The white ghosts haunting Native Americans in 'The Sentence'
This month on Code Switch, we're talking to some of our favorite Indigenous authors about books that offer an escape. First up, a conversation with writer Louise Erdrich.
Erdrich's new novel The Sentence is not your average ghost story. Ghosts are often thought to be malicious phantoms that torment the living, or maybe (if you're lucky) the spirit of a loved one watching over you. But in The Sentence, which came out earlier this month, Erdrich posits that maybe ghosts are just as human as they were in life â at times greedy, other times sympathetic, but all-in-all, complex.
Flora is all of those things. She's a ghost that haunts Tookie, the story's-- someone with such a deep fascination with Native Americans that she adopts their identity as her own. Erdrich told me that this inversion of the reflects the realities of American colonialism: "We're haunted by the spirits of settlers, by the spirits of government officials, by a history that includes extermination policies explicitly aimed at your nation, my nation, all nations. These are white ghosts."
