Unnamed Choctaw Woman

The only native American character mentioned in Flags in the Dust, this "Choctaw woman" gave Will Falls' grandmother the recipe for an ointment "nigh a hundred and thutty years ago" (227). That would be around 1790, at which time the Choctaw was one of the major tribes living in the southeastern U.S, including Mississippi. They inhabit Yoknapatawpha in Faulkner's earliest fictions. However, historically the tribe that lived in the area of Yoknapatawpha was the Chickasaw, and in his later fictions Faulkner uses that name instead. Both tribes were 'removed' to Oklahoma via the Trail of Tears in the 1830s, but a small number of Choctaw were allowed to remain in Mississippi.