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).
Aestheticizing a Political Debate: Can the Creek Confederacy Be Sung Back Together?
Part 2: Womack analyzes Posey’s representation of the vexed relationships between Creeks and Freedmen in the Creek Confederacy
Part 3: Womack contrasts Posey’s stories of racial/ethnic interdependency with the contemporary reality in the Creek Confederacy
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 Art as Performance, Story as Criticism: Reflections on Native Literary Aesthetics (2009). 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.
Recommended Resources
Text
Chaudhuri, Jean and Joyotpaul Chaudhuri. A Sacred Path: The Way of the Muscogee Creeks. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, 2001.
Dempsey, Mary A. "The Indian Connection: African American and Native American Racial Mixing." American Visions 11.4 (August-September 1996).
Henry, Michelle. "Canonizing Craig Womack: Finding Native Literature's Place in Indian Country." American Indian Quarterly 28.1&2 (2004): 30-51.
May, Katja. African Americans and Native Americans in the Cherokee and Creek Nations, 1830s-1920s: Collision and Collusion. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Posey, Alexander. Chinubbie and the Owl: Muscogee (Creek) Stories, Orations, and Oral Traditions. Edited by Matthew Wynn Sivils. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Saunt, Claudio. A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Tranformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Saunt, Claudio. "Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family. New York: Oxford, University Press, 2005.
Womack, Craig. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Womack, Craig. "Hici: Great-Aunt Lucy, Oklahoma, 1964." Native American Literatures 17.1 (Winter 1994): 122-125.
Womack, Craig. Drowning in Fire. Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2001.
Womack, Craig and Jace Weaver, Robert Warrior. American Indian Literary Nationalism. Albuquerque NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.
Film
Web
http://thorpe.ou.edu/constitution/muscogee/.
Creek Indians: North Georgia History
http://www.aboutnorthgeorgia.com/ang/Creek_Nation.
H-AmIndian Literature Links
http://libguides.asu.edu/content.php?pid=3897&sid=26118.
