Review
Title: Essays on American Indian & Mormon History
Editors: P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Genre: Social Sciences & History
Year Published: 2019
Number of pages: xxxiv, 372
Binding: Hardback
ISBN10: 1607816903
ISBN13: 978-1607816904
Price: $45.00
Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
Hafen and Rensink open their introduction to these essays with a brief account of the Bear River Massacre, perpetrated on January 29th, 1863, “the largest massacre in United States Indian history” (xi). When I first learned about this event, years ago, I knew enough about Mormon-Indian relations to be relieved that it was perpetrated by Union troops from Fort Douglas, in Salt Lake City, and not by Mormon settlers. “The Army reported about 250 Shoshone were killed. The Shoshone say more than 400 were slaughtered” (xi), a number also reported by a Mormon settler, according to the Wikipedia article “Bear River Massacre.” This discrepancy is typical of such accounts, as is the subsequent behavior of the troops, who “continued to desecrate the bodies, rape survivors, burn the teepees, and steal horses and food resources” (xi). Sadly, so is the report that “Mormon settlers in Cache Valley expressed their gratitude to the army.”
My stupid reaction, that relief, has been replaced by a reflection on the words of Thomas Jefferson and his fellow men in the Continental Congress. In the long list of grievances against King George detailed in the Declaration of Independence, and used to justify their declaration of war, this stands out:
“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
Of all their attempts to show “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” this stands out as the most mendacious (except perhaps for the clause blaming the King for encouraging the slave trade, and declaring slavery to be evil, which was removed at the insistence of delegates from the Southern states). This sentence expresses a savagery that characterizes the attitudes and actions of these European colonists towards the indigenous peoples. I doubt that any group of Indians had such a “rule of warfare.” But white men did. To me it reflects the colonists’ attitudes as through a glass, darkly. This approach to relations with the indigenous peoples, while not exclusively male, strikes me as the foundation of even our present attitude towards what is now the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” — in which the clause about “a well regulated Militia” is too often passed over in silence.
My reaction to learning of the massacre, that relief, was permanently put to rest by the next paragraph in the introduction, reporting that “on September 6, 2016, the town of Wellsville, Utah, gathered at their annual Founders’ Day celebration to watch as groups of white residents, painted red and dressed as Indians, reenacted a supposed historical battle between Natives and white Mormon settlers. The ‘Sham Battle’ has taken place for the last 100 years” (xi). But, as Rensink and Hafen point out, though there is reference made to the “Battle of Bear River” — the Massacre — there is no historical event which this celebration commemorates. It is “a fiction that has persisted for a century. Such fictions permeate the history of Indian-Mormon relations” (xii).
The essays in this book look at those “Indian-Mormon relations” from many angles — even from the angle of fiction. From the deeply personal essay by Farina Noelani King, “Aloha in Diné Bikéyah,” about native Hawaiian missionaries on the Navajo reservation, to the grimly political analysis Erika Bsumek makes in “Reclamation, Redemption, and Political Maneuvering in Diné Bikéyah, 1947-1980”, I was introduced to contrasting views. Bsumek picks apart the role of Utah’s Senator Arthur V. Watkins and governor George Dewey Clyde in the push to build the Glen Canyon Dam, to “terminate” the recognition of the tribes by the Federal government, to “uplift” the Navajos by taking away the government crutch — i.e. the treaty obligations to pay the Indigenous peoples for their lands and resources. King, on the other hand, recalls her childhood and youth on the reservation, and the ways in which the “pineapples” — a Navajo nickname for the Hawaiian missionaries — adapted to the desert and to its people.
Michael P. Taylor looks at the presentation of Mormons “In the Literature of the Lamanites,” including a look at novels by Martin Cruz Smith and Leslie Marmon Silko. Lori Elaine Taylor examines a story she heard from one man about how Joseph Smith may have gotten the Book of Mormon from Seneca peoples. She goes into the story in great depth, noting that it has been told by different speakers “since at least the 1960s.” In both cases, the authors examine Mormon-Indian relations from the Indigenous perspective.
Elise Boxer, in the first essay in this collection, takes on “The Book of Mormon as Mormon Settler Colonialism,” noting that the book “has been used to create a discourse that silences Indigenous voices and perspectives regarding their own history as a people on this continent” (4). Thomas W. Murphy, in “Other Scriptures,” proposes that narratives of Indigenous peoples could be some of the “other scriptures” Jesus refers to in the Book of Mormon (3 Nephi 23.6).
This is a rich collection of essays. My synopsis cannot do it justice. The collection deserves close, involved reading — and rewards it. It is the kind of writing — scholarly, engaged, deeply personal — that does not yield its treasures easily, and does not leave you with all answers and no questions. It challenged me and many of my preconceptions about the topic. It forced me to re-examine long held beliefs and prejudices. It deserves your attention, and I hope and pray that you will read and challenge and be challenged by these essays.
There is a mild irony in that this book, like its sister volume, Decolonizing Mormonism, though the result of seminars held at the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at BYU, was published by the University of Utah Press. Their colophon is “The Defiance House Man,” a representation drawn from an “Ancient Puebloan pictograph” near Glen Canyon, of a figure holding a weapon and brandishing a shield — surely an appropriate representation, given the subject of these essays. Just recently, however, there was a “sham battle” between BYU and UofU, marking one hundred years of a football “rivalry”. In what I see as a perfect illustration of the difficulties involved in both decolonization and Mormon-Indian relations, the mascot of the University of Utah, formerly the University of Deseret, is the Runnin’ Ute. Who is he running from? Surely not a Cougar?