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 and makeup, united by a set of social and moral values, and committed to fostering the spiritual development of its members through the practice of ritual and group solidarity. The association had deep personal meaning for key Native leaders over time, for the other ethnic groups who sought to make connection with it and for the bulk of its American membership – those drawn from the ranks of the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle class.Footnote ¹ Significantly, while the fraternity has welcomed a high proportion of the Native American Indian elite over the centuries, black or “Prince Hall” Freemasonry, which began under warrant from the Grand Lodge of England in 1784, remained outside mainstream American Masonry until the mid-1990s. Black Masons in American Masonic thinking occupied a wholly separate fraternal space and time than did Native American Indian Masons, whose selective inclusion in terms of ritual, Masonic history and physical presence in the lodge was not only possible but welcomed. In the imagined kinship of international Masonry, blacks, it seems, were not an acknowledged part of the fraternal family. An expressive as opposed to instrumental form of association, Freemasonry generally functions as an end in itself, meeting the specific, dynamic social and personal needs of those involved. This theme of an essential responsiveness to the changing needs of its membership is traceable across all three of the most significant periods of Masonic strength within the United States – the Revolutionary era, the last third of the nineteenth century and the years following the First World War. Mutual aid and brotherhood were and remain the fraternity's primary concerns, but after 1800 in particular its ritual and what might be termed the Masonic imagination took on a new and fundamental significance.

Whilst this is true, it is also true that ritual performance has always been at the heart of Masonic practice. Its men pass through successive optional “degrees,” each of which has its own codified ritual that resonates with symbolism as well as moral and psychological direction. The original London Masonic degrees were adapted and developed as Freemasonry spread globally in the wake of the fraternity's organizational birth in 1717. By the mid-eighteenth century, a system of thirty-three degrees was in place on continental Europe, but the overall high point of creative Masonic ritual complexity and proliferation occurred between 1840 and 1860 in the United States. One explanation for this is that this was a period of massive social and economic change when men felt especially keenly the need for the compensatory feelings of control and self-mastery ritual offered. After all, within the ritual reality, everything except spiritual boundaries is clear-cut and comprehensible. In this sense, Masonic ritual offers “pure space,” a calming sanctuary from a world increasingly fluid and hybrid. Thus Masonic ritual can be said to fit perfectly with Mary Douglas's broader characterization of ritual per se as something that works generally to contain fears of social formlessness, something that offers an unsullied and abstract arena where participants can feel noble and unpolluted.Footnote ²

Such an approach helps explain the pervasive Masonic ritual emphasis upon death and symbolic rebirth. Within the lodge a man was persistently reminded of death's cold and ever-watchful hand and “reborn” ritually into the warm embrace of fraternal community. Repeatedly, Masonic rituals confronted initiates with death's degradations, surrounded them with its tools and symbols and encouraged them to think hard on its inevitability and humbling spiritual message. The biblical character Hiram Abiff's death and resurrection in the centrepiece of all Masonic ritual, the Third Degree, was a touchstone for the repeated figurative and spiritual death and subsequent resurrection of the fraternal member as he progressed through Masonic and other fraternal degrees. The deeper the initiate was plunged into the world of death and the more he was exposed to the funereal, to skeletons, daggers and gruesome tools of execution, the more restorative and enabling his eventual symbolic rebirth was deemed to be. Thus the third-degree candidate and his fellow lodge members repeatedly partook in a sort of theatre of necromancy, with candidates “dying” as Hiram and being “reborn” as newly enlightened versions of themselves. However we think about Masonic ritual, what is certain is that its role within the fraternity in the United States became increasingly central and over time its enactment took on ever more theatrical forms. “The dramatic roles, the titles of the ‘actors’, the symbolic themes, the fraternal uniforms, the badges and tokens, the music, the lighting,” as Noel Gist pointed out in 1940, “all transform the ceremony into a form of pageant which in certain occasions assumes the proportions of an awe-inspiring spectacle.”Footnote ³ Having accepted that a primary element of Masonic activity is performative, can we then apply thinking from recent intellectually reverberative work on performance to the phenomenon of Native American Indian Freemasons and, if so, what is lost and what is gained in the process? Indian Masons, after all, performed the same rituals as their predominantly white, middle-class associates in the same lodge spaces – can we assume that their performances are directly comparable to those of their fraternal brothers?

To answer these questions we need first to evaluate the impact of the new attention paid to performance within study of the American past. The performative approach could be said to have begun in 1993 with Jay Fliegelman's Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance. Fliegelman was concerned with “rethinking and expanding the kinds of ‘facts’ that are traditionally judged to be relevant to understanding a major historical document” and set about analysing what he dubbed the “social dramaturgy” of Jefferson and his times. He argued 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 towards 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 Rhetorical Document.”Footnote ⁴

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 suggested, was rooted in contemporary, especially Scottish, aesthetic theory where 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; within the Masonic lodge specifically, rhetoric and the meaningful recitation of learned speech was 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,

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, as noted above, were excluded from mainstream Freemasonry even though certain Indians were allowed access to its inner echelons. In part this was because in the Revolutionary period 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:

It is important to recognize that such elevation of Indian eloquence by non-Indians served very specific purposes and only very rarely did these include actually reflecting upon 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. Yet 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 the 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: “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 Stephen Conn puts it in History's Shadow, on the Indian's relation to history in the nineteenth century, “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.”Footnote ⁷ As eloquent orators, individual Indians allowed early Americans to see the best of themselves reflected in those they considered vanquished and residual. Fliegelman's book shows us how a culture of performance in the Revolutionary era provided an avenue whereby by certain Indians might be incorporated into Freemasonry and thus into a society within society organized by the American elite.

