A Literary History of Mississippi

INDIGENOUS MISSISSIPPI LITERATURE

—GREG O’BRIEN

Those teachers never knew anything about the real stories, the ones my grandmother, my apokni, told me…. I listened as hard as I could but still only heard a little bit. Deep woods stories, olden time true stories. Chahta things, fahpo things, what Granma called aiukli. Stories I could not even let my father know I heard, because Father was a modern, a fullblood stepping away from Indian stories into this thing called America. Two worlds, two kinds of stories.

—Louis Owens (Choctaw-Cherokee), Yazoo Dusk¹

Justly renowned for their literary achievements, writers and storytellers living in Mississippi have long delighted their audiences with wit, insight, and appreciation for the role of the past in contemporary lives. For thousands of years, literature in Mississippi was preserved in the stories of the region’s indigenous people. Stories told by generations of Native Americans recorded their history, culture, religion, prophecy (predictions about the future), and humor. Everyone in these Native communities knew some stories, but certain specialists were entrusted with remembering and passing on elaborate tales of the beginning of time and the creation of particular peoples, animals, and plants. Such stories taught morals and explained how the world worked. Precise details changed over time according to the skills and embellishments of each new generation of storytellers. Storytelling was and is as much a creative act as an act of memory, like any written literature. Within these stories, historical events are retold as fiction and poetry to instill ethics and make listeners (and, later, readers) think about their identities and the places and history informing their lives. Many of these Native oral traditions were written down by Christian missionaries, anthropologists and folklorists, other Europeans or Americans from the eighteenth century onward, and by Native people themselves. Undoubtedly, many stories were never recorded in written form or copied until a later time. In a statement that could just as easily have described any of the Native people of Mississippi, missionary Alfred Wright wrote of the Choctaws in 1828, for example, that a difficulty in ascertaining ancient traditions, arises from their unwillingness to divulge them, especially to foreigners.²

In any essay attempting to summarize a variety of American Indian literatures, the question arises about what sorts of writings or transcriptions make up literature. I have followed the lead of scholars of Native American literature to include discussion of many types of stories in order to provide a glimpse of narratives that were passed down orally, as well as those later written down in French, English, and indigenous languages.³ Speeches made at diplomatic meetings, responses to queries from Christian missionaries, oral traditions shared with Euro-American partners, or ancient stories only more recently made public all contribute to the literature of Mississippi’s Indian people. Another significant issue in a short essay of this sort is trying to decide which Indian peoples should represent the area encompassed by Mississippi. As might be expected, I have privileged stories from the area’s three most prominent historical Indian populations of the postcontact era: the Natchez, Chickasaws, and Choctaws. The reader should not take from that decision the notion that other groups had (or have) no literature. Indian groups such as the Chakchiumas, Yazoos, Tunicas, Biloxis, and Houmas also maintained an array of stories, and as some of their descendants joined larger polities like the Choctaws and Chickasaws it is likely that individuals with their ancestry continue to create literature today. Before Europeans arrived in Mississippi, the region was already multicultural, as Indian tribes or splinter groups incorporated with or adopted one another; thus the region’s Native literature also reflects diverse derivations that can frequently be hard (or impossible) to separate as belonging solely or even mainly to one tribal tradition.⁴ As they have from the nineteenth century, Native people belonging to the indigenous groups that called Mississippi home (or still live in Mississippi) continue to make literature. Just as Indian people have always lived in Mississippi, their literature continues to provide insight about the area today.

Stories that explain the origins of societies or of the world provide some of the earliest examples of literature throughout the world. In numerous stories collected by Europeans and Americans in the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, storytellers among many Mississippi Indian groups tell of migrating from some point west of the Mississippi River into present-day Mississippi well before Europeans arrived in the region. Some versions of the migration stories are more detailed than others, describing the role of political and religious leaders in being guided to Mississippi by placing a sacred pole in the ground each evening and then traveling in the direction in which the pole leaned by morning. Such details may be a reference to following the North Star or some other astronomical feature as a guide to the east. In some versions, among the Choctaws particularly, the people carried the bundled bones of their ancestors (or perhaps only the ancestors of their elites in recognition of their high status and the desire to connect their lineages with the new land) in order to rebury them in the new homeland, thus laying claim to the area as their own. Some versions of the stories have the Choctaws and Chickasaws (and sometimes the Chakchiumas) all traveling together, before deciding to split off to their own territories and watersheds in central and northern Mississippi. Natchez stories told to early eighteenth-century French inhabitants also emphasized migration in waves from some place west of the Mississippi River. Such stories link the region’s people together culturally into a sort of pan-Indian creation involving migration and shared experiences.⁵

