Faulkner’s Depiction of Indians
Hironori Hayase
Professor of American Literature
Saga University, Japan
Email: hayaseh@cc.saga-u.ac.jp

Introduction
In terms of ethnicity, Faulkner studies have been drawn to a great degree to African
Americans, but hardly to Native Americans. Compared with a great amount of scholarship on
African Americans in Faulkner’s stories, there is very little about Native Americans: in book-form
scholarship, The Indians of Yoknapatawpha by Lewis Dabney is the only one, published in 1974,
while many scattered short monograms and magazine articles can be found, most of which
incomprehensively discuss only one or two short stories featuring Native Americans1.
Turning our eyes to Faulkner’s world, however, so many Indians can be found either in his
short or long stories that I can say that Faulkner has depicted various types of Indians with a clear
intention of giving them the historical position as the first settlers in his Yoknapatawpha County.
As Faulkner’s Indian stories, four short stories are most popular: “Red Leaves,” “A Justice,”“Courtship,” and “Lo!,” which are included in the “Wilderness” section of Collected Stories ofWilliam Faulkner, but Indians are also mentioned in his long stories, such as Go Down, Moses,
Requiem for a Nun, the Sound and the Fury, the Town, and the Reivers, and Indians appear as
major characters in such short stories as “Mountain Victory,” “Fox Hunt, and “Hellcreek Crossing.”
In “The Appendix” to the Sound and the Fury, for example, Faulkner calls Ikkemotubbe “A
dispossessed American king,”(225) explaining how the Compsons are closely connected with Indianfamilies in terms of land 2 ; Requiem for a Nun opens with a historical episode about how
Chickasaw’s trading post is changed into the Yoknapatawpha County courthouse, mentioning the“dispossession of Indians”(2) and the commercial exchange between Indians and white people.

Donald Kartiganer in “the Opening Remark” of the 2000 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha
Conference whose main topic is “Faulkner in the 21st Century” says that Native Americans will be
one of the “new attentions” of Faulkner studies, and that their “presence in Faulkner’s works isboth substantial and largely ignored by critics”(xix). In addition, the 2003 issue of the Faulkner
Journal, which features Native Americans, covers nine articles.
2 This land is meaningful in the Sound and the Fury: it is remembered by Benjy as a “pasture” inhis mind, and later is sold as a golf field for Quentin to go to Harvard. Requiem for a Nun narrates
how the first Compson obtains the land from Ikkemotubbe : “Compson, who had come to thesettlement a few years ago with a race-horse, which he swapped to Ikkemotubbe, Issetibbeha’s
successor in the chiefship, for a square mile of what was to be the most valuable land in the future
town of Jefferson”(13). Furthermore, in “A Justice,” Quentin, the narrator, hears Sam Fathers saythat Sam’s mother, a black, is sold by the Compsons(CS 344). Thus, Quentin knows that his family
is deeply connected to Indian history.
1
1Recollecting the word “Yoknapatawpha,” in the first place, comes from Indians’ language3, we cansay that Faulkner has a clear intention of locating them as the first people of his fictional world.
In starting our discussion on Indians in Faulkner’s stories, two simple questions are
instantly raised. The first question is related with a curious fact that Faulkner is historically andpolitically inaccurate in depicting Indians, as many critics point out.

Gene Moore, for example,

asserts as follows4:
Faulkner’s “Indians” are often found to be historically inaccurate and felt to bepolitically incorrect. His Choctaws might as well be Chickasaws, and both cultures aredefined chiefly in terms of their ignoble infatuation with the trinkets and customs of thewhite man. Worse yet, he paid little attention to the calamities of Removal and the Trailof Tears. (3)Asked about this inaccuracy, Faulkner candidly admits this and says, “I made them up”(Dabney 11),which seems to mean that the Indians in Faulkner’s stories are a product of the author’s
imagination and that his intention does not lie in an exact reproduction of Indians’ history. Then,
what is Faulkner’s intention of his Indian stories? --this is my first question.
The other question I would like to pose about Faulkner’s depiction of Indians lies in thefact that they generally look “tragic-comic.”

This is quite unique in the American depiction ofIndians, because it is commonly assumed that Indians are regarded and depicted as either tragic
victims or majestic heroes.

