Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments  I never could have written this book without my time in Oklahoma. I want to thank my colleagues at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant and the Nation Representatives of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the Chickasaw Nation for giving their energy, time, and support to the creation of a Native American Symposium that afforded me valuable insights into Native American life and cultural politics. Thanks to everyone who supported this effort , particularly to my colleagues on the planning committee: Robin Murray, James Pate, Elbert Hill, Andrew Robson, Corie Delashaw, Brad Cushman, Jane Alrujoub, Chad Litton, Elizabeth Kennedy, Chun Mei You, Sue Folsom (Choctaw Nation) and Jefferson Keele (Chickasaw Nation). The book owes a great deal to the support of friends and colleagues at the University of Mississippi, whose thoughtful suggestions and careful readings have much improved it. I would particularly like to thank Ivo Kamps, for believing I could start and ¤nish this book on the tenure clock; Deborah Barker, Karen Raber, Kathryn McKee, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Ethel Young-Minor, and David Galef, for reading early chapter drafts; Joseph Urgo and Doug Robinson, for commenting on the introduction; Robbie Ethridge, my colleague in anthropology , for discussions of the issues raised here; and Jacqueline Foertsch, for long-distance support and interest in my project. I am particularly grateful to Eric Gary Anderson for his careful attention and insightful criticism of the xi manuscript. Eric and a second reader for the press, who remains anonymous, have much improved this work. Thanks also to the staff of The University of Alabama Press, whose expert guidance was invaluable to the completion of this book. Some sections of Disturbing Indians have appeared elsewhere. I am grateful for permission to reprint a section of chapter 4 that appeared as “Tracing the Natchez Trace: Native Americans and National Anxieties in Eudora Welty’s ‘First Love’” in Mississippi Quarterly 55.3 (2002): 419–40; a section of chapter 5 that was ¤rst published as “Postcolonial Displacements in Faulkner’s Indian Stories of the 1930s” in Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Robert Hamblin and Ann J. Abadie (University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 68–88; and a section of chapter 3 that was published as “Imperial Discourses in Caroline Gordon’s Green Centuries” in the Mississippi Quarterly 57.1 (2003–4): 113–22. Finally, I want to thank my parents, Christel and Hans Trefzer, who have inspired me with their lives, and my sisters, Bianca Hippach and Christine Rödling, for their unwavering love and support. Very special thanks go to my husband, Mickey Howley, whose belief in me sustains me.  acknowledgments xii Disturbing Indians ...