Poets

Alexander Posey (Eufaula, Oklahoma, 1873-27 May, 1908) was an Amerindian Maskoki writer and politician. He was the son of a Scottish father and a Harjo mother.

Posey worked at Indian Journal [3], where he published poems. In 1895, he became a member of the Creek Parliament. He was also the director of a Creek Orphanage and in 1901 he edited the journal Eufaula Gazette, where he satirised about Creek Politics. In 1904, he worked as an interpreter in Dawes Commission and died in an accident where he drowned while crossing the flooded Oktahutche River. There is an anthology about his works published in 1910.

Alexander Posey's life was cut short on May 27, 1908. At the age of thirty-five, the Creek writer drowned while crossing the flooded Oktahutche River. It was barely a year since Indian Territory and the tribal governments within it had been dissolved. Born in the Creek Nation, Posey died in the brand-new state of Oklahoma. The end of tribal governments and the advent of statehood were long, bitterly contested transitions. As a poet, politician, and political satirist, Posey had a strong and complicated voice in the deliberations.

Often called a "progressivist" because he believed that native peoples needed at least partially to assimilate to white culture in order to survive, Posey criticized "traditionalists," calling them "pull back" Indians who couldn't possibly survive in the imminent future. Nevertheless, he respected older Creeks who remembered another way of..