{"title":"Doom and Deliverance: Faulkner’s Dialectical Indians","authors":"M. Taylor","doi":"10.14325/MISSISSIPPI/9781496818096.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/MISSISSIPPI/9781496818096.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Most critics and historians agree that Faulkner’s Indian characters are outrageous mystifications drawn from popular misperceptions and unspoken ideologies. While he famously admitted that he “made up” his Indians, numerous scholars have wondered whether such a shrewd student of Mississippi history could have ignored the facts entirely. This chapter suggests that the reality lies somewhere in between—purposefully and revealingly so. Faulkner’s Indians occupy the dialectical space between the wreckage of the South’s colonial histories and the rapacities of the capitalist future; they are despicably “other” even as they are uncannily, frighteningly kindred. Departing from the standard focus on Faulkner’s so-called “Indian stories,” this chapter instead uncovers the obscure, uncanny Indians that lurk unseen in his major texts and within his most prominent families and novels. Collectively, these Indians comprise a surprisingly active and pertinent contingent in Faulkner’s modern South: specimens of America’s most luminous possibilities and haunting failures.","PeriodicalId":389542,"journal":{"name":"Faulkner and the Native South","volume":"117 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133146722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Land! Hold On! Just Hold On!”:","authors":"Gina Caison","doi":"10.14325/mississippi/9781496818096.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496818096.003.0004","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":389542,"journal":{"name":"Faulkner and the Native South","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129837998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Faulkner Didn’t Invent Yoknapatawpha, Everybody Knows That","authors":"Leanne Howe","doi":"10.14325/MISSISSIPPI/9781496818096.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/MISSISSIPPI/9781496818096.003.0001","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":389542,"journal":{"name":"Faulkner and the Native South","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127897823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Wild and the Tame","authors":"R. Ethridge","doi":"10.14325/MISSISSIPPI/9781496818096.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/MISSISSIPPI/9781496818096.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"William Faulkner’s portraits of American Indians, rooted in popular stereotypes and misconceptions about Native people, range from the degraded, “white man’s” Indian to the Noble Savage. One stereotype that Faulkner draws on is the EuroAmerican idea that American Indians have an essential connection to the natural world, a stereotype that is certainly as old as Rousseau’s ruminations on the Noble Savage. This concept, dubbed the “ecological Indian” by anthropologist Shepard Krech, has been the focus of much debate and discussion. This paper explores the character of Sam Fathers in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses as “ecological Indian” and the continued use of Faulkner’s rendering in contemporary Native literature and social justice issues.","PeriodicalId":389542,"journal":{"name":"Faulkner and the Native South","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126492397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Native Southern Transformations, or, Light in August and Werewolves","authors":"E. Anderson","doi":"10.14325/mississippi/9781496818096.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496818096.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"In the world of Light in August, a cotton warehouse tank can look like the torso of a beheaded mastodon and an elderly couple \"might have been two muskoxen strayed from the north pole, or two homeless and belated beasts from beyond the glacial period.\" Here and elsewhere in the novel, Faulkner's reach transforms characters and environs. While none of the major characters is native to Jefferson, let alone Indigenous, some are astonishingly non-native and most if not all become more non-native and more homeless as the novel unfolds. With these and other unsettlements in mind, the chapter places Light in August alongside Mongrels, a native southern werewolf novel by Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones. Tracking the monsters and the mongrel transformations in both novels, the chapter presents and argument for the transformative methodological value of native southern studies.","PeriodicalId":389542,"journal":{"name":"Faulkner and the Native South","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127466069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Valid Signature”","authors":"A. Trefzer","doi":"10.14325/MISSISSIPPI/9781496818096.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/MISSISSIPPI/9781496818096.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses on the “X-mark” by which Chickasaw matriarch Mohataha signs over the legal title of her land in Mississippi to the white settlers of Faulkner’s Jefferson. This essay investigates the political agency of her signature, specifically the potential for native sovereignty in a situation of forced Removal. Mohataha’s mark signifies both the downward vector of a displaced culture and an upward stroke towards new horizons in Chickasaw history. Literally a legal sign, the “x” functions symbolically as a gendered figure linking Mohataha to the other female characters in the novel whose chiasmic plot structure centers on a coercive legal culture and women’s potential for resistance and rebellion.","PeriodicalId":389542,"journal":{"name":"Faulkner and the Native South","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126982727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dressing the Part:","authors":"P. Galloway","doi":"10.14325/MISSISSIPPI/9781496818096.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/MISSISSIPPI/9781496818096.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Charles Betts Galloway’s first charge as Methodist bishop in 1886 was Indian Territory. The bishop’s grandfather had held slaves and taken up Indian land; his father had served in the Civil War; he overlapped with Faulkner’s first twelve years; and his daughter’s son shared a desk with Faulkner in elementary school. Galloway’s hope for Indian people was that they would be converted to Christianity. He saw the Indian people he met as dignified and thoughtful in his accounts of visits and meetings with them. In addition to his observations, we have the testimony of Charles Dickens, who met Choctaw Peter Pitchlynn, and a businessman who witnessed the Chickasaw crossing the Mississippi going westward. Indian dress in Faulkner’s works has been seen as symbolic; The chapter explores this theme through the observation of men contemporaneous with the middle times of the fictional Yoknapatawpha.","PeriodicalId":389542,"journal":{"name":"Faulkner and the Native South","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128743625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Souths as Prologues: Indigeneity, Race, and the Temporalities of Land; or, Why I Can’t Read William Faulkner","authors":"Jodi A. Byrd","doi":"10.14325/mississippi/9781496818096.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496818096.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Reading Faulkner as a Chickasaw scholar can, at times, be disorienting in the juxtapositions of history, remembrance, family, and fiction; the experience itself relocates and displaces as much as it coheres a sense of the past or of a place. Mired in the scenes of settlement, Faulkner’s world-building helped set into motion contradictory and cacophonous discourses of blackness, whiteness, and indigeneity in the American South, and in doing so, provided the imaginative terrains through which we continue think about the intersections of slavery and colonialism. Taking up Absalom, Absalom! alongside critical work in indigenous studies, black feminism, and queer of color critique, this chapter will consider how indigeneity interrupts the temporalities and spatialities that are often taken for granted in how we understand the South as prologue for race in America.","PeriodicalId":389542,"journal":{"name":"Faulkner and the Native South","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116801340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}