Native American Freemasonry

Joy Porter of Swansea University in Wales is a prominent scholar of Native Americans. She is especially known for authoring To Be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker (2001) and for coediting (with Kenneth M. Roemer) The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (2005). In her pensive study of Freemasonry and American Indians, Porter attempts to illustrate the pertinent cultural and social significance of the Craft to Native Americans from the revolution through World War I. In ten topically and chronologically arranged chapters, she persuasively argues that Masonic doctrines and symbols attracted eminent Native Americans to the order. Porter also cogently demonstrates that lodge activities enabled Indians to occupy leadership positions in these bodies and fostered their acculturation into American civil society. In the first two chapters, Porter describes how American Freemasons and Indians perceived each other: Freemasons are lauded for their virtuosity, linguistic eloquence, and they are portrayed, to some extent, as being activists. Native Americans, conversely, looked to Freemasonry for middle-class recognition, spirituality (as exemplified by the accomplishments of the Reverend Philip J. Deloria), and privacy

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