Perhaps the most elegant and reverberative application of all to date of the performative approach has been Joseph Roach's 1996 text Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. Roach looks at what Paul Gilroy termed the black Atlantic – the circum-Atlantic region bounded by Europe, Africa and the Americas in terms of live performance, a phenomenon Roach conceptualizes as being highly expansive and experienced not just in theatres but everywhere people congregate. His study focusses on London and New Orleans from the late seventeenth century to the present and explores how the “orature” of those places expressed the interactions of race, class and gender. Orature seeks to dissolve the usual dichotomy between orality and literacy and stresses that each has always produced the other. Roach's fundamental point is that historic performance survives, and in this sense so too do the dead through the bodies and performances of the living. A key example he gives is the Mardi Gras Indians – African American parade companies who perform “Native Americanness” through music, dance and costume and who create new meaning out of a shared circum-Atlantic history of genocide and slavery. Following The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance by Richard Schechner, one of the foundational figures of performance studies who suggested that performance could be seen as “restored behaviour,” Roach shows how performers have consistently regenerated and revised their history in order to imagine new identities for themselves. Roach unearths a complicated genealogy of performance within which the past is reexamined, reproduced and reinscribed. A central idea in Cities of the Dead, as Roach explained in an interview, is the idea of surrogation or substitution,

Both these significant ideas – of circum-Atlantic performance and of surrogation – provide useful points of access to Native American Freemasonry over time. The performance elements of Freemasonry crossed the Atlantic and joined together Euro-Americans and Indians at key points in the history of each. Masons and Indians used ritual relationships as a vehicle for experiencing connectedness and for generating a satisfying sense of brotherhood and reciprocity. Masonic ritual and Masonic theatre are in this sense prime examples of “circum-Atlantic performance,” a cocreation of the peoples who constituted what Roach dubs an American “oceanic interculture.” Faced with Revolutionary circumstances, American Masons invented themselves by performing their pasts in the presence of others. Although its extent is impossible to gauge, both Indians and Masons may be thought of as performing surrogation through ritual, enacting cultural memory through substitution. Indians, of course, had compelling reasons to seek out and maintain places where cultural memory might be retained, given both the central social and spiritual significance of ancestors to many Native American communities and the unprecedented levels of death and cultural erosion that beset them in the wake of successive waves of Euro-American incursion and the devastating effects of settler-borne disease and displacement. As Roach points out, black and Native-informed performance traditions (and here I include Freemasonry) remember the role of “officially forgotten … diasporic and genocidal histories of Africa and the Americas, North and South, in the creation of the culture of modernity.” Freemasonic “Indian” rituals, as well as the significant correspondences between actual Indian rituals such as that of the Seneca Iroquois Little Water Society and the “traditional history” or the final ritual of the Masonic third degree, all served to intermingle things Indian and things Masonic, linking the dead with the living and the past, however constituted, with the present. This performative, and to a lesser extent literary, rebirth of Indian tradition within the Masonic lodge can be seen as a rehabilitation of the dispossessed, an example of what Sharon Holland characterizes in another context as “speaking from the dead,” a literature and performance in a space where it was possible for the living and the dead to “converge, mingle, and discourse.”Footnote ⁹

This positive reading of Indian Masonic involvement links directly to Joanna Brooks's argument in American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures that Masonic lodges, along with a host of other religious and spiritual fora, became “sites critical to the formation of modern black and Indian political, religious, and cultural consciousness.” Brooks shows convincingly that even within a wider social context that deemed blacks and Indians degenerate and socially dependent, “communities of color” were able to “regenerate … themselves by forming separate and independent religious bodies.”Footnote ¹⁰ She suggests that what black Masons were doing within their lodges was “passionate research,” as Frantz Fanon describes it in his essay “On National Culture”; that is, research that is foundational to resisting imperialism, research “directed by the secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation, and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others.” Stuart Hall has taken this idea further, suggesting that such research comes in two forms, one “unearths that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid, bringing to light the hidden continuities it suppressed”; another concerns itself with the “production of identity … not an identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the re-telling of the past.”Footnote ¹¹ This last type of radical history, one that Indians and black Masons created with their Euro-American brothers, was not about inventing a fixed, or static, sense of “being” but about encouraging a perpetual and critical process of “becoming.” They were reconstituting in Masonic microcosm what being black or Indian meant socially within the United States. I would add that, crucially, this was not a straightforward or predictable process and not one where either Indian or Masonic “essences” can easily be isolated; rather it was piecemeal and discontinuous. Yet it does help to explain repeated instances of Indian engagement with Masonry and individual figures' often profound regard for it.

