Faulkner and the Native South

Jay Watson, Annette Trefzer, James G. Thomas Jr.

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781496818102
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contributions by Eric Gary Anderson, Melanie R. Anderson, Jodi A. Byrd, Gina Caison, Robbie Ethridge, Patricia Galloway, LeAnne Howe, John Wharton Lowe, Katherine M. B. Osburn, Melanie Benson Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Jay Watson From new insights into the Chickasaw sources and far-reaching implications of Faulkner's fictional place-name "Yoknapatawpha, " to discussions that reveal the potential for indigenous land-, family-, and story-based methodologies to deepen understanding of Faulkner's fiction (including but not limited to the novels and stories he devoted explicitly to Native American topics), the eleven essays of this volume advance the critical analysis of Faulkner's Native South and the Native South's Faulkner. Critics push beyond assessments of the historical accuracy of his Native representations and the colonial hybridity of his Indian characters. Essayists turn instead to indigenous intellectual culture for new models, problems, and questions to bring to Faulkner studies. Along the way, readers are treated to illuminating comparisons between Faulkner's writings and the work of a number of Native American authors, filmmakers, tribal leaders, and historical figures. Faulkner and the Native South brings together Native and non-Native scholars in a stimulating and often surprising critical dialogue about the indigenous wellsprings of Faulkner's creative energies and about Faulkner's own complicated presence in Native American literary history.

Introduction

ANNETTE TREFZER AND JAY WATSON

What Is the Native South?

In order to locate William Faulkner meaningfully within the Native South, and to locate the Native South within and around him, some background material on this historical and cultural formation is in order. After all, just two decades ago, the “Native South” was neither a term nor a concept that appeared in southern—or for that matter, American—literary scholarship. The term is a complex construction because it yokes together two concepts that are not necessarily compatible, each pulling in different theoretical and disciplinary directions. Insofar as the “Native South” was methodologically visible at all, it was primarily so for scholars in academic fields adjacent to literary studies, disciplines like anthropology, archaeology, and history.

In 1976, for example, anthropologist Charles Hudson took stock of his field by noting that “all people have blind spots in their memory of the past, but the Southeastern Indians are victims of a virtual amnesia in our historical consciousness.”¹ His scholarly response to this amnesia was the book The Southeastern Indians, which laid the foundation for understanding southeastern US Indians as a “socially diverse, but culturally similar people” (5). Hudson identified a southeastern “culture area” that comprises the current-day states of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, western North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, southern and eastern Arkansas, Tennessee, and portions of adjoining states (5). For information on many of the shared cultural traits of Native people living in this area, he relied on a variety of historical sources, including the journals of the de Soto expedition (1539–43) and documents by European travelers, colonists, surveyors, naturalists, military men, and government officials such as the Chickasaw agent James Adair and the Creek agent Benjamin Hawkins. In addition, Hudson examined archaeological artifacts as well as records by previous anthropologists, including James Mooney (1861–1921) and John Swanton (1873–1958), to establish the cultural coherence of what came to be termed the Native South.

To many historians, by contrast, the Native South is a concept based on the shared experience of forced relocation following the Removal Act of 1830. Grant Foreman’s 1932 Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians is an early example, followed by historical work on individual southeastern tribes such Angie Debo’s The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (1934), David Corkran’s The Creek Frontier, 1540–1783 (1967), Arthur H. DeRosier Jr.’s The Removal of the Choctaw Indians (1970), and Arrell Gibson’s The Chickasaws (1971).² The commonalities of the modern historical experience of Native Americans from the South eventually resulted in scholarship that combined history and ethnography in the field of ethnohistory. According to Greg O’Brien, two scholars stand out in shaping this field: Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green. In the introduction to The Native South: Histories and Legacies, O’Brien writes, “As two of the very few historians writing about Native southerners in the 1980s, Green and Perdue formed a working relationship that sought to legitimize their shared academic field and create a market for new studies of the Native South.”³ Green’s work on Creek Indians and Perdue’s work on the Cherokee advanced a regional historical perspective.⁴ Both scholars were instrumental in starting a book series on Indians of the Southeast with the University of Nebraska Press that directed historians’ focus towards this geographical area. More than twenty-five years later, in 2008, this press established the journal Native South, further consolidating the discipline and issuing a challenge to scholars of southern history to “expand their conception of the field to include more than the black and white post-colonial South that colors much of the historical literature of the region” and to investigate “Southeastern Indian history with the goals of encouraging further study and exposing the influences of Indian people on the wider South.”⁵

Writing from the Native American studies point of view, historian Clara Sue Kidwell (White Earth Chippewa and Choctaw) argues that interdisciplinarity was and is crucial to current intellectual inquiry and debate within the field.⁶ She highlights two conferences, at the University of Oklahoma in 2007 and at the University of Georgia in 2008, as the crucible for the formation of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), as attendants from the disciplines of English, anthropology, history, religious studies, and Native American studies met and formed a new organization.⁷ Such interdisciplinarity has generated new research agendas: “With recognizable intellectual premises, research methodologies, theories, journals, and an association, the field certainly has all the trappings of a discipline. Key terms—survivance, communitism, intellectual sovereignty, and agency—are readily recognizable in the scholarly journals, constituting a precise language of scholarship (but, heaven forbid, not a jargon).”⁸ Joint scholarly conferences and journals welcoming interdisciplinarity continue to be crucial to the success of Native southern studies.