For the Choctaws, one of the most remarkable of these origin sources is the lengthy Traditional History of the Chahta Nation reportedly told to Gideon Lincecum by a Choctaw man named Chahta Immataha during the period 1822–1825 and then written down in English by Lincecum much later that century. Lincecum was an American settler, naturalist, and doctor who lived in eastern Mississippi in the early nineteenth century and had learned to speak and write the Choctaw language before later moving to Texas after the Indian Removal. According to Lincecum, Chahta Immataha welcomed Lincecum’s visits because you will write my talk in a book, that shall talk for me a long time after I have gone to the good hunting ground, I am proud of you, and glad that you have come.⁶ Lincecum claimed that he met with Chahta Immataha several times to learn the long history of the Choctaw migration from west of the Mississippi River to their home in present-day Mississippi, as well as the moral lessons that Chahta Immataha considered important to the story of Choctaw survival. Although it is hard to gauge how much of this translated story exhibits the research or imagination of Lincecum, and, like most oral history, the story tends to collapse time and events so that it can be hard to form a dependable chronology of actions, the story nonetheless appears accurate when discussing known Choctaw cultural features such as the Green Corn Ceremony and other rituals, kinship and clans, and the roles of specialists such as rainmakers and chiefs. Although the accuracy is in question, the story recorded by Lincecum serves as an early Choctaw example of what scholar Peter Nabokov called American Indian historicity, wherein a distinct Indian voice is presented that exposes an Indian perspective on the events described.⁷ Although the role of Lincecum in this long narrative as either translator or author (or both) may never be determined entirely, the tale’s fantastical events of war against the Spanish, political leadership, religion, and general criticism of Euro-American culture make it an intriguing work of literature in its own right.⁸

Other origin stories are also prominent among Mississippi’s Indian peoples. Although the migration narrative can be found among the earliest recorded stories discussing Native beginnings in Mississippi, the Choctaws, or at least a significant portion of them, also traced their creation to emergence from under the ground at the Nanih Waya (Mother Mound) site or from a cave nearby. Details differ in versions of the story about the roles of religious and political leaders and women in bringing into existence the people who called themselves Chahtas, but they all point to the Nanih Waya setting as the place where the Choctaws became a distinct people. Such emergence stories are a common theme throughout Native North America and serve, at the least, to place a particular people at a known location, thus proving their rightful occupation of that land and marking it as sacred geography. The two main origin stories among the Choctaws, migration and emergence, may not be contradictory since the eighteenth-century Choctaws comprised at least three different ethnic and political groupings that had coalesced only a brief time earlier; and thus each ethnic group maintained its own origin story that only later came to apply to all Choctaws. Lincecum’s version of the migration origin states that the Choctaws constructed Nanih Waya after migrating to the area and deciding to live there permanently, making the two stories compatible.⁹

One form of an origin story from Mississippi further highlights the role of the soil (clay) and the development of new technology in establishing tribal identity. A significant but little known Chickasaw story traces that tribe’s creation as a distinct people to the skills of their royal ancestors. In a diplomatic meeting with British officials at Mobile in 1771, a Chickasaw speaker introduced the newest successor to the title king of the Chickasaws, Mingo Ouma (Red King). Mingo Ouma claimed to be the King of my Nation and the last of a Long Race of Kings, although in this case that did not translate to ruling authority as readers would expect in a European context. Instead, his heritage from a Long Race of Kings connected Mingo Ouma to the originators of the Chickasaw identity, an identity based on manipulation of the land, in this case clay. His spokesman explained Mingo Ouma’s importance via a Wooden Apparatus for making Fire and a small Earthen pot in his hand. He told the British that Mingo Ouma’s "Ancestors were the First That found the Earth of which such Untensils [sic] as this pot were made. The spokesman gave the fire sticks and pot to the British officials as a symbol of Chickasaw material dependence on the English and their desire to acquire more trade. Mingo Ouma had inherited his status as the highest-ranking male representative of his family, a family traced matrilineally that had apparently created the Chickasaw identity from the earth in the form of clay to make pottery, a typically female craft. The notion of the first real people being created from clay (or by the manipulation of clay) is also found in some stories of the Choctaw emergence. This Chickasaw narrative is a version of it featuring a specific group of people with direct descendants in the (eighteenth-century) present. No matter when in the distant past the Chickasaw king’s" people created the new pottery, their descendants recounted the technological significance of pottery for generations after to demonstrate their connection to the land of north Mississippi and as a marker of Chickasaw identity.¹⁰

