Bury My Guilt in an Indian Burial Ground

Like many Americans who cherish the months following the Autumnal Equinox, I love the spooky nature of October leading up to Halloween. As a Native person however, I’m always hesitant about this otherwise enjoyable holiday because many a white person has ruined the aspect of dressing up for me. But I have always relished creepy ghost stories and supernatural thrillers, which is why when I saw the series Haunted pop up in my Netflix queue, I couldn’t wait to park my tv-loving ass on the couch for three nights of eerie binging. Without giving too much away, the show format is a documentary mashup of true stories being recounted by victims of extreme hauntings to a room full of their nearest and dearest. These storytelling sessions are plotted alongside mostly high quality reenactments played by actors. Although I’m extremely averse to tv reenactments (except for the enthralling late 80s reality series Rescue 911 — duh), I like the concept of emotional storytelling by disturbed individuals who grew up under the thumb of wicked entities.

Viewing was absolutely idyllic! With one hand shoved into a bowl of popcorn, I watched in the first episode a grown man break into tears about his experiences being haunted as a child which is honestly like porn to me. But then in the second episode, after the opening sequence ends (is “skipped” tbh), the storyteller, a middle-aged white woman opens her frightful tale with, “I grew up in upstate New York. Our house was built…on a Native American burial ground.” Instantly, a deep and guttural sigh burst from my throat. As if channeling the spirit of an agitated goose, a piercing, involuntary “HAAAAAAA!” sprang from my lips and I was suddenly compelled to turn the show right off.

What is it — I wondered — about popular horror using “Indian Burial Grounds” as a trope that makes my eyes roll harder than Beetlejuice when Lydia rejects his advances? It might be that the trope has become a comedic device so popular that when said with any kind of seriousness — as did Haunted’s storyteller — it sets the fraud alarms a-wailin’. But my annoyance goes slightly deeper than that so I did a little grave digging into the origins of the IBG concept and where it connects in history’s timeline of Native American social movements.

Turns out the Indian Burial Ground (IBG) trope is not uncommon to write about. Several white writers have cited the problematic nature of IBGs and author Terri Jean lists the many movies and books that use the trope as well as her list of reasons for using them. One thing is clear across my research: the hilariously fictional horrors surrounding construction upon or dwelling atop Indian Burial Grounds began in film and literature of the late 1970s and early 1980s with Amityville Horror (1979), The Shining (1980) and Pet Cemetery (1983). It is my official Native, horror-loving thesis that the IBG trope is a very lazy response to one of the most monumental calls for Native justice in the 20th century: the American Indian Movement of the 1970s. If you know nothing else about the American Indian Movement (shame on you), then just know that AIM was a series of Native-centered acts of resistance that brought national attention to Indigenous sovereignty issues through events such as the Occupation of Alcatraz (1969), the Wounded Knee Incident (1973) and its culmination in The Longest Walk (1978) where AIM participants and 2,000 supporters walked from San Francisco to the Washington Monument in DC. Ultimately, AIM prompted important intertribal coalitions to be formed but its attempts at gaining mainstream support garnered what appears to be more a sense of sympathy from the white population for the plight of Indigenous people of the U.S. But as activists and social critics, it is widely known that sympathy is an inactive emotional response. Sympathy merely shows a passive awareness of another’s plight. Sympathy most often manifests as or transforms into white guilt.

In the case of the Indian Burial Ground trope, the threat of hauntings from pissed-off Native American ghosts works to victimize white homeowners; to spook the settler colonial guilt right out of them, sometimes with the helpful prayers and sage-burning of a white psychic medium (eyeroll). When I see the IBG trope used, it brings me back to the image of white settlers in the era of manifest destiny and in Westerns. These hapless victims are depicted as frightened families, vulnerable to the untamed landscape and swarms of wild savages ever encroaching on their rightful homesteads. And so are the terrified homeowners of 1970s and 80s horror flicks invaded by an evil unknown. “Could it be that this pristine new property we just acquired is tainted by vexed spirits of those who came before?” There was definitely a prevalent level of white guilt relative to Native issues at this time. As an Urban Native child of the 1980s, I think back upon the ways in which the small community of intertribal Indigenous people living off of Reservations in Oregon were together going through the process of post-AIM community organizing with an emphasis on traditional practices and education. My own Grandparents and Parents worked very diligently within their local governments and the school districts to educate the populace about Native existence and ways of life, all the while raising their family to speak proudly about our heritage and to embody the values and traditions of our Indigeneity. They battled the yearly onslaught of Pilgrim-Indian pageants at our schools all with an understanding that Reservation living still came with exceptional disadvantages — the removal of a people from their land proving to be an injustice that haunted one generation after another.

Indeed one of the most baffling parts of the Indian Burial Ground philosophy in tv and film is the ridiculous way in which the haunting manifests. It never appears as the ghost of an actual Native person. Can you imagine? No, writers would never take it that far. It almost always appears as a poltergeist, a psychotic break or a possession. For the sake of research, I continued to watch Episode 2 of Haunted and (spoiler alert) the storyteller regales us with disturbing accounts of her father — a psychopath and serial murderer — being possessed with what she believes to be a demonic spirit. The Indian Burial Ground doesn’t even come up again in the episode! Are we to believe then that the literal foundation of this woman’s childhood home in rural, upstate New York disturbed the ancient Onondoga or the Oneida spirits so much that they took time away from ancestor-ing to devilishly possess this already-disturbed man, taking the form of what is very clearly a demon from Roman Catholic lore? Whatever, I’m confused.

All I know, from the point of view of one Lakota Native who enjoyed The Shining as much as you did but with one eyebrow raised, is that the only “ghost stories” I’ve ever heard from my own people are that of ancestors who carry wisdom, who aim to protect, who are considered sacred and powerful, and whose manifestations as malevolent only occur when they’re not talked about. When their story isn’t told. There’s a moral here that I hope you’re grasping. When someone tells you that their house is built on an Indian Burial Ground and it makes the hair stand up on your arms, ask yourself, “What am I really afraid of? Am I afraid of Indigenous people because of pop culture’s portrayal of them as unholy, spurned beasts of the underworld? Or am I afraid of my own willful ignorance of settler colonialism and modern Native issues? Am I afraid that Natives’ stories haven’t actually been told?” I’ll go ahead and assume that it’s a mix of all. But until Native filmmakers and television writers get a chance to scare the shit out of mainstream audiences with our own stories, we’re all stuck with supernatural microaggressions and embarrassingly coded displays of white guilt.