The phrase “Ancestral Shadows” evokes the figures of Ishi, Kennewick Man, and all those whose dead body has been subjected to "ethnocultural encounters" in the US settler-colonial context. Yet they have "talked back" in literary acts of survivance. Diana Fuss, in an influential 2003 essay, defines the genre of “the corpse poem” in terms of a central paradox: a “poem implies subjective depth,” she argues, “while a corpse negates interiority.” In contrast, the experiential framework out of which the Indigenous dead speak exposes the impoverished nature of her European Enlightenment notion of death as non-existence. The Indigenous literary dead are located within tribal-national onto-epistemologies that propose very different understandings of the animate and inanimate.In Crossbloods (1990), Gerald Vizenor calls for the inauguration of “Bone Courts” where human remains would exercise their right, as "sovereign tribal bones, to be their own narrator" (63). Arguing that rights are not annulled at the point of death, but inhere in the material body, Vizenor proposes not only the concept but also the practice of the talking Native dead. Taking up his proposition, this presentation offers a survey of the imaginative work performed by the talking dead. When museum bones become their own narrators, then the mythology of “virgin land” is subverted; the settler fantasy of Indigenous “extinction” is contradicted; the talking dead defy the constraints of linear time to recover the ancestor's vision by repatriating Native presence into the contemporary moment.As Vizenor theorizes, the construction of the "Indian" depends upon the erasure of real Native people. The talking dead expose the ghoulish removal of Indigenous bones from the land as a key strategy in this creation of Native invisibility. The spectral Indigenous presence conjured by settler colonialism goes beyond the occupation of settler imaginative space to the material occupation of national territory. Recall, if you will, in John Ford's settler-propaganda film The Searchers (1956), the heroic speech delivered by the Texan "pioneer" wife, Mrs Jorgensen: "A Texican's nothin' but a human man out on a limb ... This year an' next and maybe for a hundred more. But I don't think it'll be forever. Someday this country will be a fine good place to be ... Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come." The substitutive logic of settler for Native bones supports, on the one hand, the collection, retention, and investigation of Indigenous human remains as well as, on the other hand, the politics of recovery, repatriation, and restoration. In 1990, Bone Courts were not created but NAGPRA was. Not in federal court but in the court of Indigenous imagination, Native bones critique the instrumentalizing of Enlightenment epistemologies that serve the interests of US settler colonialism by narrating their own stories of tribal survivance. We talk for the dead and we talk to the dead but in this presentation I engage with the talking (literary) dead – the sovereign bones exercising their inherent right to narrate their own story.