Order of the Arrow cleanliness audit

Boy Scouts of America’s (BSA) camp-service extension, Order of the Arrow (OA), has a fractured relationship with honor. BSA is tainted by OA’s 111 years of racist, redface¹minstrel shows. We use this phrase to broadly describe OA’s performances of or any other use of culture of a Native American tribe without a relationship with and authorization of that tribe.²

OA recently began a half-hearted pivot from redface minstrel shows. Below is how well that is going. Only lodges with a “pass” score have moved beyond redface minstrel shows.

Source data.

Clean lodges

All these lodges passed the audit:

How this is discerned

OA’s plan to distance itself from 111 years of racist cultural theft is incomplete. Rather than a pivot, it’s a wink-wink that lets lodges³ keep their redface minstrel shows.⁴ For example, OA doesn’t bother to check for the validity of or even for the existence of lodges’ tribal agreements.

Our audit criteria requires a full cessation of redface minstrel shows. Any employment of indigenous culture must be limited to the culture of a willing tribe, formalized by that tribe entering into an agreement with the lodge’s council.⁵

Factors we audit for signs of a redface minstrel show:

• Lodge and chapter⁶ names
• Lodge flaps⁷
• Lodge and chapter totems
• References to parodies of tribal culture, like WWW⁸
• Imagery and words on lodge or chapter websites, social media, and other digital venues⁹
• Performances, like acts of OA’s children’s fantasy fiction (“The Legend”)¹⁰
• Any other signs of a redface minstrel show

When we see any sign of a redface minstrel show, we stop the audit and fail the lodge. As of February 2026, the vast majority of lodges failed the audit because their name, or names of their chapters, use native words, yet they have no tribal agreement with the tribe the words came from.

If no redface minstrel shows are found, the lodge passes. This means no use of tribal culture, or if used, it must be the culture of a tribe with which the lodge has a valid tribal agreement. To be valid, the tribal agreement must meet all these criteria:

• Publicly posted on a council website¹¹
• Expires no more than three years after agreement date
• Signed by a council Scout Executive¹² and by a member of the tribe’s government, with roles or titles listed for each
• Conveys that the council is the responsible entity on BSA’s side (it’s fine to also name the lodge, but as lodges are nothing more than operations of councils, the council must be the responsible entity)
• The tribe is in good standing¹³

Exception: the children’s fantasy fiction

OA is in a liminal space. It’s between when it announced replacing its children’s fantasy fiction and a final changeover date, which has been delayed a few times. While performances of the children’s fantasy fiction are redface minstrel shows, we will not penalize lodges for this until after OA’s final changeover date.

Because the children’s fantasy fiction is a redface minstrel show, it is unethical to use any tribal regalia during this ceremony, even with a tribal agreement. Lodges may only use fully non-native costuming.

Ask for a review

Want us to re-audit a lodge? Ask us!

Footnotes

1. Redface is similar to blackface, essentially when non-natives use tribal culture or caricatures of indigenous people in acts or for profit. ↩︎
2. As a non-indigenous corporation, the only ethical use of Native American tribal culture within BSA is that which is authorized by a tribe. ↩︎
3. OA is delivered locally by BSA’s councils. Council operations of OA are called lodges. ↩︎
4. As an example of its unwillingness to stop its endemic racist cultural theft, OA still acts as if indigenous vocabularies are war trophies seized from conquered peoples: OA permits lodges and chapters to name themselves with thieved culture. ↩︎
5. A council is a local, nonprofit corporation that is essentially franchised by the BSA national organization to deliver Scouting in an exclusive, geographic area. ↩︎
6. Chapters are subdivisions of a lodge. As they typically correspond to districts, chapters are district-level operations of a council that run under the OA brand. ↩︎
7. This refers to a patch that goes on the right pocket flap on the uniform. ↩︎
8. Per OA’s WWW Name history, “Wimachtendienk Wingolauchsik Witahemui”–what WWW refers to–is either real or parodied Lenape words. ↩︎
9. A limited exception is offered for historical documentation of past practices that are clearly disclaimed as such and presented in proper context. ↩︎
10. OA’s legend is Western children’s fantasy fiction decorated with tribal culture OA thieved from the Delaware people (Lenape). The legend centers on a story from The Last of the Mohicans, a historical-romance fiction novel by James Fenimore Cooper. ↩︎
11. Echoing the cultural rot of BSA’s national organization, transparency and accountability aren’t important to OA. For example, it declines to even verify the existence of lodge tribal agreements, beyond a self-attestation by lodges (a checkbox on a silly, red-tape form). Given OA’s lengthy record of cultural theft and duplicitousness, a non-public agreement is as good as no agreement. ↩︎
12. This assumes the Scout Executive is the only one authorized to execute contracts. While it is infeasible to review policies for all councils, we will provide due consideration when an employee with a different title signs an agreement. ↩︎
13. Some state-recognized tribes appear to be fraudulent entities. For example, the three federally-recognized Cherokee tribes have collaborated to identify fraudulent Cherokee organizations, which includes some state-recognized Cherokee tribes. ↩︎