“Brother: Is This Truth?”

Abstract

This essay approaches Faulkner’s stories about Mississippi Indians from the perspective of a historian of the Native South. It discusses shifting ideas about the role of narrative in historical analysis and reviews what other scholars have said about Faulkner’s Indigenous peoples. It demonstrates the importance of stories crafted from historical documentation to understanding Faulkner’s Mississippi. At the time that Faulkner was writing, Choctaws were engaged in their own storytelling. The tales Mississippi Choctaws spun over the course of Faulkner’s life demonstrate how subaltern peoples use historical narratives, even painful ones, for powerful political purposes. Considering the actions of Mississippi’s actual Indigenous peoples locates Faulkner’s imaginary Indigenous peoples in a critical historical context of colonialism. The stories that Mississippi Choctaws crafted about themselves, excavated from the archives, deserve a place alongside Faulkner’s work as a way to think about Native Southerners and that elusive and contingent thing we call truth