The tragic image of Indians is based on historical slaughters in

American history, as is known by the Trail of Tears, the Wounded Knee Massacre, etc.

Themajestic image, on the other, is associated with the Romantic creation of Indians as “noble savages,”
as is shown in many American literary texts made by Washington Irving and James Fenimore
Cooper.

Despite these stereotypical images of Indians, why does Faulkner depict the “vanishing

Americans” with a comical touch?
Focused on these two questions, this paper will clarify Faulkner’s intention in depicting
Indians with a comical touch and, in consequence, their significance in his fictional world.
I. Comical Touch
In the “Introduction” to Faulkner and Humor, Doreen Fowler analyzes Faulkner’s comicvision as “a more balanced perspective from which to view tragic events”(xiii). “Comic elements,”
Fowler explains, “function to temper emotionalism”(xiii).
Indians.

This is true of Faulkner’s depiction ofThis section will closely analyze several types of comic images of Indians and elucidate

truths in his Indian stories.
In the Indians in Faulkner’s stories, there is an undertone of tragedy, but, as Karen
Rhodes5 and Lothar Hönnighausen assert, they are described as comical and display a humorous“Yoknapatawpha” is a Chickasaw word derived from the name of the river flowing in the south of
Lafayette County. Etymologically, “yokna” means land, and “patawpha,” split. Faulkner explains
the name literally means “water runs slow through flat land”(Faulkner in the University 74).
4 Horsford also comments: Faulkner “shows very little familiarity with early Mississippi history orwith the Choctaws and Chickasaws who were its victims”(311).
5 Rhodes also remarks: “we read it as a tragicomic depiction of Southern grotesque”(69).
23tone. In fact, “Courtship” can be called a tall tale, and most of these stories contain such typicalelements of Southwestern humor as exaggeration, violence, and tumult.

Let us take a closer lookat comic elements of these Indian stories in three categories---irony, satire, and parody.
(1) Irony
What white people regard as natural and reasonable looks incomprehensible and evenfoolish to the Indians’ eyes.

In “Courtship,” for example, an Indian gives a deeply sarcastic eye towhite people’s regulations: claiming the land by drawing invisible lines on it to divide it, and killing
their fellows in the name of crime:
Issetibbeha and General Jackson met and burned sticks and signed a paper, and now aline ran through the woods, although you could not see it…. But merely by occurring on
the other side of that line which you couldn’t even see, it became what the white men
called a crime punishable by death if they could just have found who did it. Whichseemed foolish to us…. this land for which, as Issetibbeha used to say after he had
become so old that nothing more was required of him except to sit in the sun and criticize
the degeneration of the People and the folly and rapacity of politicians, the Great Spirit
has done more and man less than for any land he ever heard of. But it was a free country,
and if the white man wished to make a rule even that foolish in their half of it, it was allright with us. (“A Courtship” 361-2)
Demarcation in particular is incredible and even ridiculous to Indians, who have no sense of
possession of land by demarcation, believing that land belongs to nobody.

They conclude that

America is a free country, so they are doing whatever they wish to according to their principle offreedom, which gives a very sarcastic comment to America whose motto is freedom. Here we have tobe reminded that an American principle of freedom has deprived Indians of their native land andfreedom. What white people have done according to their principle of freedom is simply questioned
and criticized as absurd by Indians whose lives are based on Nature. The Indian’s comment here
gives a bitter irony to white people’s egotistic principle and logic. .
The differences in value system can often display a glaring irony.

In “Red Leaves,” which

describes Indians’ slavery-based lifestyle imitating white people’s, there is a humorous scene inwhich they hold a meeting to discuss what to do with the increasing number of black slaves
breeding in the village.
“Raise more Negroes by clearing more land to make corn to feed them, then sell them.
We will clear the land and plant it with food and raise Negroes and sell them to thewhite men for money.”“But what will we do with this money?” a third said.
They thought for a while.

(“Red Leaves” 319)

Indians have introduced slavery, as white people did, but no Indians can give a reply to thefundamental question “what will we do with the money they get?” It may be because they havenothing to buy with money.

It is not until they confront this question that they realize they have

had no need of slavery. This is quite ironic and, more importantly, this type of irony is essentially3created by the difference in value system between white people and Indians: in substance, thesocieties of the two races have depended on completely different value systems, so the insensible
conversion into a different value system is likely to lead to the destruction of the society.

