“Land! Hold On! Just Hold On!”:

Abstract

This essay interrogates William Faulkner’s “Old Man” section of The Wild Palms (1939), with its depiction of the 1927 flood, alongside Houma filmmaker Monique Verdin’s documentary My Louisiana Love (2012), which recounts Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, to examine the ways that the two texts present ecological disaster in the Native South. In many cases, Faulkner takes liberties and makes mistakes in his use of Native history, but to catalogue his successes or failures means to remain fixed upon Faulkner’s tapestry alone, imagining that the “Native” runs through his fictional Yoknapatawpha like a single thread. Rather, this essay examines the ways in which Faulkner’s work forms part of a larger fabric of a region still deeply imbued with the concerns of indigenous land claim and how contemporary Indigenous artists represent this landscape.