The Order of the Arrow, a weird, racist, secret society in Scouting America (SA), is self immolating.
Despite increasing scrutiny over its 109 years of mockery of American Indians, OA clings to racist playing-Indian activities. Its recent pattern is to express interest in correcting its sins, only to take de minimis measures unguided by strategy.
OA has good reason to be clingy. OA gets woo from its playing-Indian activities. This woo papers over that OA is just a collection of poorly related activities. Removing OA’s woo reveals its incoherence!
OA has no future. It’s time to abolish it. If we quit while we’re ahead, BSA can retain OA’s useful parts.
Background
The Order of the Arrow was founded in 1915, when the USA’s attempts to decimate American Indian tribes were at peak. The then-in-vogue notion was that Indians that we didn’t manage to kill were to be forcibly Westernized.
The goal was debasement of all American Indian tribes. That would have removed tribal customs from any sense of ownership, eliminating moral quandaries about remixing tribal customs for one’s own profit.
And profiting from an inauthentic remix is what OA did. In its early days, OA brewed legends and ceremonies from a mishmash of Western stereotypes of tribes. Much of this is phony stories of real tribes or real historical figures mixed with Western fantasy fiction rich with noble-savage stereotypes.
This is racism. I am not faulting OA’s founders for having used racist practices. In their time, racist campaigns against American Indians, like forced assimilation, were viewed as noble. I doubt they understood their art as racism. Regardless of intent, it remains that OA’s founding and its contemporary playing-Indian activities rest on racist ideology.
The USA started pivoting from racist practices against American Indians in the middle of the 20th century. Unlike the USA, OA clings to its racist legacy.
Cynically, it makes sense. OA profits on the woo of its racist legacy. Take the woo from OA, and you’re left with an organization no sane person would design: a collection of poorly related activities.
OA’s new mission and values
OA’s July 18, 2024 mission and values is a tacit admission: OA is incoherent.
OA’s new mission and values have four points. On a thin read, these points sound reasonable. The problem comes when OA lays out how the points are relevant, in a four-point list of “meaningful changes”. Two changes are contemptuous of high schoolers. The other two reflect features that should be part of SA‘s mainline programs.
In other words, OA’s own change agenda validates that it should not exist!
Change 1: Retention in Scouts BSA
OA’s first change is “a specific commitment to retention in Scouts BSA”. In saying this, OA is admitting it’s a tool to encourage high schoolers to linger in SA‘s middle-school program, Scouts BSA.
Even though it’s open to youth through age 17, Scouts BSA is a middle-school program. I will write more about this in a future article, but the capsule summary is that Scout BSA’s original design was for ages 11-14, and its program strengths still speak mainly to middle schoolers. Most high schoolers have rejected this middle-school program, fleeing SA.
For 114 years, insiders have called SA’s high-school-retention failure the “older [youth] problem”. Because SA is so bound by inertia, it is willfully blind to any strategy other than retaining high schoolers in its middle-school program. It has therefore facilitated 114 years of failure in solving this problem. (Also a topic for a future article: 114 years is enough time. The experiment has failed. Let’s move on. SA must move all high schoolers to Venturing. This will catch SA up to USA’s cultural norms and nearly all of our international Scouting peer programs.)
The centerpiece of SA’s failed high-school-retention strategy is adding bells and whistles to its middle-school program. Camp staff, high-adventure programs, and OA are the main bells and whistles.
The problem is that once the bell-and-whistle activity is done, the high schooler returns to babysitting duties in the middle-school program. Yuck!
Order has meaning. By making this the first listed change, OA’s leadership conveys that OA’s main job is to help SA avoid admitting the failure of its 114-year-old high-school-retention experiment.
Change 2: Broader service to all of SA
In this part, OA pledges to extend its high-school-level leadership training and programming beyond its own popularity-contest-gated membership. In other words, it’s seeking to be simply another program offering available to all age-eligible BSA members.
Hold on a second, let’s ask something: Which would do best at delivering leadership programming and conferences to high schoolers?
- A weird, racist, secret society that is unwilling to shuck its racist, playing-Indian crap.
- Venturing, SA’s high-school program
Of course, the answer is the high-school program!
See why this is a threat to OA’s relevance? Why would a weird, racist, secret society do better at high-school programming than a mainline program designed for high schoolers? (Hint: It can’t.)
But wait, there’s more!
OA ran an experiment in summer 2024, and it had a great outcome! The 2024 National Order of the Arrow Conference was a dramatically-reduced-racism environment. And it succeeded! The conference was great!
While about 15 instructional sessions at NOAC 2024 still promoted OA’s racist ideology, It would be trivial to trash them. We can easily eliminate from NOAC all remaining vestiges of OA’s racist activities!
SA must liberate high-school-oriented programs from its weird, racist, secret society. Venturing, SA’s mainline high-school program, is a much better fit for this!
Change 3: Emphasis on peer leadership
The point of this is OA sees itself as a place where high schoolers can “[have] the opportunity to lead their peers as opposed to younger Scouts”.
Um, we already have that. It’s called Venturing. That’s where high schoolers can lead their own peers.
Really, this is just a repetition of change 1. OA sees itself as a shiny object, distracting high schoolers from how SA’s wants them stuck in middle-school purgatory. As soon as the OA peer-leadership experience is done, guess where that high schooler goes back to? Babysitting middle schoolers.
