Troops and Tribes: Masculinity, Playing Indian, and the Social Politics of Ernest Thompson Seton's Expulsion from the Boy Scouts of America

In recent years the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) have reversed several long-standing and controversial rules aimed at barring the participation of certain groups from its programs based on their gender, gender identity, and/or sexuality. In 1988, the BSA allowed adult women to serve in leadership roles. In 2013, they lifted the ban on gay boys, and followed by allowing gay adults to serve in leadership roles in 2015. In 2017 the BSA opened their membership to transgender boys.1 Finally, in 2019, the BSA rebranded itself “Scouts BSA,” and for the first time allowed girls to participate in their mainline youth program. These changes all came after decades of legal and social pressure. Despite the changes, public perceptions remain that the organization is not a welcome place for LGBTQ people, girls, or women.2Issues of masculinity and sexuality in the Boy Scouts have been intertwined with the predominantly white, male leadership's appropriations of American Indian identities since the organization's beginnings in 1910. Both youth and adult Boy Scouts regularly participate in what Philip Deloria calls “Playing Indian” by participating in an honor society called the Order of the Arrow, dressing in Native American-inspired regalia on Indian dance teams, and clothing themselves in symbols drawn from Indigenous religion and history.34 The Boy Scouts regularly cite positive yet damaging stereotyped traits about Native Americans such as strength, endurance, and connection with nature as important aspects of their youth training program while ignoring the diversity of cultures and gender identities in contemporary and historical Indigenous groups.5 The Boy Scouts’ reliance on tropes of indigeneity and the complex ways in which they are used as referents for manhood and masculinity, were inspired by several earlier youth training groups for boys, including the Woodcraft Indians, which were founded in Connecticut by the Greenwich naturalist, artist, and author, Ernest Thompson Seton.Seton was a great believer in a self-researched understanding of Native American philosophy and was a self-proclaimed pacifist. When the United States entered World War I in 1914, a wave of nationalistic fervor forced the Boy Scouts to evolve into something unlike its original iteration. Seton's desire to see the Boy Scouts engender boys with a rugged sense of pacifist individualism modeled on his interpretation of Indigenous masculine values was overpowered by a more nationalist approach championed by his political opponents. The organization of today can find the roots of its struggles with gender and sexuality in this early period.Early twentieth-century Americans imagined links between the ideas of patriotism, masculinity, nature, and Indigenous Americans. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, believed that ruggedness gained from long periods spent in nature was the path to essential manliness.6 Unlike Seton, he envisioned Native Americans as being of nature, and by extension opposed to civilization. Many historians are guilty of accepting Roosevelt's vision of manliness as both deeply rooted and singular in its contemporary acceptance. In reality, different strains of social politics existed on the subject. Ernest Thompson Seton envisioned a different sort of outdoor manliness, one that viewed Indigenous people not as savage enemies but as the proper role models of masculinity. He based this model on deeply held stereotypes about Indigenous gender that linked Native American men with idealized traits such as strength, stoicism, resilience, and a natural equilibrium. These were deeply damaging appropriated identity traits, long connected by the turn of the twentieth century with the practice of heritage-theft conducted by white Americans seeking to boost the credentials of their connection to a landscape they had dispossessed from Indigenous peoples.7Many of the Boy Scouts’ founding members held deep fascination with nature and Native Americans. Especially Seton, who became deeply invested in the topic of Indigenous history while on a 1905 trip to Los Angeles. As recounted in his 1936 memoir, Seton and his second wife Julia received a summons from a “strange woman” shortly after arriving in the city. The couple went to meet her at her home in the outskirt neighborhood of Beverly Hills, then a sparsely populated community full of white-washed cottages.8 Three decades later, Julia Seton described the woman as “thirty or a hundred years old” with skin “like yellow parchment, and covered with thousands of faint lines not deep enough to be wrinkles” and eyes absorbed with “the faraway look of a mystic.” She introduced herself to the couple as a Mahatma from India, who had studied under some of the “great masters.”9 “Don't you know who you are?” exclaimed the woman to Seton upon their meeting, “You are a Red Indian Chief, reincarnated to give