Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction

Introduction

Introduction  The year 1930 marked the centenary of the Indian Removal Act,which had given the federal government the power to force Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River to move to a designated Indian territory in the West. The passage of the act and its traumatic and far-reaching consequences for the Native Americans who were thus dispossessed of their lands and belongings is a familiar if discomforting chapter in American history. The physical removal of Indians from the South resulted, whether intentionally or not, in their discursive removal as well.1 What was often considered their “fated disappearance”opened up a space in the white literary and scienti¤c imagination for the construction and exploration of the Indian other. In the South, the crisis of the depression in the 1930s and the resulting governmental intervention created popular and scholarly interest in the region’s Native American heritage. During this time, the “vacated” space of Native Americans was examined for traces of their presence in the signi¤ers that remained embedded in local history and lore and in the landscape itself. Among the various relief programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, federally sponsored archaeology in the South played a signi¤cant role in recovering a sense of the Native American presence that marked the land. During the New Deal, massive archaeological excavations were undertaken all over the South. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) alone spanned a huge area covering portions of Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama , and Mississippi. It created dams to control ®ooding in some of the poorest areas in the South, but in the process it would inundate many archaeological sites; as a result, archaeological work had to progress swiftly over a very large area with the help of hundreds of workers.2 These major civil works brought to the fore thousands of Native American artifacts and remains from historic and so-called “prehistoric” times as archaeologists cataloged, photographed, recorded , and excavated a large number of sites, including stone mounds, burial mounds, earth mounds, caves, cemeteries, and village sites. These large-scale physical excavations also resulted in ¤ctional excavations of Indian “remains” that brought forth, one hundred years after their removal, the Indian presence in the southern literary imagination. While New Deal ar1 chaeologists were digging into Indian mound graves all over the southeastern United States, southern writers of the 1930s were undertaking textual digs into the colonial histories of the South and its Native American heritage. William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) contains such a reference to New Deal archaeology in the South when Lucas Beauchamp tries to hide his whiskey still in an Indian mound. Then he saw the place he sought—a squat, ®at-topped, almost symmetrical mound rising without reason from the ®oor-like ®atness of the valley. The white people called it an Indian mound. One day ¤ve or six years ago a group of white men, including two women, most of them wearing spectacles and all wearing khaki clothes which had patently lain folded on a store shelf twenty-four hours ago, came with picks and shovels and jars and phials of insect repellent and spent a day digging about it, while most of the people, men and women, came at some time during the day and looked quietly on; later—within the next two or three days, in fact—he was to remember with almost horri ¤ed amazement the cold and contemptuous curiosity with which he himself had watched them. (37) Faulkner positions his narrative consciousness with the black spectators who watch and witness with “contemptuous curiosity” the “scienti¤c” excavation of Native American graves for treasures from the past. Through the marginalized perspective of his African-American characters, archaeology emerges as a white hegemonic enterprise, a new science that probes into secrets of racial others. Faulkner mocks the scientists and professionals with their new khakis and their spectacles, symbols not only of the investigating white intellectual gaze but of the new large-scale scienti¤c effort of New Deal archaeology in the South. He explores this scene for comic effect when Lucas returns to the mound six years later with the intention of burying his still in it. It is then that the mound collapses on top of him, and in an avalanche it comes to life, hurling clods and dirt at him, striking him a ¤nal blow squarely in the face with something larger than a clod—a blow not vicious so much...