Faulkner Didn’t Invent Yoknapatawpha, Everybody Knows That

Abstract

This chapter introduces the reader to some of the Indigenous ways of knowing that inform the methodology of Native South studies. It illustrates how Choctaws and other Southeastern nations have turned to “core narratives as a survival strategy over millennia” of challenges posed both by the natural environment and by the “tired, hungry foreigners” who have sought refuge in Native homelands. Turning to the subject of weather prediction, Howe cites a range of writings—from Bienville’s correspondence of the early 1700s to Choctaw chief Ben Dwight’s inquiries among leaders of other tribal nations in the 1950s—as evidence not only that the tribes possessed a diversity of Indigenous knowledge “about long-term weather processes” but that they shared this knowledge intertribally, helping each other weather the threat of ecodisaster. The chapter faults Faulkner for Native characterizations that trade on stereotype, but also also, finds his imagination to be “driven” and “enlivened” by Native stories. His own ways of knowing were in some respects compatible with the story-centered epistemologies that are explored.