Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction

1. Excavating the Sites - Indians in Southern Texts and Contexts

1 Excavating the Sites  Indians in Southern Texts and Contexts For decades, thousands of skeletons were gathered systematically and shipped away to be displayed and warehoused in museums. By the early twentieth century, it was grimly joked that the Smithsonian Institution in Washington had more dead Indians than there were live Indians. —Jace Weaver, Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture Considering the long-standing critical tradition in American studies that scrutinizes literary and cultural representations of Native Americans for their ideological and creative functions, it is surprising that no such enterprise exists yet in southern studies. Although scholars are beginning to gesture toward the Native American presence in southern literature, this inquiry remains in its initial stages. Houston Baker and Dana Nelson have recently pointed out that “the South is thick with civilly disappeared history,” including that of indigenous peoples, but their own volume ironically re®ects rather than remedies this disappearance . Noticing the “disappeared bodies” of Native Americans from the southern landscape, Baker and Nelson write: “we know that the murder, displacement , and relocation of thousands of Native American bodies from the same geographies in which enslaved Africans in the United States worked the land is a critical area of investigation for a new Southern studies”(233). And yet, despite this acknowledgment of the Native American presence in the South, Native Americans—both as authors and subjects—are conspicuously absent from their volume, which renders the southern racial geography yet one more time as a prominently “black and white” territory. 6 This study responds to such a lack of critical attention by examining the discursive appearance of Indians in southern texts and by reinserting their presence into scholarly discussions about the South. Not only do Native Americans play an active role in the construction of the cultural landscape of the South— despite a history of colonization, dispossession, and removal aimed at rendering them “invisible”—but their so-far-underexamined presence in southern literature provides a crucial avenue for a new post-regional understanding of the American South. Centering on the textual construction of Native Americans in the South, this study seeks to participate in the articulation of a new American studies project that focuses comparatively on the intersection of two cultures marginal to the nation: “the South” and “Native America.” Not only do Native American signi¤ers appear in southern texts during times of violent cultural con®ict, such as during the colonial period or the removal period, but they also appear frequently in the literature of the post-removal Map 1. “Southern States and Mississippi Territory, 1816.” Attributed to Mathew Carey and Son, ca. 1816. Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History 7 Indians in Southern Texts and Contexts  South. This study focuses on the imaginative reconstruction of the Native American past during the Southern Renaissance, when southern writers—among them William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Andrew Lytle, and Caroline Gordon—turned to Indians in their ¤ction. Writing between 1930 and 1942, these authors created works about the Spanish conquest of the New World,the Cherokee frontier during the Revolutionary period, the expansionist schemes in Mississippi Territory, and the slaveholding Indian societies of the American Southeast. Together these texts map a Native American South that stretches from Virginia to Kentucky, from Mississippi to Florida, and from Tennessee to present-day Peru. One hundred years after the forced removal of Native Americans from the Southeast, these writers return to an “Indian frontier” marked by colonial struggles and imperialist power. In the process of exploring colonial history from their position in the modern South, they engage with a variety of discourses about Native Americans: some celebrate Native American cultures as seemingly more wholesome and “civilized” than modern Anglo-American industrial culture; others reject concepts of cultural hierarchy and racial purity for a sense of the hybridity of modern identities; all of them respond to discourses of Manifest Destiny and the idea of the “vanishing Indian,” concepts that lingered in historical and political discussions about Native Americans well into the 1930s. Through the discursive construction of Indians, these writers also participate in the ethnological debates of mainstream American modernism and in a kind of primitivism they share with writers outside the South. In exploring the Native American signi¤er, southern writers engage in a double discourse about region and nation. On the one hand, discourses about Indians articulate a regionalist, if not nativist, thesis about the...