Besides the origin of their societies, Mississippi Indians also told detailed stories about the origin of corn, their most important agricultural crop, and the importance of the sun to agriculture and life generally. Corn, along with varieties of beans and squash, provided the basis of agricultural surpluses raised by Mississippi Indians for hundreds of years before and after Europeans arrived. The importance of corn-based agriculture to Mississippi Indians can hardly be overestimated. Among other benefits, it supplied some of the fundamental annual rituals through the Green Corn Ceremony, celebrated over several days in mid- to late summer and the precursor to today’s Choctaw Indian Fair held each summer by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. The reliance of corn on the sun led Mississippi Indians to view the sun (and its earthly representative, sacred fire) as being endowed with spiritual power, and the sun became their most powerful symbol of spirituality. All sorts of iconography expressed the power of the sun and thus of spiritual power more generally, especially the widespread circle and cross designs found in everything from shell pendants to architecture.

As fundamental as the power of the sun was the role of women in creating corn agriculture and maintaining human life. Traditionally, Native women in Mississippi did the farming and controlled access to the agricultural fields. This authority was also extended over families, as all the Indian groups in Mississippi traced ancestry only through their mothers’ relatives, and women managed access to their families as the final arbiters on matters of marriage or adoption. All of this female authority reflected the Native belief that women were spiritually powerful people because of their ability to create life through childbirth and to sustain it through agriculture—thus, stories of the Corn Mother who first introduced corn to the people are found among all of Mississippi’s Indian groups.¹¹

Few Indian nations in the Southeast embodied the power and symbolism of the sun and agriculture more than the Natchez. The leading elite families among the Natchez were called the Suns, and each village had lesser or greater Suns who governed many of their diplomatic and ritual activities. Although only imperfectly described by French and other European observers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Natchez stories about the sun, corn, and the role of women in making that world possible were collected off and on until the early twentieth century. One story collected in the 1720s tells of the role of religious specialists who tended the sacred fires in each Natchez village temple. In this case, two of them neglected their duty to keep their temple’s fire lit, bringing death to a succession of Great Suns (male Natchez political leaders) until one of the sacred fire keepers confessed and sacred fire was borrowed from another temple to rekindle the flames. The actors in the sacred fire story were all men, but the Great Suns attained their position because of the high status of their mothers.

The authority of women also appeared prominently in stories about the origin of corn. In the early twentieth century, Natchez descendants gave anthropologist John Swanton stories about the origin of corn that credited women with bringing corn to the people. The twin daughters (or sometimes the son) of Corn Woman spied on her to figure out where she got her corn kernels and other agricultural produce and discovered that she used supernatural power to shake corn and beans from her body into baskets. Horrified at what they assumed to be impure defecation, the children confronted their mother and refused to eat the filthy food. She scolded them for spying on her and told them to kill her and burn her body (as a witch, a person manipulating spiritual power for evil purposes, might be treated), scattering her ashes over the ground so that the earth would forever sprout corn and beans. But the children disobeyed her detailed instructions and brought unnecessary hardship on themselves and others, although they had learned how to raise corn and beans. Thus, the Natchez tale credited Corn Woman with magically introducing the crops to the people while also imparting important lessons for children to obey their parents and elders, and for everyone to respect the creative power of women.¹²

Corn Woman and her supernatural power to create life (connected with the power of the sun) were (and are) crucial elements in the stories of all of Mississippi’s Indian peoples. A Tunica tale credits a very beautiful girl with radiating light and brightness before eventually journeying to the sky to become the sun itself after the kingfisher bird brought her cheap food to eat and embarrassed her. Similarly, in a Biloxi story, the Ancient of Otters humiliated a woman (the Sun Woman) seeking his affections, so she left him to live in the sky as the sun. Another Tunica story about the origins of beans (always grown intermixed with corn) credits an orphan girl who shared bean seeds with her brother and instructed him in the techniques of growing it, before disappearing into the ocean never to be seen again. Although the exact meaning is not clear, it seems that the lessons of these related stories teach that women are to be treated as high-status people because of their connection to the creative power of the sun and agriculture.¹³

