Unnamed Mississippi Indians

The narrative lists five Indian tribes as the groups who "dispossessed" the aboriginal mound builders in Mississippi: the Algonquian, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Natchez and the Pascagoula (81). The Algonquian language group was large and widespread, but found almost entirely in Canada and nowhere near Mississippi, so their presence on the list is surprising. The Chickasaw were the people who lived in and closest to the part of Mississippi where Faulkner locates Yoknapatawpha: they often appear in his fiction (sometimes interchangeably with the Choctaw) and have their own entry in the database of this novel's characters. The Natchez lived in the southwestern part of the state, while the Pascagoula lived along the river of the same name, especially near the point where it flows into the Gulf of Mexico. The Yazoo and the Biloxi were other tribes who could have been on the narrator's list.