the message of the Redman to the white race, so much in need of it. Why don't you get busy? Why don't you set about your job?”Seton said that this experience left a lasting mark on her husband's life, giving him the sense that he was on a mission to save and spread the spiritual philosophy of the “Red Man.” But for all its exoticism and drama, Seton's tale may not be all that it seems. The woman with the mystical gaze, Julia Seton admitted, hailed from Iowa, not the Far East. And while Ernest Thompson Seton was not a “Red Man,” his identification with Native American culture was indicative of early twentieth-century Indigenous appropriation.10 Non-Indigenous people at the turn of the twentieth century were often willing to twist the reality of Indigenous lives to serve their own purposes and desires.Born in 1860 to Scottish parents in South Shields, England, Seton emigrated with his family to Lindsay, Ontario before his seventh birthday. Seton excelled in the arts from an early age. He won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Art in London but due to an illness returned to Canada in 1881 after only two years of study. His early years spent in Ontario afforded Seton a respect for nature, and by his twentieth year he had grown into an avid naturalist. Wishing to pursue his passions professionally and also seeing an opportunity to remove himself from the presence of his hated father, whom he described later in life as a man “who had the words of Jesus on his lips and the acts of Nero on his heart,” Seton moved to New York City to pursue a career as a wildlife artist.11 After spending most of the 1890s studying art (and meeting his first wife, Grace, in 1894) in Paris, the recurrently ailing Seton was forced to move to New Mexico on the advice of his doctors. The arid landscapes of the Southwest quickly became the incubator for Seton's talents as a writer, artist, and naturalist. This period preceded his most productive years, in which he wrote dozens of books and thousands of popular articles that earned him international acclaim. Staying true to his interests, Seton drew his inspiration and his subjects from the animal world, nature, and Native American cosmology.12Seton did not remain in the Southwest for long. Within a few years he had made his way back to the East Coast, settling first in New York City where he and Grace married. He moved again in 1896 to a 120-acre estate in Cos Cob (a district of Greenwich), Connecticut.13 Seton's move to the East Coast introduced him to a new set of social opportunities. Although, he corresponded with Theodore Roosevelt starting in the 1880s about naturalist materials. It was in 1896 in New York that the two met for the first time.Seton and Roosevelt's competing philosophies on manliness and nature clashed from the start. Seton's pacifistic philosophy, especially towards animals, conflicted with Roosevelt's love of big-game hunting. Despite their many shared interests Roosevelt refused to extend Seton an offer of membership in his Boone and Crockett Club, which bothered Seton who sought the peerage of Gifford Pinchot and Owen Wister.14 Despite missing this opportunity, Seton stayed true to his belief that manliness should be achieved through a communion and respect for nature, rather than through its destruction.Seton continued to find success in the first decade of the twentieth century, and his passion for his particular interpretation of American Indian philosophy became a thing of local legend in Cos Cob. So much so that in 1904, the local Greenwich newspaper memorialized the birth of Seton's daughter Anne, with a full-page article entitled “The Thompson Setons’ ‘Outdoor Baby’—Rigorous Schedule for the Little New Arrival—To Be Raised by the ‘Indian Method.’”15 Seton would later extend this “method” to the development of a youth training program for boys on his estate, Wyndygoul, in rural Cos Cob.In 1901, Cos Cob experienced an uptick in youth-driven property destruction. The suspected culprits were a group of apparently bored young boys from the neighborhood. Seton saw these boys as a symptom of a broader societal ill; the combined effects of modernization and industrialization in an increasingly urban America were leading to an effeminized malaise and mischief among the country's male youth.16 He believed this stemmed from “bad influence during the period of character growth,” which ranged from between “the years fourteen to eighteen.”17Seton argued that time in nature, which represented everything opposite to the smog-choked cities of the late-industrial period in his imagining, would provide these young boys a stronger moral core. The popular image of the American Indian, whose representation as entangled and politically divided at the turn of the nineteenth century as it is today, was paramount in Seton's conceptualization of the natural world.18 Indianness, Seton believed, was the gateway to a holistic, healthful, and natural life.Seton invited the boys for an overnight stay at his estate where he taught them woodcraft and helped