One of the most intriguing stories of the Corn Woman comes from the Choctaws, as written down in the late nineteenth century by Horatio Cushman, the son of Christian missionaries to the Choctaws. Cushman grew up among the Mississippi Choctaws, knew how to speak their language, and wrote the tale in his larger History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians (1899). As in Lincecum’s tale of the Choctaw migration story discussed earlier, it is not clear how much Cushman may have embellished this tale of an Unknown Woman (Ohoyo Chishba Osh) who traveled to the Choctaw homeland carrying corn kernels to show them how to grow corn. In the days of many moons ago, two men out hunting spent the night along the Alabama River in present-day central Alabama having killed only a hawk for a meal. After hearing mysterious plaintive and melancholy sounds while lamenting their inability to provide food for themselves and their families, they spotted a woman of wonderful beauty surrounded by a halo of light (perhaps akin to the Tunica tale above). She appeared like an illuminating shadow that had suddenly appeared out of the moon-lighted forest wearing a snow-white dress interwoven with flowers that represented loved ones who had passed from earth to bloom in the spirit land. The men perceived her to be related to the Great Spirit of their nation, and the woman confirmed that her father was Shilup Chitoh Osh—the Great Spirit. The hunters fed her the meager hawk meat, and she promised to repay them with a gift if they would return the following summer to the same spot where she now stood, atop a mound. The men did as they were told and returned to the mound that summer to find corn growing where Ohoyo Chishba Osh had stood, and thus corn came to the Choctaw people.¹⁴

Contemporary Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe has studied the tale and finds it convincing. After considering the call and response way in which nature spoke back to the two hunters, the possibility that the illuminating shadow may refer to a lunar eclipse (a time, like solstices and equinoxes, when sacred and momentous events typically occurred), the prevalent references to brightness and whiteness (designating significance and peaceful intentions), and, last, the idea that the mound that Ohoyo Chishba Osh stood upon may have represented the method of farming inherent to Native people who grew corn in small mounds intermixed with beans and squash (together the three sisters crops) rather than a burial or platform mound, Howe defines the story as inherently Choctaw rather than an invention by Cushman. Moreover, she suggests, the story may even reflect the moment when matrilineality entered the Choctaw world, as women became the key providers through agriculture and the male and female worlds became more distinct (men are hunters, women are farmers) yet complementary and whole. Howe interprets Ohoyo Chishba Osh as Woman Who Stretches Way Back to reflect the ancient roots of the story, as the allusion to a woman (or women) who traveled long distances to bring new crop technology and a new way of living to the Choctaws.¹⁵

Seemingly in conflict with the story of Ohoyo Chishba Osh is another prominent story among the Choctaws about the origin of corn deriving from a crow bringing corn kernels to an orphan child. The Chickasaws told a similar story about a bird bringing corn to the people. In both the Unknown Woman and crow versions of the story, it is emphasized that the knowledge of corn agriculture and the actual seeds came from far away in the long-ago past. In the Corn Mother stories from the Tunicas and Biloxis cited above, the woman journeyed up into the sky to live with the Sun, a power that birds embodied by traveling between earth and sky, or between the world of humans and the Upper World. Southeastern Indians generally conceived of their cosmological universe as divided into the Lower World (underwater and underground), the Middle World (the surface), and the Upper World (the sky and outer space), and animals that could travel between two or more of those worlds, such as birds, were accorded great respect. Numerous Native Mississippi stories also tell of the power of certain people to transmogrify into animals and vice versa, so that what seemingly are two vastly different explanations of the origin of corn might actually be quite similar in their emphasis on supernatural power to bring new plants over great distances. This tradition also conveniently explains the great attraction that cornfields hold for crows, and the Choctaw word for crow, fala, is also a name for Choctaw girls.¹⁶

