That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture

7. Freemasonry and Native Americans, 1776–1920

175 The story of Freemasonry and Native Americans begins in 1776, when the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant joined an English Masonic lodge.1 As an Indian leader and Loyalist ally, Brant traveled several times to England , where he discussed the role of the Iroquois in the Revolutionary War. While in London, he was entertained by the Prince of Wales, had his portrait painted, and joined a Masonic lodge. In his lifetime, the Mohawk chief learned English, gained a Western education, joined the Anglican Church, and translated the Bible into his native language. At the same time, he was a member of the Iroquois Grand Council and a leader of the Indians who fought alongside the British against the Revolution . Following the war, the British provided him with a pension and a land grant along the Grand River in Upper Canada, where he settled in a Mohawk village and joined the local lodge.2 Mediating between Indian and white worlds, Brant and the Native Masons who followed him worked to advance the interests of their people. In the nineteenth century, as the American population moved westward into lands that the federal authorities had assigned to Indians, more Native Americans joined Masonic lodges. The majority of the Native American leaders in Indian Territory were Freemasons. The Cherokee leader John Ross and his Princeton-educated nephew William contributed to the 1849 founding of their tribe’s first lodge. The Cherokee publisher and politician Elias Boudinot, the Cherokee Confederate general Stand Watie, and the Choctaw leader Peter Pitchlyn were all lodge chapter 7 Freemasonry and Native Americans, 1776–1920 176 | Beyond the White, Protestant Middle Class notables. Farther north, the Seneca chief and Masonic lodge founder Ely S. Parker worked as an engineer, served as an adjutant to General U.S. Grant, and was appointed the first commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In the early twentieth century, his grandnephew Arthur C. Parker directed the New York State Museum and held various positions in Freemasonry . Other well-known Indian Masons include the physician and author Charles Eastman, the Indian spokesman Carlos Montezuma, and the comedian Will Rogers.3 Freemasonry among Native Americans can be interpreted in the context of contact historiography. The history of Indian-white relations was once told as a story of conquest. The expansion of a growing European American population into the Indian country of North America was believed to be inevitable. In this framework, historians saw Freemasonry , when mentioned at all, much as the earlier triumphalists saw Christianity, as part of a large “civilizing” process. Since the 1970s, historians have emphasized Native American resistance to European American expansion. Newer studies have focused on Indian revitalization movements. Recently, scholars such as Rachel Wheeler “have explored the ways various Indian communities have engaged Christianity in a dialogue with native traditions as a means of preserving native identity and securing new spiritual resources with which to confront the challenges of colonialism.”4 This chapter considers the ways in which Indian leaders similarly engaged Freemasonry to both resist and adapt to European American society. On the Atlantic frontier throughout most of the eighteenth century, Freemasonry was part of a cultural milieu peopled by Indians, Africans, and Europeans, and their various religious beliefs and practices. In their contact and interactions, Indian and white peoples attempted to grasp the ways of the other’s culture and employ them for their own ends. By the early nineteenth century, the encroachment of European American settlers on Native American lands led to the end of relatively equal power relations and the removal of the southeastern Indians to the Indian Territory of present-day Oklahoma. The “civilization” program that began under George Washington and continued throughout the following five administrations held out the promise of acceptance once Indians had assimilated the values and practices of white society. Freemasonry was part of this process. At the same time, this chapter argues, Indians appropriated Masonic beliefs and practices in an effort to preserve Native identity and confront the challenges of accommodation to American society with new spiritual resources. In the late nineteenth Freemasonry and Native Americans | 177 and early twentieth centuries, while growing numbers of fraternal men were attracted to Native American wisdom in their quest for a primal American identity, modernizing Indians worked within Masonic discourse to navigate their place in American society. freemasonry in indian territory Freemasonry became established in Indian Territory following the forced resettlement there...