Brendan Riley’s “Solano Chronicles” appears every other Sunday in the print edition of the Vallejo Times-Herald.
Times are tough for fraternal organizations, but Vallejo’s Red Men Samoset Tribe #22 members aren’t ready to fold. As part of a search for new members, a July 19 birthday party is planned now that their downtown hall is 100 years old.
The 431 Georgia St. hall – or wigwam in Red Men parlance – is a designated city landmark, with an American Indian motif, that’s a throwback to a time when the downtown was thriving and fraternal clubs were popular.
The 3-story brick building, dedicated in 1925 and owned by the Improved Order of Red Men, was designed by prominent architect C.E. Perry. He also designed Vallejo’s one-time city hall, now the Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum. Both buildings are examples of Renaissance Revival architecture.
“Up to the 1950s, the Red Men were very active in the community. They brought in great entertainers like Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, and held other big events,” says Mike Brigandi, a Samoset Tribe #22 member and manager of the building. “This was the fraternal order that you wanted to belong to.”
But these days the Red Men face challenges common to many longstanding fraternal organizations: plummeting interest in public involvement. And there’s the issue unique to the Red Men – extensive use of American Indian-themed rituals and regalia. That use is viewed by critics as over-the-top cultural appropriation.
The Red Men hall’s exterior features relief sculptures of American Indians in feather headdresses. Inside, a cavernous meeting hall is lined with murals depicting native life. In another meeting room, old photos of early-day Vallejo Red Men hang on walls, along with a tomahawk collection.
Kent Knight, “sachem” or head of the local group, seeks to highlight the good it has done and will continue to do in the community. “But we have a difficult name,” he concedes.
“The original idea was basically to take the best practices and best ideas from the Native Americans that they had encountered,” Knight says of the Red Men founders. “We’re not going to change the name. We’re dealing with history and honoring our tradition.”
But Knight adds that the Red Men order has made major changes over time, including removal of a whites-only rule that was in its bylaws until 1974. The group is now open to people of all ethnic backgrounds. The order, limited to men at first, also has an auxiliary, the Degree of Pocahontas that was formed for women and dates to 1885.
Knight believes the downward trend in membership, while lasting for decades, gradually can be reversed. In the 1950s, Vallejo’s Red Men club had about 600 members. Now it’s down to about 30. Nationally, total membership in all Red Men groups has dropped from more than 500,000 to about 14,000.
“The key is to become more relevant to our community,” he says, adding, “If we can get enough different things going, it’s a way to connect with people without just being a bar. I’m not expecting a boom, but I think there’s something there.”
He notes the upcoming July 19 birthday celebration is open to the public, and hopes people will show up. Details on the free event are available on the organization’s website, redmensamoset22.org/
Author Robert Putnam, in his 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, says involvement in fraternal groups peaked after World War II but began to decline in the 1960s and 1970s due to political disillusionment, television, financial pressures and other factors.
Putnam described television as the main culprit, saying it gives the false illusion of interacting with others and deters people from getting involved in community projects, politics, church activities, volunteerism, and fraternal organizations.
Legal scholars Angela Riley and Kristen Carpenter, experts in American Indian issues, singled out the Improved Order of Red Men in Owning Red: A Theory of Indian (Cultural) Appropriation, a 2016 analysis of the use of pseudo-indigenous motifs by non-Indians.
Ironically, while members in some fraternal groups were dressing up as Indians in the 1800s, actual tribes “were simultaneously losing their lands in increasingly lopsided treaty negotiations, often conducted in the shadow or wake of violence,” Riley and Carpenter state.
They also say that modern-day cultural appropriations, involving everything from names of sports teams to products such as beer and clothing, continue that history of non-Indian disrespect of Native American rights, including a right to cultural identity.
The Independent Order of Red Men was officially founded in 1834, with a claimed connection to the Revolutionary War and a focus on temperance, patriotism and American history. Its name refers to Colonial-era rebels who in 1773 dressed as Mohawk Indians and dumped tea from British ships into Boston Harbor to protest English taxation.
The Vallejo club was founded in 1869. Its initial group of 20 members met in a hall in the 200 block of Georgia Street. A later “wigwam” was located at 532 Georgia St., until the move in 1925 to the current hall.
— Vallejo and other Solano County communities are treasure troves of early-day California history. My Solano Chronicles column, running every other Sunday, highlights various aspects of that history. If you have local stories or photos to share, email me at genoans@gmail.com or message me on Facebook.