them make Indian regalia. The project, which would come to be called first the “Seton Indian Program,” and later the “Woodcraft Indians,” and which Seton soon widened to other local boys, quickly grew into a success. In 1902, Seton published an article on the program in Ladies Home Journal. And later published a series of books, including Two Little Savages and The Birch Bark Roll.19 Greenwich was perhaps the perfect place to incubate an organization like the Woodcraft Indians, the then-rural Greenwich struck a balance between the naturalistic environment Seton espoused as central to his philosophy with the convenience of a nearby cosmopolitan center.The Woodcraft movement gained some traction in the following years, but ultimately failed to gain the international attention Seton desired. In 1906, Lord S.S. Baden-Powell approached Seton and offered him a plan to achieve greater recognition. Baden-Powell was an even better-known celebrity than the now famous Seton, having been knighted for his military service and his use of British “Scouts” in the Boer War.20 Baden-Powell now hoped to recreate his military success with the youth of England. With a nascent idea for a youth training organization in mind, Baden-Powell read and was impressed by the writings of Seton. Seton and Baden-Powell's partnership would lead to the founding of the Boy Scouts of America in 1910.The first five years of the Scouting movement were a time of philosophical and pedagogical contradictions. Historian John Neaubauer described Scouting's early programs as an “amalgam of naturalism and militarism” with its naturalistic roots being the brainchild, primarily, of Seton. The nature-ideal became embodied in the values of the organization when Baden-Powell “adopted a number of the games and outdoor activities from Seton” which Seton had previously developed as a part of his Woodcraft movement.21American engagement in the First World War led to a shift in public sentiment and a corresponding one in the Scouting movement. Baden-Powell and other key figures in the Scout's leadership of the 1910s began to see the Boy Scouts as having both a patriotic and a militaristic mission meant to “advocate loyalty, discipline, altruism, and the submission of the individual to a community or an ideal.”22 Alternatively, Seton meant to use the Scouts as a means to instill in boys a hearty, masculine, and nature-centric upbringing that was opposed to the loss of individualism affected by modernism, incorporation, and industrialization. Both Baden-Powell and Seton represented larger ideological beliefs prevalent at the time of the Boy Scouts’ founding.Seton wrote of his societal philosophy some three decades after his split with the Scouts: “Our system has broken down. Our civilization is a failure,” and still further that when left to its own devices it created “one millionaire and a million paupers.”23 Seton's pessimistic vision of the era's social constructions of masculinity, as associated with an industrialized and incorporated self, aligned him with the Bohemian thinkers of the Fin de Siècle like Nietzsche and Toulouse-Lautrec.24This self-styled philosophy does not perfectly map with a Bohemian worldview, rather it appears that Seton adopted aspects of this understanding of proper manliness into a masculine-ideal more prevalent in America and certainly associated with American Indian stereotypes. The strong and stoic Native man and the pacifist and sentimental Parisian intellectual fit perfectly within Seton's conceptions of proper manhood. Seton's writings, especially those related to the Boy Scouts and the Woodcraft Indians, suggest that Seton viewed stereotypes about Indigenous masculinity as waypoints for white boys. Seton lived in an era when the notion of the “noble savage” was on the rise, a philosophy which viewed American Indian groups and their lifeways through an idealized lens. Adaptations of the writings of Rousseau and the continued popularity of the works of James Fenimore Cooper and others may have informed Seton's perspectives on the inherent superiority of Indigenous ways of being, particularly in the sphere of gender.Seton adopted a particular aspect of masculinity, the one associated most with a that the of male Seton these who were by in and political and who that these were both and It was this perhaps developed during Seton's years studying art in Paris, which he hoped to make to in the Woodcraft later, the Boy of Seton's to the Scouting movement in America was his role in the of the first BSA in 1910. This which would influence that followed represented a of the Boy more the was the means by which that philosophy was to the organization's youth the Seton hoped to that his philosophies would be central to the Scouting movement for are most in the where he wrote that not is the first of He hoped to the organization's boys to and what he to be the effects of the It is that Seton developed this for his His writings in the suggest that at some Seton to see youth training through a more of the is of what Seton called