It's Not by Any Lack of Ghosts. We're Haunted.

First Nations Gothic and Spiritual Realism

The writing of Canada’s aboriginal peoples is, predictably, replete with colonial history and (post-)colonial horrors. It is also replete with myth – from the ubiquitous trickster to all sorts of ghosts that have come to haunt First Nations people in a (post-)colonial, globalized world. This study looks at four contemporary First Nations novels to trace these ghosts – Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen, and Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Night Wanderer and Motorcycles and Sweetgrass. It explores the question of how a traditional Eurocentric mode, the gothic, at the heart of which lie both imaginary horrors and the (colonial) binary of ‘self’ and ‘other’, can be turned back on itself in a very deliberate ‘writing back’ paradigm to express very real colonial horrors. This study also centers on the phenomenon of spiritual realism, prevalent in post-colonial writing all over the world, a mode in which mythical and spiritual elements enter a narrative of undiluted social realism to create a hybrid, decolonizing life-world, facilitating and celebrating a recovery of indigenous identity and culture in a globalized world, balancing colonial history with First Nations heritage.