In thissense, Karen Rhode’s analysis is much to the point:
This incongruity of values provides the basis for the story’s humour and its tragedy,
when the three cultures in this story value the same thing differently. …and these
economic value systems highlight the processes of unresolvable differences which form
first the grotesque humour and then the grotesque tragedy of “Red Leaves.”(70)Interestingly, the fact that Indians have introduced slavery which is utterly unnecessary tothem makes us find that slavery in the Indians’ society is a good example of “mimicry” of a
postcolonial maxim: the ruled will imitate the ruler’s lifestyle.

It is important to point out thatbehind the humor lies a postcolonial relation between Indians and white people.
(2) Satire
The Indians appearing in “Red Leaves,” and “Lo!” look grotesque and weird, but they
assume a comical touch. In “Red Leaves,” the Indians, who depend on slavery, abandoning physicallabor and their original nature-based lifestyle, are now undergoing an irreversible deterioration.
Those Indians are described with a comical and caricatured touch, and Chief Moketubbe, thesymbol of deterioration, presents an ugly, fatty figure:He wore a broadcloth coat and no shirt, his round, smooth copper balloon of belly
swelling above the bottom piece of a suit of linen underwear. On his feet were theslippers with the red heels. Behind his chair stood a stripling with a punkah-like fanmade of fringed paper. Moketubbe sat motionless, with his broad, yellow face with its
closed eyes and flat nostrils, his flipperlike arms extended. On his face was an expression
profound, tragic, and inert. He did not open his eyes when Basket and Berry came in.
(“Red Leaves” 325)
It should be noticeable that Moketubbe, potbellied and motionless, wearing the “slippers with thered heels,” is described with quite a comical touch.

The comical depiction of deteriorating Indianslays bare to us not only a sin of white people who have uprooted Indians’ nature-based life bybringing in slavery., but also Indians’ foolish ease with which to resign their original lifestyle.

Itcreates a bitter satire aimed at both races. Faulkner discloses truths hidden in a tragedy by adding
a comical touch.
(3) Parody“Lo!” can be classified as a parody of a historical fact6: President Jackson, the ruler, isdescribed as timid, whereas Indian chief Francis Weddel, the ruled, is stately.

In this story, theruler and the ruled are depicted in a perfectly reversed position displaying a historical parody, as
Hönnighausen also points out: “ ‘Lo!’ is a text that…rewrites a tragic chapter of history as burlesque
In “Lo!,” the seventh president Andrew Jackson(1767-1845) is a model of the President, and a
Choctaw chief Greenwood Leflore(1800-65), Weddel.

64comedy and transforms the victim into the victors”(339).

It is a historical fact that the Indian race

was conquered by the white race, but it is ironic that on the individual level, the Indian chief isstatelier than the white leader.

Therefore, though the chief calls themselves “poor innocent

Indians,”(398) from his true recognition of the reality, he sounds pretty ironic7.
In “Lo!,” we can find another parody in Indians’ clothes.

The Indians are dressed in a very

humorous fashion; they wear a formal coat, but no trousers, with shoes in one hand and trousers
under their arm:--in their new beavers and frock coats and woolen drawers. With their neatly rolled
pantaloons under their arms and their virgin shoes in the other hand; dark, timeless,decorous and serene beneath the astonished faces and golden braid, the swords andribbons and stars, of European diplomats.
The President said quietly, “Damn. Damn. Damn.(“Lo!” 384)
Their fashion represents a power relation between Indians and white people: therefore, in order tofollow the ruler’s principle, the Indians try to imitate the white people’s fashion, but the mimicry
here is so incomplete that it injects sharp humor.
It should be noted here that this kind of humor is felt by the reader, not by any characters in thestory.

When the white people see those Indians in the White House, the Indians, especially theirclothing, offer irritation and even threat to the white people, as the President utters many times
over his shoulder, “Damn!”.

