Essays on American Indian and Mormon History
Author: P Jane Hafen
Publisher:
Published: 2024-12-31
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781647692100
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On Zion’s Mount
Author: Jared Farmer
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2010-04-10
Total Pages: 472
ISBN-13: 0674036719
DOWNLOAD EBOOKShrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no “Indian” legend graced the mount until Mormon settlers conjured it—once they had displaced the local Indians, the Utes, from their actual landmark, Utah Lake. On Zion’s Mount tells the story of this curious shift. It is a quintessentially American story about the fraught process of making oneself “native” in a strange land. But it is also a complex tale of how cultures confer meaning on the environment—how they create homelands. Only in Utah did Euro-American settlers conceive of having a homeland in the Native American sense—an endemic spiritual geography. They called it “Zion.” Mormonism, a religion indigenous to the United States, originally embraced Indians as “Lamanites,” or spiritual kin. On Zion’s Mount shows how, paradoxically, the Mormons created their homeland at the expense of the local Indians—and how they expressed their sense of belonging by investing Timpanogos with “Indian” meaning. This same pattern was repeated across the United States. Jared Farmer reveals how settlers and their descendants (the new natives) bestowed “Indian” place names and recited pseudo-Indian legends about those places—cultural acts that still affect the way we think about American Indians and American landscapes.
Losing a Lost Tribe
Author: Simon G. Southerton
Publisher:
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781560851813
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor the past 175 years, the Latter-day Saint Church has taught that Native Americans and Polynesians are descended from ancient seafaring Israelites. Recent DNA research confirms what anthropologists have been saying for nearly as many years, that Native Americans are originally from Siberia and Polynesians from Southeast Asia. In the current volume, molecular biologist Simon Southerton explains the theology and the science and how the former is being reshaped by the latter. In the Book of Mormon, the Jewish prophet Lehi says the following after arriving by boat in America in 600 BCE: Wherefore, I, Lehi, have obtained a promise, that inasmuch as those whom the Lord God shall bring out of the land of Jerusalem shall keep his commandments, they shall prosper upon the face of this land; and they shall be kept from all other nations, that they may possess this land unto themselves (2 Ne. 1:9).
The Whites Want Every Thing
Author: Will Bagley
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2019-10-17
Total Pages: 561
ISBN-13: 0806165812
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAmerican Indians have been at the center of Mormon doctrine from its very beginnings, recast as among the Children of Israel and thereby destined to play a central role in the earthly triumph of the new faith. The settling of the Mormons among the Indians of what became Utah Territory presented a different story—a story that, as told by the settlers, robbed the Native people of their voices along with their homelands. The Whites Want Everything restores those Native voices to the history of colonization of the American Southwest. Collecting a wealth of documents from varied and often-suppressed sources, this volume allows both Indians and Latter-day Saints to tell their stories as they struggled to determine who would control the land and resources of North America’s Great Basin. Journals, letters, reports, and recollections, many from firsthand participants, reveal the complexities of cooperation and conflict between Native Americans and Mormon Anglo-Americans. The documents offer extraordinarily wide-ranging and detailed perspectives on the fight to survive in one of Earth’s most challenging environments. Editor Will Bagley, a scholar of Mormon history and the American West, provides cultural, historical, and environmental context for the documents, which include the Indians’ own eloquent voices as preserved in the region’s remarkable archives. In all these accounts, we see how some of western North America’s most colorful historical characters recorded their adventures and regarded their painful stories—and how, in doing so, they bring light to a dark chapter in American history. Ranging from initial encounters through the 1850–1872 war against Native tribes, to recitations of Mormon millennial dreams continued long after Brigham Young’s death in 1877, this is history as it happened, not as some might wish it had, at long last returning the original owners of today’s Utah, Nevada, and Colorado to their rightful place in history.
