Analysis Of The Indian Burying Ground

Native American depiction that is centered around death is equally emphasized in Freneau’s “The Indian Burying Ground”. Not only does Freneau’s poem deal with the death of Indians and their burial rituals, it also introduces a ghost-like and spectral representation of the Native Americans. As Renee L. Bergland effectively chronicles in her book, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects: “the ghosting of the Indian is a technique of removal . . . [where] white writers effectively remove them from American lands, and place them, instead, within the American imagination . . . By discursively emptying physical territory of the Indians and by removing those Indians into white imaginative spaces, spectralization claims the physical

In the last stanza of “The Indian Burying Ground” Freneau describes a “painted chief, and a pointed spear” amidst the “shadows and delusions here” (1108) and speaks of the ghosts and spectres that will “linger” (1108) in perpetuity. It is important to note that when Freneau speaks of ghosts, he is looking to a time when the Indians have vanished and gone but it is not so in the present-day. His poem foreshadows the ghostly and spectral Native American’s plaguing of the “Enlightened” American future. Although there seems to be an indication of a certain kind of Native American presence in the “American imagination” and narrative, it is critical to note that this presence is of a supernatural and abstract nature. Bergland’s use of the word “haunts” (5), when describing the bearing of the Native American ghost on the “American imagination” (5), is indicative of the nature of their influence –that it would be horrifying and mostly uninvited by the American narrative. The supernatural and incredulous quality that is credited to such a spectral presence in the larger American narrative, then, is not a step up from being relegated to the sidelines of history. In a dark, spectral representation, the Native American voice continues to be