In this respect, Bruce Johnson’s comment is true: “the mimicry in thisstory is used as a means of communication with the white race, but it creates a hostile threat
against the white people”(Bruce 23). Thus, it is interesting to say that mimicry in “Lo!” can be used
as a parody of the power relation. Nevertheless, the historical fact cannot be changed, as the story
ends with the possibility of military ascendance over the Indians, displaying a tragic tone behindthe humorous atmosphere.
II. Faulkner’s VoiceThe results of the analysis of Faulkner’s humorous depiction of Indians in the previous
section can be summarized into the following two points:(1) A strong reproach against the white people who have depraved the Indians:
The humor of these Indian stories reproaches the white people who have plundered the Indians’
land and civilized them.

In this respect, we can hear Faulkner’s reproachful voice. In 1937 when

he drove in an Arizona desert and passed a group of Indians sitting by the highway, Faulkner said
to Ben Wasson: “This was theirs….all of it.
them off onto reservations”(Biography 383).

This whole country.

We took it from them and shoved

Faulkner keenly feels guilty of white people’s sin of

According to Dabney, the title “Lo!” is derived from a verse of “An Essay on Man” by AlexanderPope(44). It says, “Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind/Sees God in clouds, or hears him in
the wind;/His sound proud Science never taught to stray/Far as the solar walk, or milky way”(355).
Pope’s image of Indians is lofty and it matches the stately behavior of the Indians in “Lo!”5

7

taking their land.

With his sense of sin, the Indians in his stories are depicted.

(2) Innocence of the Indians who have imitated the white people’s value
The white people’s sin is doubtlessly grave; however, Faulkner thinks the Indians are so
innocent as to accept the white people’s value with no thought of the consequence.

Slavery andmaterial civilization are not what they need, and what is worse, these factors play a destructive roleof uprooting their original lifestyle and value.

From a practical viewpoint, when they accepted

heterogeneous values, they should have gained enough knowledge and vision to compete with thewhite people on the same ground.

On the contrary, they have innocently imitated the white

people’s lifestyle and culture, and in consequence, their innocence has been easily manipulated andexploited for the white people’s benefits.

Faulkner points out Indian’s innocence which has led totheir loss of culture and identity.
This opinion is supported by the fact that Faulkner creates some Indians who, getting someknowledge from white people’s culture, still have a dignified pride as Indians.

Saucier Weddel in“Mountain Victory,” for example, is so educated in white people’s schools that he can succeed inbusiness, and yet he has a high pride as an Indian and serves in the Civil War as a Confederate
major.

He chooses to gain education in the white people’s society instead of following blindly the

Indian’s hereditary system only to go to ruin with the tide of the times, as Weddel himself explains:“In the old days The Man was the hereditary title of the head of our clan; but after webecame Europeanised like the white people, we lost the title to the branch whichrefused to become polluted…..” (“Mountain Victory” 333)
Weddel’s father is Choctaw chief Francis Weddel, who argues fairly and squarely with President
Jackson in “Lo!”Weddel is as dignified and brave as his father, but he is not innocent, but

realistic: Weddel tries to survive in the white people’s society with the same recognition of realitythat Indians are destined to disappear, as his father shows in “Lo!”: “We are but Indians:
remembered yesterday and forgotten tomorrow.”(“Lo!” 396)
Another dignified and realistic Indian character is Sam Fathers.

He is actually a hybrid

descendant of three races—Indian, white and black races, and is forced to live alone as a marginalman in the white-dominated South, but Faulkner depicts him with a dignified touch and casts him
as a mentor for Ike McCaslin:
It was Sam Fathers, the negro, who bore himself not only toward his cousin McCaslin
and Major de Spain but toward all white men, with gravity and dignity and without
servility or recourse to that impenetrable wall of ready and easy mirth which negroes
sustain between themselves and white men, bearing himself toward his cousin
McCaslin not only as one man to another but as an old man to a younger. (GDM 170)
It is noticeable that these three persons we have found as dignified Indians are all mix-blooded:
both Saucier and Francis are half-Indian and half-French. The Indians conquered have no choice
but to survive as mix-blooded.

Mixed-blooded people are oppressed by a cruel fate in the South,

but they retain pride, dignity and humility to endure their cruel fate.

