“American Indians": Church History Topics Essay, Part 3

In this one we talk about an aspect of the early Mormon missions to “the Lamanites” that this essay conviniently leaves out.

Last time we talked abt Mormon enacted “cultural genocide” of Indigenous Peoples thru religious and cultural assimilation (“civilizing the Indian”)

This time we talk about miscegenation as a form of genocide-destroy and replace.

Around this time the US was practicing their racist “One Drop Rule” for Africans and a form of Blood Quantum laws for Indigenous ppls.

These seemingly opposing logics both worked for the settler-project.

The economics of this project required an abundance of stolen labor. Thus, it was beneficial to have as many people racialized as Black as possible.

This project also required stolen land. So thru the logic of Blood Quantum and miscegenation Indigenous Peoples and their claims to land could be eliminated.

Mormons also sought to destroy Indigenous Peoples as part of their particular Christian-Zionist-settler-project.

“Within months of the founding of the Church in 1830, Latter-day Saint missionaries journeyed to Indian Territory.

During the 1840s, Joseph Smith and the First Presidency sent missionaries to the Sioux (Dakota), Potawatomi (Bodéwadmi), Stockbridge (Mahican), and other Indian peoples residing in Wisconsin and Canada.6 Delegations from the Sauk (Asakiwaki) and Fox (Meskwaki) tribes met in Nauvoo with Joseph Smith, who told them of the Book of Mormon and plans to raise up a New Jerusalem.”

As discussed in part 2, Mormons sought to destroy Indigenous cultures by “restoring their original culture”--Mormonism. But religious and cultural assimilation wasn’t the only genocidal tactic these early Mormon missionaries were using. 
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"Ye should take unto you wives of the Lamanites and Nephites, that their posterity may become white, delightsome" - Joseph Smith Jr, 1831. Recorded by W.W. Phelps some years later

“We are now going to the Lamanites…We will show them that in consequence of their transgressions a curse has been inflicted upon them – in the darkness of their skins. We will have intermarriages with them, they marrying our young women, and we taking their young squaws to wife. By these means it is the will of the Lord that the curse of their color shall be removed and they restored to their pristine beauty.”
- Brigham Young, 1846, Sugar Creek, Iowa
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So, if you’ve been following along for a minute (or studied the BoM yrself) you may be wondering abt 2 Nephi 5:23 which reads: “And cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed; for they shall be cursed even with the same cursing.” Maybe because Euro-Mormon-settlers aren’t Nephites their pure white blood is strong enough? Idk.

But exactly 100 years later President J. Reuben Clark said: “We should hate nobody, and having said that, I wish to urge a word of caution, particularly to you young girls. It is sought today in certain quarters to break down all race prejudice, and at the end of the road, which they who urge this see, is intermarriage. That is what it finally comes to. Now, you should hate nobody…but do not ever let that wicked virus get into your systems that brotherhood either permits or entitles you to mix races which are inconsistent. Biologically, it is wrong; spiritually, it is wrong.”

But then by 1960 Spencer W. Kimball “joked” from the General Conference pulpit: “The (Dine) children in the home-placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers & sisters in the hogans on the reservation…are changing to whiteness & to delightsomeness. One white (missionary) jokingly said that he & his companion were donating blood in hopes of accelerating the process.”
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"The positive outcomes of the logic of elimination can include officially encouraged miscegenation (intermarriage), the breaking-down of native title into alienable individual freeholds, native citizenship, child abduction, religious conversion, resocialization in total institutions such as missions or boarding schools, and a whole range of cognate biocultural assimilations. All these strategies, including frontier homicide, are characteristic of settler colonialism…Settler colonialism destroys to replace."
- Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”