Scholars of both American and U.S. southern history have turned attention to the Indigenous traces often overlooked at the dark heart of place-making. Such revisionism has proved no easy feat in the South, a place where “real” Indians are presumed to be largely extinct after the sweeping Removal land-clearing policies of the 1830s. Nonetheless, Indigenous traces linger – preserved indelibly in the region’s place names, cultural memories, and compensatory fictions. Especially in southern literature, Native hauntings appear to speak for themselves; but they are also uncannily, frighteningly reticent: “vanish’d,” “incomprehensible,” and “inexplicable.” As vital precursors to a traumatic regional history – their expulsion directly facilitating the rise of the South’s plantation economy – this chapter suggests that their centrality can be neither fully recovered nor reckoned with. Indeed, for southerners from a surprising range of backgrounds and moments, the Indian endures as a consistent, formative presence central to the region’s fictions of identity.

As both the record of and rationale for a settler construct, “Native American literature” has always been uniquely embattled: a body of production marked by particularly divergent opinions about what constitutes “authenticity,” sovereignty, and even literature. As such, its texts announce a culture beset by paradox: simultaneously primordial and postmodern; oral and inscribed; outmoded and novel; quixotic and quotidian. Above all, its texts are a site of political struggle, shifting to meet expectations both external and internal. This Introduction sets out the plural, capricious, and contested character of both Indigenous texts and our habits of evaluating them.

Born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas, Katherine Anne Porter cultivated an elaborate fiction of genteel southernness: she adopted the name of her Kentucky-born grandmother, along with an apocryphal genealogy of illustrious ancestors and landed gentry. Yet Porter, who rarely lived in the South or even in Texas, would claim other home spaces throughout her life - or, more accurately, her stake in a southern narrative would emerge only circuitously, by way of alternative geographies and narratives in which she identified variously with the elite and the dispossessed. She eventually imported a nativist southern identity that bore the traces of a much deeper American chronicle and called frequently upon an Indigenous motif to both account for and ameliorate the anxieties of dispossession. In Porter’s fiction, an Indigenous frame narrative provides a tempting window onto a reorienting, and finally mythical, humanity unscathed by modernity’s ills. Her long career would bear the traces of an entwined southern-Indigenous imaginary steeped in the lessons and vexations of early American settler colonialism.

Hannah earned extravagant praise from both fellow writers and critics, who were collectively bedazzled by his prolific and profound universe and his inimitable prose - at once brilliant and bizarre, gorgeous and grotesque. Even Hannah’s greatest fans admit to occasional “disgust” - he never shied away from violence, and its recipients were often women or racial others. It is into this desperate, violent world that Hannah compulsively deposits his Indians as not just inept but decidedly corrupt guides to a redemption that will not come. A pioneer of so-called “Grit Lit,” Hannah’s work rejects romanticism and nostalgia - conceits that typify and bedevil Indigenous and southern cultures simultaneously. There, the Indigenous motif poses not just as guide but at times as lingering fetish, drawing its subjects toward a narrative of fulfillment, albeit one based on hurt and horror rather than transcendence. For his primarily white southern male characters, the lessons of Indigenous conquest become a contemporary parable for the self-defeating desires, vacancies, betrayals, and violence of both southern history and modernity’s insidious bequests.