It was around this time that literary scholars in southern studies began to question prevalent constructions of a biracial South. In the 2002 collection of essays South to a New Place, Eric Anderson argued that “non-Native writers and other custodians of southern literature and history often downplay the long-standing Indigenous presence in, as it were, their own backyard.”⁹ Noting the continuing predominance of a bicultural black-and-white version of the South in a 2006 special issue of American Literature on the topic of new southern studies, Anderson again addressed the “relative absence of Indians in Southern literature classrooms” as a “gap in the field” and a challenge to “would-be practitioners of Native Southern studies.”¹⁰ There it is: quite possibly one of the first uses of the “Native South” within the context of southern literary studies.¹¹

And here is a crucial shift from longstanding acknowledgments of the Indian presence in the South by non-Native writers to the inclusion of Native American literature in studies of the US South. Depictions of Southeastern Indians are ubiquitous in American literature, from contact narratives by John Smith and others, to eighteenth-century narratives by William Byrd and William Bartram, to nineteenth-century fantasies of Noble Savages in novels by James Fenimore Cooper, William Gilmore Simms, and Helen Hunt Jackson, to twentieth-century depictions of Indians in southern literature by Andrew Lytle, Caroline Gordon, Eudora Welty, Alice Walker, and many others, including, of course, William Faulkner. Although scholarship on individual authors occasionally highlighted the Native American presence as character or trope in southern literature, such studies did not, however, include Native American texts or authors in the canon of southern literature and its scholarly explorations.

If southern literary studies did not typically include Native American texts, neither did Native American literature scholars especially take note of Indigenous southern authors and contexts. Anderson highlights the disconnect between Native and southern studies in work by Native American scholars, including Craig Womack, Robert Warrior, and Daniel Heath Justice, whose work on literature produced by members of the South’s Indian nations does not provide “an explicit regional perspective” on those works.¹² In Red on Red (1999), Womack’s study of the Creek literary tradition, he proposes a tribally specific framework emphasizing “Native American literary separatism.” Womack mentions the important role of a “geographically specific Creek landscape and the language and stories that are born out of that landscape” across which Creek people mapped their migrations from their original home in Alabama.¹³ But he does not posit any rootedness in or significance of the South as a literary shaping force and instead suggests a “concept of multiple homes” and continued migrations.¹⁴ Like Womack, who seeks to explore a tribally specific epistemology, Daniel Heath Justice establishes a unique Cherokee critical paradigm in the cultural concept of the Beloved Path.¹⁵ Though he later qualifies his “initial supposition that there was a single unitary idea of ‘Cherokeeness’” as “both naïve and, ultimately, impossible, especially given the long and tangled realities of Cherokee social history,” he insists on the importance of sovereign tribal literary traditions.¹⁶ Both Craig Womack and Daniel Heath Justice continue the work of Robert Warrior, who urged Native American scholars to “recover” their own intellectual traditions.¹⁷ Collectively these works are critical not only of an unspecified “Native American literature” category but also of a regionalist approach that would situate Native writing by Southeastern tribes in the South.

Just such a perspective, however, was available in the 1995 anthology by Daniel Littlefield and James Parins, Native American Writing in the Southeast: An Anthology, 1875–1935.¹⁸ This collection of primary works by Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Yuchi writers attributes a regional coherence to this body of writing that already points forward to the idea of a Native South. The main goal of the anthology is to trace a “long history of cultural continuity” as the period under consideration was marked by a “tremendous literary energy and extensive production of a rich literature, which blossomed in the late nineteenth century and bore fruit in the twentieth.”¹⁹ Though they do not explicitly theorize the regional boundaries they draw, Littlefield and Parins sift through hundreds of texts by writers whose “ancestral homelands were in the American Southeast” to highlight their contribution to a legacy that inspired contemporary Native authors such as Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Jim Barnes (Choctaw), Robert Conley (Keetoowah Band Cherokee), Joy Harjo (Cherokee/Muscogee), and others.²⁰

