Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America
366
Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America
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Overview
Freemasonry has played a significant role in the history of Native Americans since the colonial era—a role whose extent and meaning are fully explored for the first time in this book. The overarching concern of Native American Freemasonry is with how Masonry met specific social and personal needs of Native Americans, a theme developed across three periods: the revolutionary era, the last third of the nineteenth century, and the years following the First World War. Joy Porter positions Freemasonry within its historical context, examining its social and political impact as a transatlantic phenomenon at the heart of the colonizing process. She then explores its meaning for many key Native leaders, for ethnic groups that sought to make connections through it, and for the bulk of its American membership—the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle class.
Through research gleaned from archives in New York, Philadelphia, Oklahoma, California, and London, Porter shows how Freemasonry’s performance of ritual provided an accessible point of entry to Native Americans and how over time, Freemasonry became a significant avenue for the exchange and co-creation of cultural forms by Indians and non-Indians.
Joy Porter is a professor of Indigenous history at the University of Hull, UK. She is the author of Native American Environmentalism (Nebraska, 2014) and To Be Indian: Indian Identity and the Life of Arthur Caswell Parker, the coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature, and the editor of Competing Voices from Native America and Place and Native American Indian History and Culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496216625 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2019 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 366 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Joy Porter is a professor of Indigenous history at the University of Hull, UK. She is the author of Native American Environmentalism (Nebraska, 2014) and To Be Indian: Indian Identity and the Life of Arthur Caswell Parker, the coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature, and the editor of Competing Voices from Native America and Place and Native American Indian History and Culture.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Approaching Native American Freemasonry, Part One
On Ritual, Rhetoric, and the Performative Turn in Contemporary Scholarship
Although it does not confine itself to one period, in approach this book draws on the performative turn discernible in recent studies of early American culture and literature. This is appropriate given how central ritual performance has always been to Masonic identity. As one now largely forgotten source explained back in 1940, dramatic pageantry is something that has been at the very heart of the organizational functioning of many secret orders, and of Freemasonry in particular, for a long time. "The dramatic roles, the titles of the 'actors,' the symbolic themes, the fraternal uniforms, the badges and tokens, the music, the lighting," Noel P. Gist pointed out, "all transform the ceremony into a form of pageant which in certain occasions assumes the proportions of an awe-inspiring spectacle." Such an emphasis on Masonic performance does not deny that mutual aid and brotherhood were and remain the primary concerns of the fraternity, nor is Steven Bullock necessarily wrong in his claim that in the colonial period Masonry's spiritual and mysterious side was "virtually ignored by colonial brothers." Yet the significance of drama and of what might be called the Masonic imagination has until now been underemphasized and bears fresh consideration. Bullock has argued that before 1800 rituals were "mainly the means of establishing the order," but after 1800 they became "ends in themselves." Around this time Masonry adopted a new sanctity and its ritual a new significance, but performance was always, and remains still, at the heart of Masonic practice.
The types of performative analyses with which this book connects repeatedly call for a rethinking of the recognized parameters of the historical discipline and for a broadening of the sphere of information normally permitted to constitute our understanding of the past. To better understand performance as a possible framework for understanding Native American Freemasonry it is worth considering in some detail the key texts that have applied the idea to American history. In doing so we begin to understand the ideas surrounding performance of things Indian in general, and we get a firmer sense of the porous, interlinked nature and disjointed processes whereby culture gets exchanged.
The new approach could be said to have begun in 1993 with Jay Fliegelman's Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance. Fliegelman is concerned with "rethinking and expanding the kinds of 'facts' that are traditionally judged to be relevant to understanding a major historical document" and sets about analyzing what he dubs the "social dramaturgy" of Jefferson and his times. He argues that Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence was written to be read aloud; it was a "performative utterance," and Jefferson inserted pause marks to divide it in the same way poetry is delineated. The public readings demanded by various audiences, including Congress, "made the Declaration an event rather than a document." Fliegelman asks us to view Jefferson's Declaration as part of a larger "elocutionary revolution" in political discourse and public speech in England and America in the mid-eighteenth century, a shift away from classical argumentation and style toward delivery and a concern to generate emotional force and sympathy with the audience via sounds, tones, and facial expressions. His approach flies in the face of previous studies of the period, such as Michael Warner's The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century America, where, rather than the affective power of voice, the impersonal printed word is deemed primary. Warner's depiction of a "civic and emancipatory" American print culture is analogous to the bourgeois public sphere theorized by Jürgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, whereas Fliegelman's Declaring Independence, with its performative emphasis, has much more in common with Garry Wills's Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Stephen E. Lucas's "Justifying America: The Declaration of Independence as a Rhetorical Document."
