The Stevens and the McCaslin-Beauchamp families are at the center of this novel, but it also contains a single reference to "the Negro Sam Fathers whose father had been a Chickasaw chief" (91). Sam's father is not given a name, but there is no reason not to identify him as Ikkemotubbe.
Ikkemotubbe is the central character of this story about a rivalry between him and a white man for the unnamed sister of the Indian Herman Basket. The story's fourth paragraph quickly rehearses the history of how he was born "Issetibbeha's sister's son" and - after acquiring the sobriquet Doom - became the Man by probably killing his own nephew, the "little son" of Issetibbeha's son Moketubbe - and perhaps killing Moketubbe too, though nothing is said about what happens to Moketubbe (363).
Faulkner adds three generations to the Compson family in his 1946 addition to The Sound and the Fury. But the only member of the Ikkemotubbe|Issetibbeha family to appear there is "IKKEMOTUBBE" himself, whose entry comes first as a "dispossessed American king" and the person who "granted out of his vast lost domain" the land on which the Compsons created the estate they were also to lose (325).
Most readers probably know the Ikkemotubbe|Issetibbeha family best from the way their story is linked to the McCaslin-Edmonds-Beauchamp story in this 1942 novel. They are linked through what could be considered a third, non-biological but recognizably familial relationship between Sam Fathers and Ike McCaslin, who commune across racial, cultural and generational lines that seem almost to disappear in the wilderness. The novel's treatment of Sam's Indian family as a family is much less resonant.
Faulkner wrote the magazine version of "The Bear" after writing the longer chapter for the novel Go Down, Moses. It offers a reduced image of the family that Sam Fathers belongs to, but with only two exceptions - one clearly a case of authorial inattention, one a major revision - the story represents his parents as the novel will describe them, though the phrasing is slightly different in the story's two references to him as the "son of a slave woman and a Chickasaw chief" (282) and the "son of a Negro slave and an Indian king" (294).
In this elegiac story an aged Ike McCaslin briefly looks back at the role Sam Fathers played as his spiritual guide in the wilderness that once belonged to the Indians. Sam's own story as part of a family, however, is complicated in new ways. Here he is "half Chickasaw, the grandson of a chief, and half Negro" (273). The only way to make those fractions work is to create a generation between this unnamed chief and Sam, with one Indian and one black parent - a couple that does not appear in any other account of the family.
With this story, published in 1940, a decade after "Red Leaves," the Ikkemotubbe|Issetibbeha family is reconfigured to include Sam Fathers, which adds to its standing in both the distant and more recent past of Yoknapatawpha. However, the story also creates real confusion about Sam's place in the family's generational sequence. Ikkemotubbe-Doom is still the central figure from the past, still the ruthless plotter who becomes the chief by killing his cousin Moketubbe, who had inherited the title in the customary way.
The group of Chickasaws from whom Sutpen acquires his Hundred is mentioned by Rosa, who calls them "ignorant" (10), but the only Indian individualized with a name is "Ikkemotubbe," whom the narrator refers to as the specific Indian "from whom [Sutpen] got his land" (33). His title (Chief, The Man) never appears, nor does his name appear again, although later Shreve calls him "a poor ignorant Indian" (145) and the hypothetical lawyer refers to him as "a drunken Indian" whom Sutpen "robbed" (241).
This is the first time Faulkner identifies the Indians as Chickasaws, but they appear only in passing and in the context of the party of men who hunt in the wilderness that the tribe's chief "once owned" (184). His niece is the grandmother of Boon Hogganbeck, one of the hunters, who is at least one-quarter Indian (some say "half," 184), and by his grandmother part of the chief's family. This is Boon's only appearance on the family tree; elsewhere it is made explicit that his blood is "not a chief's blood" (203).
Faulkner's second Indian story is set earlier than the main action of "Red Leaves." It takes on the question of miscegenation more directly, but outside the context of the Ikkemotubbe|Issetibbeha family - except to the extent that it falls to Ikkemotubbe (as Doom is called once in the story, 346) to oversee one of his slave's quests for justice. It goes deeper into Doom's own story, but its representation of his family is less developed. Doom's mother is mentioned merely to establish his relationship to the family's male line.