Mississippi Indians also told numerous other stories about the role of animals and how humans relate to nature and each other, trickster and humorous stories, as well as adventure and culture hero stories. Choctaw stories such as The Man Who Became a Deer, Alligator Power, The Origin of Poison, The Little People, Journey to the Sky (by the brothers Tashka and Walo), Owl Murders a Man, and Deer Butts a Tree; Natchez stories such as The Ukteni (a horned serpent that lives underwater), The Frog That Lost His Wife, and Rabbit and Alligator; Chickasaw stories like The Invisible Little People; Biloxi stories like The Killing of Turkey and Marooned Hero (Thunder Being); and the Tunica story The Rescue of the Brothers provide a sampling of the rich traditional oral literature among Mississippi’s indigenous people.¹⁷

Foundational stories about the origin of the people or the Corn Woman and more whimsical ones about animals, tricksters, and human relationships with nature have been known among Mississippi Indians in at least their broad versions up to the present day. However, formal storytelling among Mississippi’s Indian people apparently fell into decline around the era of the Indian Removal after Mississippi became a state in 1817. In 1823, an unnamed Choctaw chief told missionary Cyrus Byington, for example, that when he was a boy it was customary for the oldest men in the nation to give long talks to the boys, concerning the former wars of Choctaws, Chickasaws, &c., but that that form of education was now neglected.¹⁸ Alfred Wright also revealed that elders once assemble[d] the youth and children of their respective towns and rehearse[d] to them those … stories which embodied all their traditional knowledge. In this way, he continued, was their traditional knowledge, depending alone on the memory for its preservation, transmitted from generation to generation. But since their intercourse with the whites, [the Choctaws] have in a great measure lost the knowledge of their ancient traditions, and the little that is now known, is retained only in the memories of a few old men who have survived their own generation.¹⁹

One unnamed Choctaw man explained to British missionary Adam Hodgson in 1820 that great changes had taken place among the Indians, even in his time. Previously, children were collected on the bank of the river after ritual morning bathing to learn the manners and customs of their ancestors, and hear the old men recite the traditions of their forefathers. The children were assembled again, at sunset for the same purpose and were taught to regard as a sacred duty, the transmission to their posterity of the lessons thus acquired. But now this custom is … abandoned … except … where there is, here and there, an old ancient fellow, who upholds the old way.²⁰ Two years later, Chahta Immataha, talking to Gideon Lincecum, offered another description of how Choctaw traditional education and storytelling had changed. He explained that a long time ago, before the white man came, it was a custom with the old men, after they had become too feeble from age and decrepitude to pursue the chase, for them to remain at home with the women and children, assist them in the cultivation of their little farm patches, and carefully teach the traditional [Choctaw] history to the children. All Choctaws once knew the traditional history of their people, he continued, [but] when the white people came and brought with them [alcohol] old men as well as the young [got] drunk, & the traditional teaching ceased.²¹ Similarly, Nathaniel Folsom, longtime resident and fur trader among the Choctaws, learned Choctaw history from another elderly Choctaw man in 1798 who also emphasized alcohol as the main cause of Choctaw cultural change. After listening to his informant, Folsom likewise came to lament Choctaw and white dependence on trade goods and the decline of traditional storytelling.²²

If these reports by non-Indians are to be believed, it would seem that Mississippi Indians like the Choctaws stopped telling stories and creating literature in the early nineteenth century. The Indian Removal and the associated land loss that began as soon as Mississippi became a state have long cast a dark shadow over the role of Indians in Mississippi’s past by literally erasing much of their presence from the state. However, Indian people have always lived in Mississippi, represented most obviously today by the eight communities of the federally recognized Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. Not only have Indian people who reside in Mississippi continued to retell and create literature through the nearly two centuries since the Removal era began, but the descendants of those Indian people who endured banishment to Indian Territory and other points have also told and published stories.

