This essay argues that mainstream, familiar concepts of a bordered South and a recognizable southernness, however permeable and flexible, are mostly dysfunctional when it comes to American Indian literatures. "Native southern ground" can nevertheless be located and described. For example, captivity narratives written before and during Indian removal, though narrated by Europeans or Euro-Americans, reveal non-utopian ways in which "the South" works as Native ground. From a pointedly sovereign Native perspective, contemporary Native texts such as Shell Shaker (2001) by LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) reaffirm what various Indians in early captivity narratives say and "say" and do as they work against the impositions of a proto-regional colonial demarcation. In radically repossessing the very experience and practice of captivity, removing it from its western generic place and casting it as primarily a tribal affair conducted on Native ground, Howe stands with various other contemporary southeastern Native writers in working to repossess homelands that they rearticulate not as "the South" but as Native ground.