosts. The dead were known, and the living unknown; and thus, Native Americans were relegated to ghosts, and rumors of their ghostliness grew in the American consciousness.

  Another factor that contributed to the Native American haunting mythology is the convergence in the United States between European Christianity and Native American belief systems, which can be rather loosely labeled under the term totemism. Claude Lévi-Strauss writes, “…totemism assimilates men to animals, and the alleged ignorance of the role of the father in the replacement of the human genitor by spirits closer still to natural forces,” and, “Totemism is firstly the projection outside our own universe, as though by a kind of exorcism, of mental attitudes incompatible with the exigency of a discontinuity between man and nature which Christian thought has held to be essential.”14 Thus, the Native American saw himself as part of the spirit of nature, born from it and allied intimately with plants and animals, which were spiritual guides, guardians, provocateurs, and parents. The Indian was an extension of nature rather than lord over nature as appointed by a patriarchal God. Primitive peoples expressed this kinship with nature through the building of totems (like totem poles in North America) that simultaneously captured the spirit of particular plants and animals and also transcended those spirits and transformed them into something solid and concrete—a symbol. The Native Americans, by their belief system, were tied to the haunting land, which the settlers had begun to colonize. These beliefs fused both living and dead Indians to the very land that was being colonized and further blurred the boundary between tangible native and ephemeral ghost. Lance M. Foster is a part-time professor of anthropology at the University of Montana, Helena, and a member of the Ioway Tribe. He also runs a blog called Native American Paranormal, which traces some of the ideas and influences of Native American haunting, particularly concerning sacred burial grounds.

  Indigenous peoples, people before Christian times, have a tradition of merging with the land, physically and spiritually, after death and of restless spirits when they have been wronged. So in a way, the spirits of Native Americans are more present and powerful in their burial and sacred places, because they have merged their essence with the land itself and the land spirits there. And when the land is damaged, disturbed, built on … the spirits, the land itself, is unhappy. The average American feels that when they die, they go to heaven or hell, or somewhere else. The traditional Native American may have an idea of a distant “happy hunting ground” but also that some part of their spirit is fused within the land, especially where they are buried.15

  The apparent disparity between Christian beliefs in the separation between man and animal and the totemic beliefs that tied them together was obvious fodder for European settlers to associate the Native American with witchcraft, demons, and diabolical magic. Similar to the prosecution of witches in Europe during this time, the European settlers tried to either convert the natives or destroy them, thereby completing “God’s work” in the new land. “Christian settlers were soldiers in the war against Satan, who was in turn determined to unsettle what God had settled. The doubleness of the language is clear: unsettlement is both the undoing of the colonial project of settlement and the uncanny ‘feeling of dread and creeping horror’ (as Freud might describe it) that arises when Satan’s devices—Indians, diseases, lightning bolts, witches—threaten the settlement.”16

  However, the Native American belief systems were not destroyed along with the people. The colonists’ effort to do “God’s work” succeeded in eliminating the indigenous people, but it failed to destroy their belief system. In actuality, Christianity fused with the totemic belief systems and incorporated the Native American beliefs into its larger and more dogmatic framework. The fear of Indian ghosts, which was prevalent in the seventeenth century through the twentieth century, actually demonstrates that the Native American belief that the soul merged with the land had come to be readily accepted and feared by the U.S. population. The Ghost Dance Massacre at Wounded Knee, which will be discussed later, is ample evidence that the people and the government took the beliefs of the Native Americans seriously and had come to incorporate their totemic paradigm into their own Christian belief structure.

  In his work Psychoanalysis and Religion, Erich Fromm postulates that Christianity and the U.S. politic are nothing more than primitive totemic beliefs with the veneer of religion, organization, and politics.

  A person whose exclusive devotion is to the state or his political party, whose only criterion of value and truth is the interest of state or party, for whom the flag as a symbol of his group is a holy object, has a religion of clan and totem worship, even though in his own eyes it is a perfectly rational system (which, of course, all devotees to any kind of primitive religion believe). If we want to understand how systems like fascism or Stalinism can possess millions of people, ready to sacrifice their integrity and reason to the principle, “my country, right or wrong,” we are forced to consider the totemistic, the religious quality of their orientation.17

