BSA’s Order of the Arrow is reducing its mockery of Native American tribes at National Order of the Arrow Conference 2024, its biannual national conference: It’s deleting American Indian Affairs activities (AIA)!
AIA explainer
A good deal of OA’s AIA is performance art, and much of that art is brownface cosplay, mainly in two forms:
- Doing Native American-themed performance art without permission of the tribes whose customs they purport to represent.
- Just “playing Indian”, acting out a whiteboy caricature of indigenous peoples or amalgams of tribal customs.
And let me be super clear about a point: Some may allege tremendous research and earnest interest in authenticity. That’s great, and I am glad you did that. However, if you are performing without written permission of the tribe you claim your performance to commemorate, you have not separated yourself from brownface cosplay.
While there is technically more to AIA, like static art, the brownface cosplay-dominant performance art gets most attention.
Commentary on (phony) tribal permission
Since before I was a youth in Scouting, OA has swum in allegations of local tribal authorizations of AIA activities. Such authorizations indicate relationships that would be highly valued under a system that alleges to respect Native Americans.
I have yet to see any lodge publicly share evidence of such an agreement. That absence speaks volumes.
I have also repeatedly heard local allegations of individual Native Americans endorsing local AIA activities. They, too, are likely phony. But even if not, they are irrelevant: Tribal customs are owned by tribes, not individuals.
All this notwithstanding, the concern is non-natives appropriating tribal customs under the color of BSA. How Native Americans express their own tribal customs is a private matter between that person and his or her tribe, outside the scope of this document.
BSA (OA) fights society for improper ends
Society has wrestled with cultural appropriation of Native Americans for a century. In the past few decades, society’s viewpoint has coalesced on that the appropriation is harmful. Controversies over Native American-themed sports mascots follow this reasoning.
BSA is supposed to promote leadership. But BSA suffers from a leadership vacuum at the top. Filling this leadership vacuum are inertia and throwback-reactionary culture. Actively preventing leadership, this culture causes BSA to fight for improper ends, such as our costly membership controversies that have served little point than to cause alienation. Included in these improper ends are how BSA clings to anachronisms, such as justifying a “separate but equal” regime using a straight-from-the-1950s hoax that girls are catastrophically different than boys.
Another anachronism is that it’s OK to “play Indian”. This is why brownface cosplay remains rampant in the Order of the Arrow.
An example of OA endorsing “playing Indian”
AIA’s sibling in OA is Inductions and Ceremonial Events (ICE). These are OA’s core ceremonies, which are whiteboy riffs of indigenous customs.
Approved attire for ICE ceremonies includes “American Indian attire”. This allowance is accompanied with “should”s regarding the attire’s authenticity and approval by tribes it reflects. Because “should” is not “must”, OA members remain free to use phony or unsanctioned-by-a-tribe Native American-ish costumes when they “play Indian”.
An example “playing Indian” ceremony is the Ordeal ceremony (PDF password is ahoalton, the word for the OA admonition). It starts with pretendian characters whose names are appropriated from the Lenni Lenape vocabulary. The pretendians’ spoken words are garbled through a noble savage stereotype and typically delivered in a stilted manner that resembles “Tonto talk”.
Warbonnets are among the highest brownface-cosplay-related concerns voiced by Native Americans. Yet we still see warbonnets widely used, such as this April 2023 ICE ceremony:
It’s not the only place where OA uses warbonnets.
The only acceptable Native American-themed performance art depicts the customs of a tribe that has recently and explicitly authorized this use. But we should also consider the view of most recent national-scope youth leaders: OA should end all Native American theming.
CU Boulder values Native American relationships
CU Boulder, the NOAC 2024 host school, is known for its interest in good relationships with the Native American community. Evidence includes its Land Acknowledgement and its Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, which CU Boulder’s chancellor characterized as “long overdue”.
It’s hard to see how CU Boulder would tolerate OA’s mockery of Native American tribes.
To match CU Boulder’s ethos, OA should go further and fully implement the above-mentioned desire of its national and regional recent youth leaders, which is “ending the use of American Indian iconography and activities in our programs”. Given that OA is thematically soaked with cultural appropriation, more NOAC changes are needed than just pausing AIA.
CU Boulder probably did not force this
A reasonable person may suspect that OA removed NOAC’s brownface-cosplay activities due to a CU Boulder agreement. I have not seen convincing evidence of this. This suggests that OA leadership may simply be doing the right thing.
This is the RFP sent out by BSA to multiple universities:
This RFP mentions “American Indian pageants”, so BSA’s starting point assumed brownface cosplay would happen.
In its “Letter of Intent” response to the RFP, CU Boulder does not regulate Native American-themed activities:
This is a good sign. It suggests OA’s national leadership chose to pause AIA without being forced to.
When will OA get its act together?
OA still has no public statement that attests it has decided to stop mocking Native American tribes.
It was time to rip that band aid off decades ago. OA’s brownface was controversial and managed poorly when I was a kid. I am now old, and OA is still mocking Native American tribes!
How much longer do we have to wait for OA to clean up its act? Public clarity from OA leadership is crucial!
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