The best way to deliver this promise is with Venturing. A weird, racist, secret society adds no value over Venturing.
Change 4: Recognition for Scouts and Scouters
This change makes little sense. SA has robust recognition opportunities in its mainline programs. Why do we need a weird, racist, secret society for that? (Hint: we don’t.)
Back to the purpose
These four changes were how OA plans to alter itself to align with its new purpose. Let’s get into that new purpose.
Sadly, points 1, 2, and 4 of the new purpose are undifferentiated from what should be normative in mainline SA programs:
Points 1, 2, and 4 of OA’s purpose, as of July 2024
- Recognize those who exemplify the Scout Oath and Law in their daily lives, and, through that recognition, cause others to act in the same way
- Reinforce a life purpose of leadership in cheerful service to others
- Be an integral part of Scouting America and encourage participation in all it offers through units, outdoor adventures, and national events to further the Scouting experience
None of these are enhanced by a weird, racist, secret society.
Point 3 usurps what Venturing already excels at:
Point 3 of OA’s purpose, as of July 2024
- Create and deliver peer-led, adult-guided, advanced leadership experiences for Scouts and Scouters that positively impact their unit, community, and ultimately our nation
“Advanced” here is a comparison to Scouts BSA’s middle-school-oriented experiences. It’s coded language for how OA offers programs targeted to high schoolers.
Venturing is SA’s high-school program. That is the best place to deliver high-school-targeted activities.
OA is still a secret society
OA was founded in 1915 as a secret society. To its credit, OA reduced its secrecy over time. But just as reduced-racism does not make OA not-racist, reduced-secrecy does not make OA not-secret.
To shuck the racist and secret labels, OA must drop all racism and all secrecy. It has declined to do either.
On secrecy specifically, I have two examples.
First is its Safeguarded Material practice. This is just a fancy label for how OA keeps core ceremony scripts secret. (The scripts’ passwords are ahoalton, itisonlyright, and leadershipinservice, respectively.) (By the way, in the context of SA, “safeguarding” refers to abuse prevention. Why does OA use that word for its secrecy-preservation scheme?)
Second, the National Order of the Arrow Committee has been extraordinarily secret on how it will deal with its playing-Indian problem.
I am old. When I was a youth, OA’s playing-Indian problem was widely known.
Here I am decades later, and OA’s playing-Indian problem remains unresolved. While some piecemeal action has happened, they are piecemeal, disconnected from any strategy, such as the 2019 prohibition on redface cosplay during Arrow of Light or crossover ceremonies for Cub Scouts. As I write this in September 2024, I still wonder what OA’s plan is, noting that a two-year, “very detailed and methodical evaluation” recently culminated in “minor changes” to its core ceremonies, which still contain a laundry list of racist, pretendian material.
Again, for OA to not be a secret society, it has to stop keeping secrets. Stop adding passwords to your documents. Stop the extreme secrecy of the National Order of the Arrow Committee. And importantly, stop the legacy of secrecy in your sayings, actions, and culture.
OA is weird
Why do I use “weird” to describe OA?
When talking about OA, we’re referring to a 109-year old secretive organization, whose incoherence is only masked by woo from playing-Indian activities, that through its own admission mainly exists to keep high schoolers in a middle-school program, and that in 2024 clings to racist activities long rejected by society.
How is that not weird?
OA has no future
In my past pieces (article 1, article 2), I held out optimism that OA may have a path forward.
I no longer believe that.
OA refuses to change. And I get it now. It can’t change! Its most urgently needed reform–dropping its racist, pretendian practices–will reveal an amalgam of unrelated activities, with access gated by a popularity contest.
Who needs that?
OA’s 110th birthday is in 2025. The best way to celebrate this is to quickly abolish OA while it can still happen in an orderly process. Some of OA’s programs have value, and we can preserve their legacy by reassigning them to Venturing.
Doing anything else is allowing OA’s slow suicide. If allowed to persist, OA will slowly self-immolate in a cauldron of conflict, dragging into chaos the parts that had value.
It’s time to move on. None of SA’s WOSM peers have a weird, racist, secret society. I am unaware of any USA youth-serving organization other than SA with a weird, racist, secret society.
All of SA’s energy needs to be focused on creating a better future. To succeed, we must eliminate all distractions, like OA.
Appendix: How about cheerful service?
This article focuses on the youth-serving aspects of OA. What about “cheerful service”?
While OA claims a character-development aspect of service, especially influenced by the Billy Clark story, the notion of youth providing community service needs to be engrained at all levels, not something claimed by a weird, racist, secret society.
I therefore do not feel it’s a strongly addressable need in the context of this article. Service must be an emphasis of all of BSA’s programs!
However, camp service remains valuable. I hear too many stories of how it enhances councils’ ability to deliver programs.
I recommend creating a new council-camp-service society. It must not be a renewed OA: No mockery of American Indians, no secrecy, no gating by a popularity contest, no national committee moated off from the base. It would be a clean-sheet society open to all who wish to serve.
An achievement system, whose main input is service hours, could be the recognition system. Councils would be well advised to develop appreciation systems to recognize camp-service achievements.
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