  Although Fromm was writing in the twentieth century and concerned himself mostly with the horror witnessed during World War II, his message speaks also to the Christian settlers during the earliest days of our nation when, in the name of “God,” an entire civilization was wiped out, and U.S. nationalism and government justified the near erasure of an entire people. Their belief was in the country as an entity rather than in the individual; and the belief of the Christians was equally in their symbolism of crosses and churches rather than in the actual teachings of Christ. In essence, their belief, their view of reality, and their very lives were extensions of the symbols of the state and church, and in those symbols was the strict adherence to blind faith despite all the contradictions that may arise. These symbols allow faith to become fact. Faith can be difficult because it requires belief in something that cannot be proved and cannot be seen; however, when replaced with a symbol, such as a cross or a flag, suddenly the belief goes from incorporeal faith to tangible gods. Thus, Fromm asserts that to this very day we continue to put faith and blind obedience into symbols and ideas rather than in spirit and reality. “Like nation, race, class, and gender can all be understood as ghostly entities. They may be imaginary, but they structure our lives nonetheless … If hegemonic powers are, in fact, ghostly powers, then all of us must believe in ghosts, just as we believe in stories, histories, or in memories.”18 And as Strauss writes, “In order that social order shall be maintained … it is necessary to assure the permanence and solidarity of the clans which compose the society. This permanence and solidarity can be based only on individual sentiments, and these, in order to be expressed efficaciously, demand a collective expression, which has to be fixed on concrete objects … This explains the place assigned to symbols such as flags, kings, presidents, etc., in contemporary societies.”19

  Thus, Christianity and U.S. nationalism were able to incorporate the totemic beliefs of the Native Americans into their respective frameworks, which resulted in the spirits of the Native Americans haunting the nation’s past and present. Our society and our religions are perfect for Indian ghosts. It has become part of our collective consciousness. Despite Tuan’s assertion that the United States should not be hospitable to ghosts, it is, in fact, part of our very soul.

  The greatest evidence for the assimilation of Na
tive American beliefs by the new Americans came in the battle of Wounded Knee, also known as the Ghost Dance Massacre.

  The Ghost Dance Movement began in 1889 when Jack (Wovoka) Wilson, a member of the Nevada Paiute, had a vision in which he saw God and all of his ancestors in paradise, and God instructed him to tell his people to live in peace and love and harmony; only then would peace come to their people. Wilson advocated a peaceful end to the white expansionism. He believed that the ancestral ghosts whom he had seen in his vision would aid the Native Americans in reclaiming their heritage, their lives and their lands. Wilson’s message resonated with other tribes, who sent members to Wilson to learn of his teachings. The practice of the Ghost Dance began to spread rapidly across the Midwest United States. The ritual called for a five-day dance that would cleanse the earth of evil. However, many in the U.S. government believed that the call to cleanse the earth of evil meant the eradication of the white race from American soil. During the reorganization of a Lakota treaty, government officials were sent to observe and monitor the Sioux in their transition and to train them in farming techniques. However, when food rations to the Sioux were cut in half, the tribes began practicing the Ghost Dance ritual with increased fervor, which caused great anxiety and fear in the government watchdog group. Troops were deployed to the area, and on December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull was arrested for not stopping the Ghost Dance ritual. The following day, as troops moved to disarm the Sioux, a struggle ensued and a gunfight broke out. The troops opened fire on the Native Americans and killed 153 within minutes, resulting in the “Battle at Wounded Knee,” also known as the Ghost Dance Massacre.

  Within this story, there lies an apparent contradiction in the U.S., Christian attitudes toward the native beliefs. Why would the Ghost Dance cause such a reaction? “Wavoka (Jack Wilson), the Ghost Dance prophet, developed the positive implications of Native American ancestral ghosts into one of the central elements of his vision. From the white American viewpoint, the same figure caused abject terror. The massacre at Wounded Knee brutally illustrates the United States’ refusal to allow the invocation of Native American ghosts.”20 The only explanation is that the “invocation of Native American ghosts,” caused such a stir because the Native American belief system had been adopted into the Christian American belief system. The totemism of the native people, who formed their symbols out of plants and animals, was recognized and incorporated by the Christian religion and U.S. nationalism that were themselves inherently totemic. The Ghost Dance caused fear precisely because the public and the government had come to recognize the Native American beliefs to be as indelible as their own. The white European Christian had come to occupy Native American land; however, the Native Americans had come to occupy the European belief systems. The Ghost Dance was feared because the people believed it would call upon all the evil ghosts of Native American ancestors to invade the waking, civilized world of the post–Civil War United States. It would be an invasion of the colonized, organized world of the new United States by a chaotic force of ghostly power. The Ghost Dance represented a threat to the spiritual boundaries of the new United States and was thus wiped out. However, those very ancestral spirits lived on in the ghost stories and testimonies of haunted people in future generations.