Among today’s Native inhabitants of Mississippi, the Choctaw storytelling tradition has been studied most thoroughly by anthropologist Tom Mould. The most prevalent types of stories identified by Mould among Mississippi Choctaws are those in the category of humor and animal stories, called by the Choctaw shukha anumpa (hog talk or hogwash). Shukha anumpa are make-up stories, according to Mould, created by the teller to be funny. Even when retold by the same or other storytellers, such tales are supposed to be creatively adapted to new situations and thus modified with each retelling. Such humorous storytelling genres are found throughout Native America, as well as being a staple of southern literature. Opposite shukha anumpa are what Mould terms elders’ stories. Whereas shukha anumpa are as much performances (think stand-up comedian) as storytelling, elders’ stories are acts of memory and the retelling of past stories in order to have them preserved in the present and future, and in that sense they are true. Stories still told today falling into the elder story category encompass creation myths, historical legends, and supernatural legends like the ones discussed earlier in this essay. Shukha anumpa stories, on the other hand, include jokes, tall tales, and animal stories. Mould’s work makes clear that Mississippi Choctaws have never stopped telling stories, whether they are inventing new ones or repeating foundational accounts of their origins and other events that mark them as distinctly Choctaw.²³

Since the nineteenth century, people of Mississippi Indian descent have contributed directly to more formal literature in the form of poetry and fiction. The poetry and stories of Israel Folsom (Choctaw), who was born in Mississippi but moved to the new Choctaw Nation in Indian Territory as part of the Removal, included his well-known poem Lo! The Poor Indian’s Hope in which he decried the forced banishment of his people from their central Mississippi homeland. A contemporary of Folsom, the Chickasaw author James Harris Guy was reared at Boggy Depot, Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory and struck similar tones in his poems The White Man Wants the Indians’ Home and Lament of Tishomingo. The Natchez-Creek planter and Indian agent George Stiggins, whose maternal grandfather was one of the Natchez leaders who established the Natchez community among the Creeks in Alabama after the Natchez war against the French in the 1730s, penned a lengthy history of the Creek War of 1812–1813 that also exposed Natchez customs and language as they existed in the early nineteenth century. Chickasaw farmer and US government employee Ben H. Colbert, along with Choctaw lawyer David C. McCurtain, published brief historical essays critical of the US role in forcing stipulations upon the removed tribes after the Civil War and dissolving the Indian Territory nations as Oklahoma became a state in the early twentieth century. US Congressman Charles David Carter (Chickasaw) represented Oklahoma in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century and wrote a famous piece for the dedication of the Pushmataha memorial at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, DC, in 1921 about Pushmataha’s rejection of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh’s plea for allies against the United States in 1811. Prolific Choctaw historian Muriel Hazel Wright published a popular retelling of the Legend of Nanih Wayah about the origin of the Choctaws in the early twentieth century, along with several essays and books on Choctaw and Oklahoma history. Ben D. Locke, a Choctaw and World War I veteran, wrote poetry, including his popular The Doughboy and more whimsical stories such as Meeting with Reptiles.²⁴

Twentieth-century and contemporary Chickasaw writers include Linda Hogan, the twice–Pulitzer Prize–nominated author for the novels Mean Spirit (1990) and People of the Whale: A Novel (2008). Her other novels and poetry collections are numerous and include Seeing through the Sun (1985), The Book of Medicines: Poems (1993), Solar Storms: A Novel (1995), and Power (1998), in addition to her memoir The Woman Who Watches over the World: A Native Memoir (2001). The famous twentieth-century Chickasaw actress Te Ata also wrote a well-received children’s book entitled Baby Rattlesnake (2003). Chickasaw artist Jeannie Barbour is a renowned book illustrator and author of children’s books. Chickasaw historian Amanda Cobb-Greetham has written historical monographs, edited the academic journal American Indian Quarterly, and coauthored Chickasaw: Unconquered and Unconquerable (2006), published by the Chickasaw Nation Press. Cynthia Gaillard (Chickasaw-Choctaw-Cherokee-Seminole), who grew up spending summers with family in northern Mississippi, is an Emmy Award–winning television producer who has also written poetry and nonfiction essays.

