Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America by Joy Porter

Author:Joy Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2019-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

Denslow then adds to Mackey’s outline of notable Indian Masons by providing details of Masonry’s significance in a long list of Indian lives, men such as the “honorary” Creek Cherokee revolutionary war leader William Augustus Bowles (Estajoca, ca. 1764–1805), the Choctaw leader Peter P. Pitchlyn, the Cherokee supreme court judge David Carter, and Pushmataha (1764– 1824), the Choctaw military and spiritual leader and diplomat. Masonic history in Indian Territory owed most to the Cherokee, and so Denslow devotes space to those noted men involved with its first lodge: John Ross and his nephew William P. Ross; David Carter, lodge treasurer; and G. W. Adair, John S. Vann, J. Foreman, and J. M. Lynch. He goes on to list noted Creek Masons, including the supreme judge George W. Stidham and the mixed-blood Creek Seminole Brig. Gen. Alexander McGillivray (Hippo ilk Mico, 1750–93). Consistently he avoids commenting on the forced removal of Indian communities these mid-nineteenthcentury Indian Masons were much involved with, or that removal (or as Denslow terms it, “relocation”) occurred in spite of the fact that some of these communities and their leadership had heavily assimilated American mores. Instead removal is presented as a sad inevitability and the factionalism that arose among Indian communities as a result of broken treaties due to “old wounds.” Freemasonic principles and influence are put forward as Indian communities’ “greatest healer.” For Denslow, Masonry in Indian Territory is somehow wholly separate from the suffering and death that resulted from forced migration imposed by American authorities. It is an unmitigated good epitomized by heartwarming stories of compassionate American Masonic soldiers sharing their rations with starving Indian families.24

Although published in 1956, Denslow’s book teems with the sort of social evolutionary thinking that informs its two main anthropologist-archaeologist protagonists, the Seneca Iroquois Arthur Caswell Parker (1881–1955) and his fraternal brother and friend Alanson Buck Skinner (1886–1925). Alongside much discussion of what the author calls “the Red Man’s mind” we learn, for example, that only the most intelligent Indians had the good sense to become Freemasons: “The more intelligent Indians came from a limited number of nations. First were the Iroquois of upper New York; another group was the Five Civilized Tribes that were moved bodily from the southeast United States to Oklahoma Territory. These Indians readily adapted themselves to Freemasonry and hundreds of them were initiated into the order in early years.”25

Both Parker and Skinner were dedicated Freemasons, Skinner within the York Rite and Parker within the Scottish Rite, where he gained its highest degree, the thirty-third, conferred only by election by the body’s Supreme Council. Both learned their intellectual orientation from F. W. Putnam of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and from the work of the social evolutionist (and play-Indian fraternalist) Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–81). Skinner wrote extensively on Indian spirituality and culture, with a particular focus on the Menominee of Wisconsin, and worked for the American Museum of Natural History and later for the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York.

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