One of the most interesting things about Declaring Independence is the way Fliegelman puts the bond of sentiment and common feeling at the heart of the revolutionary ideal. The "new rhetoric" of the era, he suggests, was rooted in contemporary, especially Scottish, aesthetic theory, in which the objective was to produce an involuntary response in the listener through speech. This ability to work directly on the passions of the listener was a rhetorical skill associated at the time with Native Americans, and in the Masonic lodge specifically rhetoric and the meaningful recitation of learned speech were absolutely central. Fliegelman thus provides one of the key ways to understand why Masons might permit Indians into the very heart of their exclusive, white, Protestant, and predominantly middle-class organization. He quotes the contemporary thinker James Burgh on the ideal passionate, elocutionary act, "which, by influencing the will, makes one proceed to action. ... Like irresistible beauty, it transports, it ravishes, it commands the admiration of all. ... The hearer finds himself as unable to resist it as to stop the flow of a river with his hand. ... His passions are no longer his own. The orator has taken possession of them: and with superior power, works them to whatever he pleases." In fact it was witnessing Indian oratory that allowed the young Jefferson to first feel such feelings and be moved emotionally by speech. A rather pathetic orator himself, he recalled being in awe of the Overhills Cherokee chief Outacite when Outacite delivered a parting oratory to his people the night before embarking on a trip to London after a peace settlement had been struck following the Cherokee War in North Carolina and present-day Tennessee in about 1758–60. Jefferson remembered Outacite speaking under a full moon: "His sounding voice, distinct articulation, animated action, and the solemn silence of his people at their several fires, filled me with awe and veneration, altho' I did not understand a single word he uttered." One could add to Fliegelman's record of Jefferson's reverence for Indian oratory by referencing Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, where he repeats a favorite theme, the supposed similarities between Indian and classical cultures: "I may challenge the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of many more prominent orators, if Europe has furnished any more eminent, to produce a single passage, superior to the speech of Logan, a Mingo chief, to Lord Dunmore when Governor of this State."
In stark contrast to this positive stereotype of Indians that tied them to the republican virtue he saw as foundational to American identity, Jefferson saw blacks as being an emotional void, empty of and insensible to the sensibility that defined the nation. Black Americans, it is worth noting, were excluded from mainstream Freemasonry even though certain Indians were allowed access to its inner echelons. I suggest that, in the revolutionary period at least, in part this was because Indians were deemed to be exemplary exponents of the new oratory, possessors of qualities that marked them as being capable potentially of inclusion in American political life. Fliegelman makes explicit this link between aesthetic virtue during the "elocutionary revolution" and political inclusion by referencing his fellow scholar John Barrell: "If the dominant object of both eighteenth-century oratory and fine arts was, as John Barrell puts it, 'to promote the public performance of acts of public virtue,' then oratory and the arts were necessarily addressed to and produced by 'those imagined to be capable of performing such acts'— to citizens, those 'capable not only of being ruled but also of ruling.' ... Full membership in the republic of letters, the republic of taste, or the republic of virtue — either as producer or consumer — required prior political enfranchisement."
This idea, that the ability to speak eloquently on Euro-American terms was linked with the capacity of different racial groups for inclusion in the nation — the idea that certain groups possessed a set of sympathies shared by Euro-Americans — has also been explored by Stephen Conn in his study History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. Conn's is not a "performative" analysis, but his evidence very much supports Fliegelman's theme. Conn points out that at this stage Americans still thought of Indians as being within history, as opposed to, as they would be later, relegated conceptually to natural history or considered largely ahistorically primarily by ethnologists and anthropologists. Many eighteenth-century Americans perceived history as working in continually operating cycles of rise and fall, just as it had been thought of in classical antiquity. This is why Jefferson felt moved to compare the Iroquois war leader Logan to the greatest ancient orators, and why in architecture, place-names, and politics Americans consistently invoked the classical, democratic, but simultaneously slave-owning past. Today, when time is generally thought of in the West as being linear rather than cyclical and ideas about American exceptionalism and triumph over the cycles of history hold sway as well as a pervasive stereotype of the silent or monosyllabic Indian, this respect for Indian eloquence can seem out of place. Yet Jefferson's praise of Indian oratory was in itself a form of boosterism as his new American nation fought to position itself positively in cultural and intellectual terms in relation to the other great powers. The British, for example, also claimed to have discerned a poetry in savage Americans, and Jefferson was keen to argue that such eloquence in fact belonged uniquely to the Republic. "The notion of the 'savage poet' was common in 18th-century Britain," Matthew Lauzon points out, "and those found in North America were a part of the construction of British identity during the colonial period." Jefferson was not alone in referring to Logan as an exemplar of the American trait of eloquence deemed to be characteristic of strong nations; the other Indian voice most often referred to in this context was that of the Six Nations orator and supposed Freemason Red Jacket. Indeed in the antebellum period one of the habitual ways American schoolchildren were encouraged to learn the highly prized skills of oratory and elocution was by memorizing and reciting a variety of such Indian speeches.