a of The and his of twentieth century of “the of with the of and that of Seton that the proper of was not to or for but rather to turn boys into men of moral His of manliness was from and it was not the most Seton in the that Baden-Powell's movement was more quickly than his Woodcraft organization and the Woodcraft and Scouting Seton and Baden-Powell's continued to be Seton grew with the militaristic nature of Baden-Powell's conceptions of the Baden-Powell and the other were of the and what they believed were aspects of Seton's Despite his Seton saw the of the Scouts as an opportunity to about and the loss of an imagined and may have represented a in Seton's of this philosophical of the World War I for Seton, as the patriotic fervor that was by the of the after Seton's trip on the to be the of his woodcraft influence in the The second year of the first great was also the year in which Seton was from the Boy Scouts of from the Boy Scouts can be linked most to two of the other of the The first was the who the Scouts its militaristic and a great of its early popularity by his celebrity to the The other was James whom Seton described as who is a man of great but of the activities of who has of with boys, and I has the in his The of World War I in a series of that what he had for years, an to and the of new role as a and in a led to an for patriotic to and believed the Boy Scouts were perfectly for the an ideological shift to the Scouts the He to Seton's woodcraft which were by his writings on tropes of Indigenous masculinity, in of a on the and of Baden-Powell's It came to attention that Seton, being in and having lived most of his young life in the British of had a American the of two years, used this as a to Seton from the Seton's of her offered an on Seton's The was of Seton. Julia from the that her was for the founding of the Scouting movement in this believed that her should have been greater in to the of his of Seton's other was that Seton's and were a for deep between the two In of the Boy Seton. Seton for what he believed was a Within a year of the organization's had Seton of both his and ideological influence and his as by Baden-Powell's Seton that was seeking to the organization from the Woodcraft Indian continued in to the Boy Scout's as the patriotic military training for Seton's including the that he at the fervor the in Seton was with being a a and an believed that had more to with his to Scouting's military aspects then with his and that these were not shared by the other further believed that a new on Baden-Powell's vision was the for the success of the program and when the opportunity he about for some way to Seton so that he be damaging the Seton had and that he was opposed to Roosevelt Seton both and in to James Roosevelt wrote in of that have used the Boy Scouts organization as a for the of pacifist and as a for with the training of boys to a of military is that the to whom Roosevelt America its eyes towards the in it itself in need of an earlier training for its and Baden-Powell the Boy Scouts for the Seton's moral to made him an As Seton returned to Connecticut and on his Woodcraft where he spent much of both his years and Seton's the group gained the popularity by the Boy the turn of the twentieth masculinity existed as a complex idea with number of and groups to be the of its true Seton's understanding of masculinity, which on a strong and Indigenous as its imagined to a pacifistic idea championed by both Baden-Powell and The Boy Scouts would on to this interpretation of proper manliness as a of their The Boy leadership of their original to fit a This new reality saw Baden-Powell's military inspired the more pacifistic of Seton's so the Boy Scouts on a philosophical path that led them to that have made them the of Boy Scouts still use Indigenous and appropriations as a of many The Order of the Arrow, dance teams, and the of and are drawn from a of history and culture in to an experience within these are meant to honor Native Americans they have often the of members of Indigenous understanding the history of in the the organization a more that a understanding of contemporary Native America rather than on a of an imagined This be a As Deloria from Scouting in a new era in in which to as something than has now been a century since the Scouts even a approach to and that shift the history of the and on white perceptions of Native Americans. the Boy Scouts are in what for proper and moral masculinity. the philosophies of Seton, the Scouts come to that their own ideological a of beliefs and a broader interpretation of what it meant to be a proper to the Scout's does not in the beliefs of Seton, who espoused damaging and of Indigenous gender In to the gender of a set of Native American Seton did not Indigenous gender or sexuality his own and the Scouts that their own in to have been deeply and complex and to use this as an for It would the to something Seton did and the of Indigenous people, including people, in their of

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