Twentieth-century and contemporary novelists and poets of Choctaw descent are numerous and prolific. Louis Owens (Choctaw-Cherokee), whose excerpt opens this chapter, was a novelist and coeditor of the American Indian Literature Series of the University of Oklahoma Press and an English professor at the University of New Mexico and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His novels include Wolfsong (1991), The Sharpest Sight (1992), and Bone Game (1994). Poet Roxy Gordon (Choctaw-Assiniboine) published poems in numerous publications and in three anthologies of his work entitled Unfinished Business (1985), West Texas Mid-Century (1988), and Revolution in the Air (1995). Jim Barnes is a poet who won the Oklahoma Book Award for his The Sawdust War (1993). Among Barnes’s other verse collections are American Book of the Dead (1982), A Season of Loss (1985), La Plata Cantata (1989), The Fish on Poteau Mountain (1980), and This Crazy Land (1980). His memoir On Native Ground: Memoirs and Impressions was published in 1997. Ronald Burns Querry was an English professor at the University of Oklahoma and the author of The Death of Bernadette Lefthand (1993). Beatrice Harrell is an author of children’s books, including How Thunder and Lightning Came to Be: A Choctaw Tale (1995) and Longwalker’s Journey: A Novel of the Choctaw Trail of Tears (1999). University administrator John Woodrow Presley is a prolific writer of poetry and literary studies; an anthology of some of his poetry was published as How Like a Life in 1986. Larry Richard is a member of Alabama’s MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians, has researched Louisiana Indian history extensively, and published Eagle Feathers and Tartans (1996). Mississippi Native American besmilr brigham (she preferred her name to be written in lowercase letters; her first name is an adaptation of her birth name, Bess Miller) was a poet and fiction writer whose publications include Agony Dance: Death of the Dancing Dolls (1971), Death of the Wild (1984), and To Live as a Bird (1984), along with numerous essays and journal articles and a posthumous collection of stories entitled Run through Rock (2000). Poet and scholar William Jay Smith is a nationally acclaimed writer who was twice nominated for the National Book Award and served as national poetry consultant in 1968–1970 (the position is now called the US poet laureate). He published more than eighty books of poetry, children’s literature, nonfiction, and translations. D. L. (Don) Birchfield, Choctaw satirist and professor of Native American studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, was a well-known novelist whose books include Field of Honor: A Novel (2004), Black Silk Handkerchief: A Hom-Astubby Mystery (2006), and How Choctaws Invented Civilization and Why Choctaws Will Conquer the World (2007). LeAnne Howe is a widely published novelist, poet, short story writer, playwright, and documentary filmmaker; her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and collections. Her books include the well-received novels Shell Shaker (2001) and Miko Kings (2007) and the poetry collections Coyote Papers (1985) and Evidence of Red (2005). Kimberly G. Roppolo (Cherokee-Choctaw-Creek) teaches literature and Native American studies at the University of Oklahoma and has published numerous poems and essays. The internationally known Choctaw artist Gary White Deer recently published his memoir, Touched by Thunder (2013).

In addition to fiction and poetry writers, many Choctaws have made their literary mark by writing history and anthropology. Besides the individuals already named in this essay, Choctaw historians include the late Anna Lewis, who became the first woman to receive a PhD in history from the University of Oklahoma; she pursued a distinguished teaching career at the Oklahoma College for Women, now the University of Science and Arts, in Chickasaha, Oklahoma, while devoting her life to researching a biography of Pushmataha that became Chief Pushmataha, American Patriot, published in 1959. Clara Sue Kidwell, formerly a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Oklahoma and head of the Native American studies program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has published numerous essays as well as the books Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918 (1995) and The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855–1970 (2007). Jacki Thompson Rand of the Departments of History and Native American Studies at the University of Iowa has published numerous articles and the book Kiowa Humanity and the Invasion of the State (2008). Michelene Pesantubbee is a religious studies professor at the University of Iowa and author of the book Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World: The Clash of Cultures in the Colonial Southeast (2005). Donna Akers is a professor of history at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and author of Living in the Land of Death: The Choctaw Nation, 1830–1860 (2004). Valerie Lambert is an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Choctaw Nation: A Story of American Indian Resurgence (2007). Anthropologist Circe Sturm is a Mississippi Choctaw descendant and the author of Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-First Century (2011) and the award-winning Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (2002). Choctaw author Devon Mihesuah is a prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction and has received multiple awards for her publications. Her numerous books include Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851–1909 (1993), Roads of My Relations (2000), American Indigenous Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism (2003), Recovering Our Ancestors’ Gardens: Indigenous Recipes and Guide to Diet and Fitness (2005), So You Want to Write about American Indians? A Guide for Writers, Students, and Scholars (2005), and Choctaw Crime and Punishment, 1884–1907 (2009); and the edited collections American Indians: Stereotypes and Realities (1996), Natives and Academics: Research and Writing about American Indians (1998), and Repatriation Reader: Who Owns Indian Remains? (2000).

