Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
The author thanks Professor Judy Newman of the School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, for prompting her to consider Native American Freemasonry in connection with the performance paradigm.
Perhaps surprisingly, given its self-selecting and exclusive nature, American Freemasonry has always welcomed Native American Indians that it perceived to be of a certain rank. Thus Native American Indian Freemasonry developed along regional or tribally specific lines that reflected the course of European-American intrusion, namely in the Northeast (especially among the Iroquois), in the Southeast (continued in Indian Territory after removal), and in the Great Lakes area. In the Northeast, it was an important means of power play for Native leaders in the Revolutionary era such as Joseph Brant (1743-1807) and in the nineteenth century Ely S. Parker (1828-95). It is connected with the rise of American ethnology, in particular with professional Native American anthropologists such as Seneca Iroquois Arthur C. Parker (1881-1955), Francis La Flesche (1857-1932) and John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt (1859-1937). It played a very important role within Indian Territory politics, many key Indian political figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries all being Masons in good standing. By 1848, there was a regular lodge of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, chartered by the Grand Lodge of Arkansas (Cherokee Lodge No 21). Masonry was again especially significant during Cherokee removal, with the Cherokee Keetoowah Society, which had clear Masonic connections and fostered a unique form of pro-abolitionist religious nationalism in the years succeeding Indian removal west. By the turn of the twentieth century Freemasonry was closely associated with a key development in Indian life, the rise of urban Native American fraternal organizations. Groups such as the Loyal Order of Tecumseh and Descendants of the American Aborigine (both created within the first intellectual pan-Indian group, the Society of American Indians, in 1912), as well as hybrid organizations such as the Tepee Order of America (1915) and the Indian Council Fire (1923), all had Masonic links.
The complexities of Freemasonry as a fraternal association are too varied to fully encompass here, but the following working definition is a useful orientation. In the American context, Freemasonry is a self-selecting fraternity of men, developmental in terms of its activities...