White Ghosts Haunt Native Americans in Louise Erdrich's 'The Sentence'

Louise 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—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 protagonist. In life, Flora was dubbed by the employees at the Minneapolis bookstore where Tookie works as their “most annoying favorite customer.” She’s what Erdrich calls an Indigenophilopath—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 Indian burial ground trope 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.”

We spoke about her new novel, why she wanted to turn the horror trope on its head, and why Erdrich herself is a character in her own novel. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The bookstore in The Sentence is haunted by a woman who you describe as their “most annoying customer.” What about her is so annoying to the employees of the store?

This is a bookstore with an emphasis on Native American literature, politics, history, memoir, everything, right? Also jewelry and beautiful baskets, all the things that I wanted to have there in order to make it a focus for people who came to learn more, or for Native people, especially, to find favorite writers. Our most-annoying-favorite-customer comes partly because she loves books, but also because she is an imbiber of all things Indigenous. I mean, she is what people term a wannabe. She’s someone who is not Native, but has a kind of desperation to be Indigenous.

And that’s what happened, I think, to so many people during that time. It’s like the structures of society were uncovered as though they were covered with sand and the sand blew off in one tremendous month, beginning with those nine minutes.

It wasn’t just that. Obviously, there had been police killings and police beatings happening since the beginning of the state of Minnesota. She and Pollux go back to thinking about the Dakota War and how this incredibly murderous time in Minnesota history is still there, somehow, in the attitudes and in the pain that becomes uncovered in times like this.

Tookie works at a bookstore that’s similar to the one that you own, and she knows you—you’re a character in the book. Could you tell me about setting the book in your world, but not from your perspective?

I didn’t expect to do this exactly the way it happened. Of course, none of us really do. When a writer starts, I think we start writing because we don’t know what’s going to happen. But I wanted to write a ghost story. And I tried to do it in 2014. I wanted to set it in the bookstore because I felt like that’s a kind of haunted space, by definition. It’s a collection of many consciousnesses enclosed in what Tookie calls this “collection of words between cardboard covers.” But it’s really the contents of a person’s consciousness alive or dead. There are many, many thoughts, many dimensions in a bookstore. I thought it was haunted to begin with, and I thought I would really give it an extra haunting by providing a ghost.

It’s sort of an inversion of the Indian burial ground trope. Native people are haunted by a white ghost, as opposed to the way it is often, you know, with white people haunted by Native ghosts. So I’m wondering why you wanted to play off of that kind of plotline?