Mississippi’s indigenous peoples rightly claim the mantle of the earliest creators of Mississippi literature. Their focus on humor, explaining the past, and all the rest that makes this region and its peoples unique in the world has been carried on by a host of non-Indian Mississippians to the present day. Indigenous Mississippians are located throughout the United State and have remained in the Magnolia State, where their literary voice is still felt. Sometimes forgotten by the non-Indian residents of Mississippi, these deep Native literary roots reveal much about what has made Mississippi’s literature distinctive. As Dartmouth College literary scholar Melanie Benson Taylor writes about southern Indian and southern literature and history in general:

Both southern and Native communities have been irrevocably altered and revivified by the narratives that each attempts to tell about the other and in turn about themselves—stories and motives that have far more in common than they at first suggest. Indeed, Native and non-Native southerners have been defiantly making their own stories and worlds in parallel streams for as long as they have coexisted geographically; the time has come to see them occupying the same space, both material and discursive.²⁵

Notes

1. As reprinted in The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing after Removal, ed. Geary Hobson, Janet McAdams, and Kathryn Walkiewicz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 224.

2. Alfred Wright, Choctaws: Religious Opinions, Traditions, &c., Missionary Herald 24 (1828): 178.

3. See, for example, Andrew Wiget, ed., Handbook of Native American Literature (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1994).

4. George E. Lankford, Oral Literature of the Southeast, in Wiget, Handbook of Native American Literature, 83–84.

5. These migration origin stories for several of Mississippi’s Native peoples can be found in a variety of sources, one of the most prominent early sources being James Adair, The History of the American Indians (1775; rpt. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005). The following sources compile these stories into readily accessible formats: John R. Swanton, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico (1911; rpt. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998); John R. Swanton, Chickasaw Society and Religion (1928; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 2–8; John R. Swanton, Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians (1929; rpt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); John R. Swanton, Source Material for the Social and Ceremonial Life of the Choctaw Indians (1931; rpt. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001), 5–37; George E. Lankford, Native American Legends: Southeastern Legends; Tales from the Natchez, Caddo, Biloxi, Chickasaw, and Other Nations (Little Rock: August House, 1987); and Greg Urban and Jason Baird Jackson, Mythology and Folklore, in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 14, Southeast, ed. Raymond D. Fogelson (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2004), 707–19.

6. Gideon Lincecum, Traditional History of the Chahta Nation: Translated from the Chahta, typescript, Gideon Lincecum Papers, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, 1861, 6. See also Gideon Lincecum, Pushmataha: A Choctaw Chief and His People (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004).

7. Peter Nabokov, A Forest of Time: American Indian Ways of History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 34–57. See also Peter Nabokov, Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492–2000, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).

8. An excerpt of this Choctaw origin story was published as Gideon Lincecum, Choctaw Traditions about Their Settlement in Mississippi and the Origin of Their Mounds, Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society 8 (1904): 521–42; reprinted in Swanton, Source Material for the Social and Ceremonial Life, 17.

9. For the emergence story and consideration of its relation to the migration stories, see Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500–1700 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 140–43; and Lincecum, Choctaw Traditions, 521–42. On my rendering of the spelling and definition of Nanih Waya, see Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 12–15. There is also a reference to the Chickasaws claiming an origin from underground emergence; see Swanton, Chickasaw Society and Religion, 2–3.

10. Greg O’Brien, Delusions of Chiefdoms: An Ethnohistorian’s Viewpoint, Native South 2 (2009): 108. The original document is reprinted in Dunbar Rowland, ed., Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, vol. 5, Centenary Series (Jackson: Mississippi Historical Society, 1925), 146–47. See further discussion of the document in Greg O’Brien, Supplying Our Wants: Choctaws and Chickasaws Reassess the Trade Relationship with Britain, 1771–72, in Coastal Encounters: The Transformation of the Gulf South in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Richmond F. Brown (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 59–80. For the role of clay in certain southeastern Indian emergence stories, see Urban and Jackson, Mythology and Folklore, 709.

11. O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 3–6.

12. Lankford, Native American Legends, 56–57; and Swanton, Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians, 230–34.

13. Lankford, Native American Legends, 59–60, 144–45.

14. Horatio B. Cushman, The History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians (Greenville, TX: Headlight Printing House, 1899), 277–78.

15. LeAnne Howe, "Ohoyo Chishba