Consider in this regard one significant example, the Episcopal priest, community leader and Freemason the Reverend Philip J. Deloria (Tipi Sapa/ Black Lodge, 1853–1931).Footnote ¹² In 1890, having qualified as a deacon, Deloria became an inspiring superintending presbyter of the Episcopal Church's work at Standing Rock Reservation, land which straddles the western boundaries of present-day North and South Dakota. He became a priest in 1892 and worked at Standing Rock for forty years using his skills as an orator to guide his people through truly tumultuous times,Footnote ¹³ including the height of the intertribal spiritual and cultural resurgence known as the Ghost Dance movement. He became a Freemason in Aberdeen lodge No 38 at Aberdeen, South Dakota in 1911, the same year he joined the fledgling pan-tribal Indian assimilationist organization the Society of American Indians, which in turn contained a number of prominent Masons and eventually its own subfraternities.Footnote ¹⁴ Deloria went on to gain the thirty-second degree within the Scottish Rite. As with so many important Indian men, it is not known exactly how Freemasonry figured within his life or, in his case, how it gelled with his Christian faith. Many ministers of the time were Masons and there was nothing about Freemasonry's spiritual journey that precluded a Protestant minister from taking part. Indeed, Tipi Sapa's son, the Reverend Vine Deloria, was to continue both the Episcopal and Masonic traditions. Initiated in 1934 at Pioneer Lodge No 219 in Martin, South Dakota he would serve as grand chaplain of the Grand Lodge of South Dakota in 1946.

According to Vine Deloria Jr., his grandfather was a Mason primarily as a means of educating non-Indians about Indian ways; he wrote, “Tipi Sapa became a Mason and participated in their ritual, recognizing that these kinds of relationships were a big help in influencing white society to understand his people.”Footnote ¹⁵ Ella Deloria scholar Susan Gardner broadly supports this idea, registering that in his daughter's opinion her father Philip J. Deloria's spirituality was principally pragmatic, a strategic response to conditions of unprecedented cultural attack. Three years after her father died Ella wrote, “He knew that the race, as a race, was doomed, insofar as they failed to adjust to conditions brought on by European civilization.”Footnote ¹⁶ Should we wonder at Deloria's decision to adopt an alien faith, Christianity, so completely, and an alien society, Freemasonry, up to the thirty-second degree, it is perhaps worth bearing in mind the psychological burdens he bore as his family's first Euro-American-style intellectual. He was, after all, someone who fought consistently against terrific odds for his people's welfare in the wake of generations of conflict between tribes and with the US military. Having survived brutal, forced migration, adrift in a sea of endemic corruption, bereft of their homelands and forbidden the web of spiritual practice that sustains traditional Dakota culture, the Deloria family turned to institutions that offered some semblance of the spiritual solace and kinship they had lost – the Church and the Masonic lodge. Certainly, two of Freemasonry's abiding characteristics, fraternity and the absence of sectarianism, were important to Deloria, since soon after his conversion he helped found an indigenous organization that gradually spread to all the Sioux reservations, the Planting Society later known as the Brotherhood of Christian Unity. It remained active until the early 1940s. Like the Masons, Deloria's fraternity made charity key to their activities, and whilst it encouraged assimilation, its primary function was to foster kinship and community amongst a people in spiritual and social peril.

It is, perhaps, too easy to underestimate the burning need to replace the beauty of what had been lost within Indian communities in the post-frontier era. There was a gaping hole where once elaborate orature and a series of performative spaces within which to honour the dead had thrived. Masonry in this sense provided an arena for restored behaviour and a context for ritual, memory and the safe promulgation of Indian mores and values. Within Dakota society, American expansion had left life coldly empty, bereft of energy, with no available spiritual architecture to cling to. Gardner quotes Ella Deloria's comment:

We know that Philip Joseph Deloria, although a zealous eradicator of traditional practices especially in the early days of his conversion, also remained nostalgic for the joy and fellowship of his pre-Christian life. Just six years after his Masonic initiation as an entered apprentice and some nineteen years after qualifying as a priest he said he had

For Indians like Deloria as much as perhaps for Euro-Americans in a modernizing America, Masonic life offered an important levity, pleasure and camaraderie that had been ripped away by the migration and inexorable processes of individuation that characterized the era. Masonry was an allowed means whereby “spiritual brokers” like Deloria could maintain practices in sympathy with the old tribal life, where they could luxuriate in expanded social ties reminiscent of the kinship networks of their own communities and undertake spiritual journeys on their own terms. The Indian men welcomed into the Masonic lodges of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were special people who had lived through phenomenal upheaval. A significant number sought compensation for the enormous price they paid in adopting an alien culture in the unique and assured promotional structure of the Masonic lodge, a place where they could enact, preserve and revitalize something of what they and their cultures had lost.