Cultural geographies essay: Indigenous spectrality and the politics of postcolonial ghost stories

Abstract

This essay considers the politics of describing Indigenous peoples as ghostly or haunting presences. Focusing on the history of haunting tropes in Canadian cultural production and the recent re-emergence of the spectral Indigenous figure in, among other places, a wilderness park in southwestern British Columbia, I argue that the mobilization of haunting tropes to make sense of contemporary settler-Indigenous relations reinscribes colonial power relations and fails to account for the specific experiences and claims of Indigenous peoples. At a time when cultural geographers are contemplating the possibilities of a ‘spectral turn’, this essay asks what politics are involved in deploying a spectro-geographical approach to studies of the colonial and postcolonial.