In "Drowning in Fire" (2001) Creek writer and scholar Craig Womack explores how an investigation of queer experience can open onto an accounting of the historic and ongoing imperial project of reorganizing Muscogee peoplehood. The novel foregrounds homoeroticism among the Creek people in the early and late twentieth century in ways that emphasize how identification with straightness is enmeshed in the continuing legacy of the civilization program and allotment. By queering Creek tradition, Womack not only challenges the presumption of straightness but also develops a structure of feeling that highlights possibilities for individual and collective self-representation--Creek differences--that have been targeted for eradication by the United States. Presenting prominent Christian tropes--particularly snakes and fire--as a figure for state ideologies, the novel links homoeroticism to other suppressed aspects of Creek history, including the extensive opposition to the policies and social imaginary of allotment emerging out of town- and clan-based movements. This article expounds how Christian tropes such as snakes and fire are portrayed in the Womack's novel. (Contains 33 notes.)