Every time I return from the Western History Association’s annual meeting, I feel rejuvenated. WHA is one of the most welcoming and convivial communities for graduate students, and I’ve been fortunate to call it one of my intellectual homes for six years now. The friends and mentors I’ve been fortunate enough to make here and see each year make being a graduate student so much more joyful and sustainable. The Kansas City conference was no exception.

WHA is also a place where it’s easy for graduate students to make new friends to share our intellectual journeys with. I was excited to join a panel with Abby Gibson and USC and Saffron Sener from Harvard to discuss our work on the haunted West, specifically the haunted Native West. With the happy coincidence that WHA meets in October, we not only wanted to share our work, but make it fun, seasonal, and thought-provoking ahead of Halloween. Plus, what fun would it be to be a space historian if I didn’t get a chance to do some history of ufology before focusing on my dissertation? It was a chance for me to practice my historical storytelling skills, something my advisor puts a premium on, while also raising critical questions with the panel. How did ghost stories set in the West about Native Americans or appropriated from Native American traditional stories—shared around campfires at summer camp, circulated in newspapers, and even enshrined onto place names on maps—serve to promote American innocence in settler colonialism while also furthering the dispossession of Native lands?

Though I’m in Oregon now, I did my MA in Utah, which is no stranger to hauntings or aliens. The supposedly haunted history of a 500-odd acre ranch in the middle of the Uinta Basin in Utah once called the Sherman Ranch (now more famously known as Skinwalker Ranch) was my target of analysis. I was interested in investigating this “remote” site in the middle of nowhere that was haunted by the “curse of the s-walker.” Certainly, that’s the impression one gets from the ranch’s current owners and the History Channel, both of whom often claim that the site is avoided by “the Natives” even to this day. But when I put my BS in Geography to work (by opening Google Maps) I found the ranch was practically right down the street from Ute Indian Tribe’s offices in the middle of the second largest Indian reservation in the United States. Remote? Perhaps. But not nowhere. My research from there took me through territory I didn’t expect, examining a conspiracy (and, arguably, a scam) tying together the paranormal, odd aerospace tycoons, drought, and recessions in the cattle market.

I found that the haunted Native West is not a harmless trope, but one that can be weaponized by settlers for enormous economic gain while bloodlessly narrating Native people off of the land, even in the middle of literal Indian Country. After all, what’s the harm in breaking off this piece of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation if the stories we tell say Utes didn’t want the land in the first place? Abby then gave her paper on ghost stories of the “Great American Desert” and how hauntings paired with geographic knowledge about the American West (or lack thereof) in the nineteenth century. Our adventures in historical geography then ended with Saffron’s interrogation of places in the United States with the word “devil” in their names. What should have been recognized as sacred places of spiritual power, honoring Native histories, were instead demonized and sanitized, now uncritically accepted as part of our geography. In an age of alternative facts and pseudohistory, we must ensure that Native histories and traditional stories do not get appropriated and weaponized to continue the cycles of dispossession against Native people.

As I transition to focusing on my dissertation research, I’ll miss the opportunity to continue to poke around the history of the American West with these fun research side quests. However, even as I switch from ghosts and aliens to eclipses and telescopes, I know that I can continue to rely on the community at WHA to improve my scholarship in ways that are helpful, critical, and joyful.