Unnamed Chickasaws

Submitted by padgettjb@breva... on Tue, 2017-10-03 11:20
Text: 
"A Bear Hunt"
Character Key: 
Unnamed Chickasaws 1
Display Name: 
Unnamed Chickasaws
Sort Name: 
Unnamed Chickasaws
Race: 
Indian
Gender: 
Multi Gender Group
Class: 
Indian Tribal Member
Rank: 
Minor
Vitality: 
Alive
First Mentioned: 
Courthouse and Square in "A Bear Hunt" (Location)
Home: 
Chickasaw Settlement and Store in "A Bear Hunt" (Location)
Biography: 

The Chickasaw Indians inhabited northern Mississippi at the time the first white settlers arrived. In this story Faulkner imagines that a "remnant" of the tribe remains in Yoknapatawpha in the 1930s, living together "under Government protection" (65), but historically, the entire tribe was "removed" beyond the Mississippi River a hundred years earlier, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. The story's "Chickasaws" do not directly appear, but they play a role in the imagination of the county's young white boys, whose ideas of "Indians" are derived from reading "dime novels": they were "a little fabulous, their swamp-hidden lives inextricable from the life of the dark mound . . . as though they had been set by the dark powers to be guardians of it" (65-66). The pivotal role they play in the story's narrative, when they threaten to torture a man they believe is a federal agent in order to protect their moonshining operations, could also be said to derive from popular stereotypes.

Note: 
A group of Chickasaws who pretend they are about to burn Luke Provine to scare him when they are told he is a revenue agent. The remnant of a “once powerful clan of the Chickasaw tribe” who now have American names, they live in a settlement with a store near the Indian mound “under Government protection,” according to the unnamed narrator (65). They almost never come to town and are strongly suspected of manufacturing moonshine whisky. The narrator says when he was a child, they were “a little fabulous, their swamp-hidden lives inextricable from the life of the dark mound … as though they had been set by the dark powers to be guardians of it” (65-66).
Individual or Group: 
Group
Character changes class in this text: 

digyok:node/character/14232