‘Destination Indigenous’: Wilderness Tourism, White Guilt, and Indigenous Ghosts in Algernon Blackwood's Canadian Gothic

Blackwood's Canadian stories offer a version of Gothic wilderness-tourism terror, informed by an inherent ambivalence and repressed guilt about the British ‘colonizer’ entering traditional Indigenous territory. The encounter with Indigenous peoples and cultures, even as these cultures are recognized as more holistic and authentic than rational British subjects, is marked by a distinct discomfort. The British tourists, for all that they want to become one with nature, experience themselves encompassed by a hostile natural environment in which they are aware of themselves as intruders. Indigenous cultures in these stories are either threatening spectres (‘The Valley of the Beasts’; ‘The Haunted Island’; ‘The Wendigo’) or forlorn remnants (‘Running Wolf’), in both instances highlighting the irrepressible guilt that stalks the white intruder who unconsciously courts an experience of self-dissolution as expiation. If the repressed content in these stories is the fact of colonization, entering the territory as a foreign element, an invader, represents a form of uncanny intrusion through which the disowned past returns. However, in Blackwood's stories, the characters seek out this memory of disownment. As a form of colonial expiation, Blackwood's Canadian gothics enact the process identified by Renée Bergland in The National Uncanny, whereby Indigenous ghosts (and monsters) are internalized within the colonizer's imagination as spectres of both guilt and desire.