Faulkner and the Native South ed. by Jay Watson, Annette Trefzer, and James G. Thomas, Jr. (review)

T his volume, like one ofF aulkner' s modernist novels, presents itssubject from a number of perspectives. And the subject is a dual one: Faulkner and the Native Southfocuses on the Native Americans created by Faulkner's imagination and on the experience of the historical Chickasaw and Choctaw who originated (and in some cases remained) in the southeastern region of the United States. The collection brings together a dozen scholars from an array of fields—literary studies, anthropology, history, and Native American (or Indigenous) studies—to address common questions: (1) How do Faulkner's fictions about Native Americans compare with life as lived by Chickasaws and Choctaws and with novels written by authors who are themselves Native American? (2) Are Faulkner's Native American characters "mere stereotypes" (Howe 11) or do they transcend stereotype? (3) Do Native Americans have "a special relationship" to the land or is the "Ecological Indian" (Ethridge 135) another stereotype used "to justify dispossession" (Osburn 129)? And (4) what larger implications do the discussions in this volume have for future collaboration among the fields of southern studies, Indigenous studies, and African American studies?

Several chapters measure Faulkner's Indians against external evidence, historical or literary. Ethnohistorian Patricia Galloway compares descriptions of Indian clothing in Faulkner's stories to the reports of nineteenth-century missionaries, observing that in "neither [Faulkner nor the missionaries] do we find an effort to understand how the Indian people who lived the outcomes of colonization . . . experienced those drastic changes." By reading "subtle gestures and non-Anglo habitus" in photographs of nineteenth-century Native Americans alongside archival and other historical evidence (67), Galloway attempts to recover some picture of the real experiences on which Faulkner's fictions are based. Similarly, historian Katherine M. B. Osburn sets Faulkner's stories in the context of the "stories that Mississippi Choctaws crafted about themselves" and of her own account of the Choctaw resurgence in Mississippi (117). Osburn reads Faulkner's 1934 short story "Lo!"—a tall tale of Chickasaws traveling from Mississippi to Washington, DC, in the 1830s to petition Andrew Jackson—in the context of the ceremony that the Mississippi Choctaws held in 1934 to "celebrate their tribal rebirth" (123). "If Faulkner read any of the state's major papers," Osburn notes, "he knew that the allegedly vanishing Choctaws were in the process of resurrecting their tribal government" (124). Far from vanishing, the Choctaws were pressing their case by turning "the stereotypes proffered by Faulkner . . . to their political advantage" (122), as one Depression-era leader did in quoting a speech from Samuel Cobb, another Choctaw leader from a century earlier: "When you took our country, you promised us land. There is your promise in the book. Twelve times the trees have dropped their leaves, and yet we have received no land. . . . Brother: Is this truth?" (122, 128). Against such rhetoric even Faulkner's rhetoric pales, and Osburn's chapter (like Galloway's) uses Faulkner's work to reveal the perspectives of real people whom Faulkner treats in his fiction.

The literary critics, unlike the historians, tend to focus on Faulkner's art, although they, too, often measure Faulkner's fictions against Native American sources. John Wharton Lowe, for example, finds parallels between Native American humor and Faulkner's in his two comic tales about Indians ("Lo!" and "A Courtship"), arguing that Faulkner uses the joke "as a 'temporary visa,' as [Sherman] Alexie puts it, into a culture he knew was alien to most of his readers" (182). While the literary critics (Lowe, Trefzer, Melanie Benson Taylor, Eric Gary Anderson, and Melanie Anderson) produce what are at times dazzlingly nuanced readings of Faulkner's portraits, the historians, anthropologists, and cultural theorists tend to see Faulkner as perpetuating "dehumanizing" stereotypes—of the vanishing Indian and/or the "ignoble savage" (Osburn 120). Conversely, Lowe describes Faulkner's Indians as "multifaceted characters who range from the...