In their introduction to the 2010 anthology The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing after Removal, editors Geary Hobson, Janet McAdams, and Kathryn Walkiewicz argue that the title of Littlefield and Parins’ anthology is “a misnomer, since only four, or possibly five, of the twenty-eight contributors were born in the Southeast prior to the Removal period of the 1830s and 1840s. All of the remaining writers were born in Indian Territory (later Oklahoma).”²¹ The editors argue that the writers anthologized by Littlefield and Parins had a western geographical orientation since with the exception of four “they all lived their lives in Indian Territory.”²² Thus, strictly speaking, the writings of Reverend Israel Folsom, who was born in the Choctaw Nation in Mississippi in 1802, count in Hobson, McAdams, and Walkiewicz’s book as Southeastern Indian literature, but not the contributions of Muriel Hazel Wright, a historian who was born into the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma in 1889. This raises important geographical and historical questions: Where and when is the Native South to be found? Should Oklahoma, the former Indian Territory to which the Five Civilized Tribes were removed, be included or excluded? Does the term refer to any space where Native people originally from the South are now living? Or is it a template overlapping with mainstream geographical definitions of the US South? In insisting on a geographical US South and creating section headings by particular states and sub-regions, the editors of The People Who Stayed eliminate cultural connections and minimize continuities between people from the same tribe in the original Southeastern homelands and the new nations in Oklahoma—such as the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, or the Eastern Band of Cherokees and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma—but they effectively combat the pervasive idea of the Indian “vanished” from post-Removal southern space as they focus on “the South seldom seen.”

If focusing on Native American writing of the South is helpful for freshly recontextualizing southern literature by modifying its entrenched black and white racial patterns, the question remains, what, if anything, can a regional framework add to Native American studies? What are the contributions that each literary community might be able to offer to the other? What are the theoretical and scholarly collisions and collaborations that might result from such an expanded cross-disciplinary framework? As Melanie Benson Taylor asserts in Reconstructing the Native South (2012), Native and non-Native southerners have much in common, and their literary efforts share topics and concerns “echoing one another’s voices in kindred, unmistakable intimacy.”²³ Taylor argues that “native and non-native southerners have arrived at a common meeting place: that very fixation on storied pasts and insurmountable loss forms a shared Lost Cause more present, prescient, and uncanny than we might imagine.”²⁴ She proceeds to trace those points of conversion, including cultural narratives of abjection directed at southerners and Native people alike, poverty and economic deprivation, and haunting histories of material and cultural loss. Black southerners and Native Americans suffered long-term exposure to white supremacy and its “spectacles and illusions of opportunity and emancipation” that made it difficult to maintain their cultures and communities.²⁵ Native and non-Native southern communities experienced an imposed economic order during Removal and Reconstruction that resulted in a profound and long-lasting sense of dispossession. Taylor suggests that “perhaps in the end, the tribes that remain in the South have the most to teach us about the hope of solidarity and the peril of compromise—and above all, about the haunted, insular, and frail foundations of contemporary tribal nationalisms and sovereignty.”²⁶ As a trailblazer into the burgeoning field of Native southern studies, Taylor’s book raises methodological problems, most critical among them the question of how already “frail” tribal national perspectives and claims to Indigenous sovereignty square with regional alliances. When should southern regional identity be subordinated to Native nationalism? By whom, how, and why? When and how does the cultural geography of the South become important for Native American writers? In other words, what does it mean for Native American writers to claim multiple homes, including the South? Scholarship on the South certainly stands to gain more nuanced insight and complexity by integrating Native American texts and perspectives, but what does the Native American scholarship gain by paying attention to the place and practices of a particular region? However we proceed in exploring these questions, Eric Anderson advises that the “radical nature of the difference [between Native and southern studies] needs to be acknowledged, respected, and foregrounded.”²⁷ While Native and southern studies might have different disciplinary goals and ideological purposes in constructing their respective traditions, then, the fact is that being southern and Native American is a lived reality for many writers, including the sixty included in The People Who Stayed, and many more, like LeAnne Howe (featured in this collection) who are outspoken about embracing both legacies. While this introduction to Faulkner and the Native South can only gesture at the vexing complexity of these topics, we offer the chapters included here in the spirit of furthering discussion not only of Faulkner’s Native South but of the intersections between Native and non-Native histories and methodologies more generally.

The Indians of Faulkner Studies

So, what d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Note on the Conference
• Faulkner Didn’t Invent Yoknapatawpha, Everybody Knows That. So What Other Stories Do Chickasaws and Choctaws Know about Our Homelands?
• Souths as Prologues: Indigeneity, Race, and the Temporalities of Land; or, Why I Can’t Read William Faulkner
• Doom and Deliverance: Faulkner’s Dialectical Indians
• “Land! Hold On! Just Hold On!”: Flood Waters, Hard Times, and Sacred Land in “Old Man” and My Louisiana Love
• Dressing the Part: Evolution of Indian Dress in Faulkner
• “A Valid Signature”: Native American Sovereignty in Requiem for a Nun
• “Brother: Is This Truth?”: History, Fiction, and Colonialism in Faulkner’s Mississippi
• The Wild and the Tame: Sam Fathers as Ecological Indian
• Native Southern Transformations, or, Light in August and Werewolves
• From the Mausoleum to a Spider Web: William Faulkner’s and Louise Erdrich’s Takes on Hybridity
• Red Laughter: Humor in Faulkner’s Native Narratives
• Contributors