Real Native Genius
Author: Angela Pulley Hudson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2015-07-16
Total Pages: 270
ISBN-13: 1469624443
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the mid-1840s, Warner McCary, an ex-slave from Mississippi, claimed a new identity for himself, traveling around the nation as Choctaw performer "Okah Tubbee." He soon married Lucy Stanton, a divorced white Mormon woman from New York, who likewise claimed to be an Indian and used the name "Laah Ceil." Together, they embarked on an astounding, sometimes scandalous journey across the United States and Canada, performing as American Indians for sectarian worshippers, theater audiences, and patent medicine seekers. Along the way, they used widespread notions of "Indianness" to disguise their backgrounds, justify their marriage, and make a living. In doing so, they reflected and shaped popular ideas about what it meant to be an American Indian in the mid-nineteenth century. Weaving together histories of slavery, Mormonism, popular culture, and American medicine, Angela Pulley Hudson offers a fascinating tale of ingenuity, imposture, and identity. While illuminating the complex relationship between race, religion, and gender in nineteenth-century North America, Hudson reveals how the idea of the "Indian" influenced many of the era's social movements. Through the remarkable lives of Tubbee and Ceil, Hudson uncovers both the complex and fluid nature of antebellum identities and the place of "Indianness" at the very heart of American culture.
Reconstruction and Mormon America
Author: Clyde A. Milner
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2019-10-03
Total Pages: 267
ISBN-13: 0806165863
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe South has been the standard focus of Reconstruction, but reconstruction following the Civil War was not a distinctly Southern experience. In the post–Civil War West, American Indians also experienced reconstruction through removal to reservations and assimilation to Christianity, and Latter-day Saints—Mormons—saw government actions to force the end of polygamy under threat of disestablishing the church. These efforts to bring nonconformist Mormons into the American mainstream figure in the more familiar scheme of the federal government’s reconstruction—aimed at rebellious white Southerners and uncontrolled American Indians. In this volume, more than a dozen contributors look anew at the scope of the reconstruction narrative and offer a unique perspective on the history of the Latter-day Saints. Marshaled by editors Clyde A. Milner II and Brian Q. Cannon, these writers explore why the federal government wanted to reconstruct Latter-day Saints, when such efforts began, and how the initiatives compare with what happened with white Southerners and American Indians. Other contributions examine the effect of the government’s policies on Mormon identity and sense of history. Why, for example, do Latter-day Saints not have a Lost Cause? Do they share a resentment with American Indians over the loss of sovereignty? And were nineteenth-century Mormons considered to be on the “wrong” side of a religious line, but not a “race line”? The authors consider these and other vital questions and topics here. Together, and in dialogue with one another, their work suggests a new way of understanding the regional, racial, and religious dynamics of reconstruction—and, within this framework, a new way of thinking about the creation of a Mormon historical identity.
Race and the Making of the Mormon People
Author: Max Perry Mueller
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2017-08-08
Total Pages: 348
ISBN-13: 1469633760
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe nineteenth-century history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Max Perry Mueller argues, illuminates the role that religion played in forming the notion of three "original" American races—red, black, and white—for Mormons and others in the early American Republic. Recovering the voices of a handful of black and Native American Mormons who resolutely wrote themselves into the Mormon archive, Mueller threads together historical experience and Mormon scriptural interpretations. He finds that the Book of Mormon is key to understanding how early followers reflected but also departed from antebellum conceptions of race as biblically and biologically predetermined. Mormon theology and policy both challenged and reaffirmed the essentialist nature of the racialized American experience. The Book of Mormon presented its believers with a radical worldview, proclaiming that all schisms within the human family were anathematic to God's design. That said, church founders were not racial egalitarians. They promoted whiteness as an aspirational racial identity that nonwhites could achieve through conversion to Mormonism. Mueller also shows how, on a broader level, scripture and history may become mutually constituted. For the Mormons, that process shaped a religious movement in perpetual tension between its racialist and universalist impulses during an era before the concept of race was secularized.
Utah, the Right Place
Author: Thomas G. Alexander
Publisher: Gibbs Smith Publishers
Published: 1995
Total Pages: 500
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAmerican Apocrypha
Author: Dan Vogel
Publisher:
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 400
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the preceding pages, I have tried to show how a historical-critical view of the Book of Mormon illuminates some of its more interesting problems. Many questions remain, and many problems have yet to be discovered and analyzed. I myself have questions about the Book of Mormon's origins that I cannot yet answer. However, that fact does not diminish the certainty of my conclusion that the Book of Mormon is a modern text.
Making Lamanites
Author: Matthew Garrett
Publisher:
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781607814948
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExplores how and why many Native youths in the Indian Student Placement Program adopted a new notion of identity