It is important to recognize, however, that such elevation of Indian eloquence by non-Indians served very specific purposes, and only very rarely did these include actually reflecting on the import of what Indians had to say. Jefferson venerated Indian oratory but did not hesitate to promote the policies that desecrated Indian land and displaced and dispossessed Indian communities. Anthony Wallace dubbed Jefferson's elevation of Logan's speech following the murder of Logan's family in 1774 "crocodile tears," and in his study Jefferson and the Indians makes no bones about acknowledging that the process Jefferson promoted at the time is one known today as "ethnic cleansing." The president's respect for Indians was always mitigated by his desire to advance the new nation; as Wallace puts it, "If Jefferson was guilty of insincerity, duplicity, and hypocrisy in Indian affairs, it must be conceded that this shiftiness, like his political ruthlessness, was a weapon in his struggle to ensure the survival of the United States as a republic governed by Anglo-Saxon yeomen." Tellingly, Wallace points out, by the time Jefferson discovered the elegance of Logan's lament he had also acquired a financial interest in the lands Logan had fought to retain. In sum Indian eloquence could be used as evidence of indigenous American virtue or used, as it was by Indian Affairs Commissioner Thomas McKenney in 1846, as evidence that Indians were "worthy of the Christian teaching and labours, and of the government's protection." It was also invoked nostalgically in memoriam for a supposedly "vanishing race," but when such eloquence referred to Indian dispossession those who invoked it rarely critically reflected upon it. By the nineteenth century Indian eloquence was increasingly seen as evidence of Indian decline, and thus it became a building block of the new narrative of unending American progress. As Conn puts it, "Americans ... executed a nifty shift in the first half of the nineteenth century: by displacing the historical narrative of the [Puritan] jeremiad, with its sense of declension and repeating cycles of history, onto Native Americans — by making it 'their' narrative rather than 'ours' — Americans cleared a discursive space to be occupied with the much sunnier, linear narrative of progress that would dominate mainstream historical thinking throughout the nineteenth century." It was as if Indians were permitted the quality of eloquence but only as a means to more powerfully articulate their inevitable demise and to starkly contrast with the brightness of the American future. Jefferson may have bemoaned the fact that America had "suffered so many of the Indian tribes already to extinguish," but in the discourse of the time the loss he was really decrying was the loss of Indian languages and knowledge to non-Indian science, not the loss of the lives of Indian peoples themselves.
Even so we must not lose sight of the fact that the American veneration of individual Indian rhetorical skill that characterized the eighteenth century came close to recognizing that Indian peoples had the aesthetic and literary abilities that in Euro-American terms qualified racial groups for nationhood. Skill in language was key to what created nations, and this was especially true in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, in which Freemasonry has its roots. As Benedict Anderson explains, language has the "capacity for generating imagined communities building in effect particular solidarities." John Quincy Adams famously made the point in another form in 1805, referring to the classical era to which his contemporaries were so fond of comparing their own, stating, "Eloquence was power." By the terms of Fliegelman's "elocutionary revolution" Indian rhetorical skill made individual Indian figures appear valid, admirable, and even respectable. As Conn puts it, "The achievement of Indian eloquence might or might not raise the estimation of all Indians, but it had the force to make individual Indian speakers into real men." As eloquent orators, individual Indians allowed early Americans to see the best of themselves reflected in those they considered vanquished and residual. The nineteenth-century archaeologist Caleb Atwater encapsulated this idea especially forcefully when he argued, "Enthusiasm is the secret spirit which hovers over the eloquence of the Indian," an enthusiasm he felt was aroused whenever the selling of ancestral lands was discussed. Then the Indian's "eyes flash fire ... every muscle is strained ... and his voice becomes clear, distinct and commanding. He now becomes, to use his own expressive phrase, a man." Thus for Atwater at least it was through performance alone that Indian humanity was glimpsed, at the expense of the larger and more obvious way to perceive Indian humanity: through actual connection with and perception of Indian grief, loss, and distress. In sum it was the manner of expression that struck Jefferson's contemporaries as significant about Indian speech, not the message of the words themselves or their implicit or explicit demands for redress.
The period's respect for Indian eloquence was also part of an urge for a return to nature, which Fliegelman connects to the emergence more generally of personality as a concept. It was part of "a revolution in the conceptualization of language, a revolution that sought to replace artificial language with natural language and to make writing over in the image of speaking." Fliegelman quotes the Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Reid, who defined "natural language" as being "like that of dumb people and savages," in that "it has more of nature, is more expressive and is more easily learned." All this was closely linked to the parallel deist ideal of natural rather than revealed religion, an ideal that lies close to the source and heart of Freemasonry. Fliegelman's book shows us how a culture of performance in the revolutionary era provided a way for certain Indians to be incorporated into Freemasonry and thus into a society within society organized by the American elite.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Note on Terms
1. Approaching Native American Freemasonry, Part One
2. Approaching Native American Freemasonry, Part Two
3. A History of Freemasonry: From Europe to the United States
4. Freemasonry as Ornamentalism: Class, Race, and Social Hierarchy
5. The Attractions of Freemasonry to Indians and Others, Part One
6. The Attractions of Freemasonry to Indians and Others, Part Two
7. Native American Freemasons: The Revolutionary Era
8. Native American Freemasons: The "Settlement" of the West and the Civil War Era
9. Native American Freemasons: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
10. On Television's Deathblow to Fraternalism: Understanding Associationalism and the Declining Role of Fraternalism in American Life
Notes
Bibliography
Index