Native American Dis/possessions: Postcolonial Trauma in Hitchcock’s Vertigo

Abstract

The Ohlone, the original settlers of the San Francisco region, were violently dispossessed by successive colonial regimes, first Spanish, then US American. The colonial trauma was written out of history, and by the 20th century anthropologists pronounced the Ohlone to be ‘extinct’. In this article, I explore how the dispossession of the Ohlone haunt one of the greatest movies of all time: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Although Vertigo is one of the most-analysed films ever, no one has noticed that Carlotta Valdes – the dispossessed woman who comes back from the dead to take possession of the living – would have been Native American. A hauntological reading reveals Vertigo as an unwitting witness of colonial dispossession.