IkkemotubbeFamily

There is one family in the Indian tribe that lives in Yoknapatawpha which recurs in Faulkner's fiction. As a family, it is mainly defined in terms that can be called political. According to Faulkner's representation of Indian culture, the male head of that family is also "The Man" - the chief of the tribe, who is also "the hereditary owner" of the tribal lands and slaves and can sell or trade these commodities to the white settlers who have already begun arriving in the area ("Red Leaves," 317). As in a European aristocracy, the title passes from father to eldest son, although as in many Elizabethan plays, for example, there are impatient sons and ambitious nephews who use violence to usurp it. The conflict between these males around keeping or gaining power is the basis for most of the familial interactions depicted in the sixteen texts in which the family appears, though throughout this is conceived ironically, against the Indians' inevitable 'removal' by the American government to territory west of the Mississippi.
Over the course of those sixteen texts, the family story comes to center mainly on the character Ikkemotubbe, or "Doom." The ambitious son of the sister of the chief, Ikkemotubbe becomes The Man by killing and intimidating his relatives. But the details of the story are inconsistent. When Faulkner first tells it, in "Red Leaves," The Man is only referred to by his title, and Issetibbeha is Doom's son. In all but two of the stories, however, that first chief, Doom's uncle, is Issetibbeha. Thus it has seemed best to identify the family name with both Issetibbeha and Ikkemotubbe, and to create a pair of side-by-side genealogical charts for the familial template. "Tree 1" represents the generations as they appear in the two first "Indian stories," "Red Leaves" and "A Justice," published 1930-31. "Tree 2" shows the generational sequence as it appears later, beginning with "Lion" in 1935.
And this is only one of the many ways in which the family is reconceived in different texts. Originally, for example, the story of Had-Two-Fathers, the mythic Sam Fathers of Faulkner's hunting fictions, is not part of the Ikkemotubbe|Issetibbeha family history. Even when Sam is added to the family tree, his place on it repeatedly changes: it takes Faulkner a while to decide if he is the son or the grandson of a Chickasaw chief; it is only in his sixth (and most famous) appearance - in the novel Go Down, Moses - that Sam's mother is made a "quadroon," making Sam himself genetically more "white" than "black." Faulkner returns to some version of the family history even in his last five Yoknapatawpha novels. In two of them the "Man" has become a 'woman': the apparent leader of the tribe is the matriarch Mohataha, identified as Ikkemotubbe's mother (and based on a historical Chickasaw leader named Hoka).