This can be shown as astrong antithesis Faulkner proposes to the pure-blood supremacy in the South.
6III. Indian Identity
In this section, we will discuss why Indians encounter the fate of vanishing from an ethnic
viewpoint. The main reason is that the white people have dispossessed the Indians of their land.
For Indians, the land is the basic keystone they have lived on and taken over from generation to
generation. Jean O’Brien explains Indians’ inseparable relation with land:
For the English, land was central to identity and place in society.…For Indians, land
was something much more essential. Land also signified identity for Indians, but ina fundamentally different way than it did for the English. For Indians, land meant
homeland, which conferred identity in a corporate and religious sense, and it
contained the crucial kinship networks that inscribed their relationships on the land.
As English colonization proceeded, land also became a commodity for Indians.
Eventually, it became a source of social welfare, which completed the process of
dispossession…. (O’Brien 211)
As O’Brien points out, land defines Indians’ identity.
will lose their identity as Indians.

It follows that if they lose their lands, they

The loss of identity will lead to the vanishing of the race.

Faulkner keenly realizes the white people’s dispossession of Indians’ land as a capital sin as follows:
I think the ghost of that ravishment lingers in the land, that the land is inimical to
the white man because of the unjust way in which it was taken from Ikkemotubbe
and his people. That happened by treaty, which President Jackson established with
the Chickasaws and the Choctaws, …There are a few of them still in Mississippi, butthey are a good deal like animals in a zoo: they have no place in the culture, in theeconomy, unless they become white men, and they have in some cases mixed withwhite people and their own conditions have vanished, or they have mixed with
Negroes and they have descended into the Negroes’ condition of semi-peonage.
(Faulkner in the University 43)
Faulkner thinks Indians whose lands are lost have “no place in the culture, in the economy,” and“ghost of that ravishment” is lingering in the South.

In the same way, in Faulkner’s fiction, in

which land is one of his major themes, land is regarded as everyone’s property, not any individual’s,
as is shown in Go Down, Moses:---it belonged to no man. It belonged to all; they had only to use it well, humbly
and with pride.(GDM 354)
As is discussed in the previous section, land is for Indians a fundamental basis for living and in
essence, they have no idea of possessing land, whereas the white people have deprived them of theirland which is exploited for an individual’s property and speculation8.

As a result for Indians, theyIn the opening of “The Bear,” the big woods, which belong to nobody, are also exploited for
speculation: “It was of the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded
document:--of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it, of Indian
ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey”(GDM 191). In addition,
in “Lo!” the same idea is mentioned: “Another white man came among us, to hunt in peace we
8thought, since God’s forest and the deer which He put in it belong to all. But he too became obsessed7are forced to change their lives from the hunting economy based on land into the monetary economy
preying on land, which makes Indians go to ruin. This is what Ike calls “the curse on the South.”‘Dont you see?’ he cried. ‘Dont you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed,
and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under
the curse?’(GDM 278)
Ike decides to relinquish his right to inherit the land to sever such a sinful chain. In this respect,
Toshio Koyama’s view is most suitable: “Faulkner places Indians’ destiny as an important phase in
American history by penetrating to the roots of avarice, frailty and other human fundamental evils
in our bosoms”(131).

Thus, Faulkner’s Indian stories show that the white people’s deprivation ofIndians’ land is not merely a problem of the two races, but a fundamental problem rooted in theSouth.
Conclusion
Before Faulkner, many other American writers deal with Indians, and in most cases they
depict them either as noble savages or as poor victims.

Faulkner, however, depicts them with ahumorous touch in order to reveal some truths behind the vanishing of the Indians.
Faulkner’s comical depiction of Indians reveals a strong irony to both the white race andthe Indian.

On one hand, Faulkner gives a strong reproach to the white people who haveemasculated Indians by usurping and speculating their land, God’s possession and their identity.
On the other, he offers a bitter irony in describing Indians’ innocence of imitating the white people’s
lifestyle.

Adding a comical touch, he tries to disclose the objective aspects of Indian problems,

relinquishing too much sympathy and emotionalism.
Faulkner aims to set Indians as pioneering people in the history of Yoknapatawpha.
Faulkner, by inserting Indians minutely in his long and short stories, tries to give a huge ethnic
group of Indians a position in American history--especially in the southern history, considering why
and how they are destined to decline and disappear.

Problems related with Indians are found to be

deeply rooted in the South, as Ike and Quentin manage to hand them down from generation to
generation with acute suffering: Indian problems will not end with the disappearance of the race.
Indians play an important role and give historical and thematic consistency in the world ofFaulkner’s Yoknapatawpha.

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