Craig Womack, Aestheticizing a Political Debate: Can the Creek Confederacy Be Sung Back Together? Southern Spaces

Aestheticizing a Political Debate:
Can the Creek Confederacy Be Sung Back Together?

Craig Womack, Emory University

Overview:

Speaking at Emory University on April 13, 2007, Dr. Womack explores the complex historical relationship between African Americans and the Creek Confederacy through a close reading of two short stories by Creek author Alexander Posey: "Uncle Dick and Uncle Will" (1894) and "Uncle Dick's Sow" (1900).

Presentation Sections:

Aestheticizing a Political Debate | Recommended Resources

Aestheticizing a Political Debate: Can the Creek Confederacy Be Sung Back Together?:

Part 1 (8:57 min.) RealMedia Windows Media QuickTime	Womack introduces his talk by reviewing the relationship between Creeks and African Americans. After aligning themselves with the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, the Creeks were forced to admit their former slaves as full tribal members in 1866. Over 130 years later, in 1979, the Creeks voted to overturn this decision and in so doing, disenfranchised black Creeks. This troubled relationship is a prominent subtext of two short stories by Creek author Alexander Posey (1873-1908), which feature two freedmen characters, "Uncle Dick" and "Uncle Will." Womack discusses these two characters as well as the intriguing figure of the sow, which he argues is a metaphor for the Creek Confederacy itself.
Part 2 (12:41 min.) RealMedia Windows Media QuickTime	Womack continues his discussion of Posey's short stories, arguing that the author uses Dick and Will to represent the vexed relationships between Creeks and Freedmen. His discussion revolves around the complex and multilayered reality of race or ethnicity within the Creek Confederacy, in which "tremendous genetic variability" exists. Womack examines another of Posey's representations of the hybrid and ambiguous interrelationship between Freedmen and Creeks in the story "Jes Bout a Mid'lin', Sah."
Part 3 (10:24 min.) RealMedia Windows Media QuickTime	While Posey's stories present African Americans and Creeks as highly intertwined and interdependent, the contemporary reality within the Creek Confederacy reflects a much starker and more reductive view of these racial/ethnic categories. Rather than arguing about whether the Freedmen’s descendents are "really Creek" or not, Womack suggests that the Confederacy would be better served by acknowledging "the commonalities and interdependency" between the two groups.

About Craig Womack:

Dr. Craig Womack is an Oklahoma Creek-Cherokee Native American literary scholar, writer, and teacher. He received an MA in English from South Dakota State University in 1991, and his PhD from the University of Oklahoma in 1995. He is the author of Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (1999), Drowning in Fire (2001), and Reflections on Aesthetics (2008). He is co-author of American Indian Literary Nationalism (2007) and Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (2008). At the time of this lecture, Prof. Womack taught Native American literatures and gay and lesbian literatures at the University of Oklahoma. He joined the English Department of Emory University in the fall of 2007.

For another video lecture by Womack, visit "Baptists and Witches: Multiple Jurisdictions in a Muskogee Creek Story."

Presentation Sections:

Aestheticizing a Political Debate | Recommended Resources