Chosen Whiteness and Indigenous Erasure in Mormonism, pt. 2: Lamanite Placement Program, 1954-2000

collage by nicholas b jacobsen

“Above all the problems the Indian has, his greatest one is the white man” 
​- Spencer W. Kimball, 1953

The first Mormon missions were to Indigenous nations or as Mormons call them, Lamanites nations. Mormons carried these missions into their manifest destined Zion in the west where they worked to assimilate, enslave, or massacre Indigenous peoples there. These assimilation practices are rooted in the Mormon teaching that Indigenous Peoples and white Mormons share an ancestor in the ancient House of Israel. Similarly, mormons called their enslavement practice "adoption".

"Who and Where are the Lamanites?" by Lane Johnson, Assistant Editor of Ensign magazine, 1975

"Joseph the Prophet Addressing the Lamanites" by Edward Williams Clay and Henry R. Robinson, 1844

This “adoption” practice later morphed into the Lamanite Placement Program (LPP) or Indian Student Placement Program, (1950’s-2000) in which more than 20,000 Indigenous children (from about 63 different tribes in so-called North America, though mostly Diné) were baptized and placed with white, Mormon families for the duration of the school year, every year, until the child graduated or left the program.

"The children in the home-placement program in Utah are often lighter
​than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness...
One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were
donating blood in hopes of accelerating the process.” 
- Spencer W. Kimball, GC, Oct 1960

In Mormon-written articles, the “success” of the program is measured by how white / Mormon the participants became. Mormon missions, temple weddings, and BYU attendance are all marked as successes. (There was no difference in economic success between participants and their reservation-raised peers)

Seven percent of LPP participants identified themselves as “mostly white” or “totally white.” Their peers who were raised on the reservation were twice as likely to feel that they “completely fit in” with their own people. Assimilation is genocide.

One author notes the “undoubtedly well-meaning” motives of the program’s organizers. But these “well-meaning” motives are exactly the problem. How well meaning can you be when rather than acknowledging the cultural / economic / ecological genocide that you’ve enacted on a people, you instead build a program to finish the job, to “Kill the Indian, save the Mormon." And then pat yourself on the back for it. 

In an NPR podcast on the Lamanite Placement Program, a Mormon man asks:
"What is culture? And when is it good and when is it bad? And what's sacred about it? My grandmother came from Denmark." He continues, "She gave up her complete culture to come to America and be a member of The Church. Is that wrong? Is that bad? Which culture did these children give up? Did they give up their original culture where they had the gospel of Jesus Christ in their life? Or did they give up another culture that they came to when they left the gospel of Jesus Christ?" 

These “undoubtedly well-meaning” “nice white” people are the definition of White Saviorism. 

There is so much more that could be said about this program and its impact on the Indigenous peoples, like the on-brand cases of sexual assault filed by a few Diné against the church. One individual told his case manager that he was being beat and sexually abused who didn’t show up for 6 months and his boy scout master. Neither did anything. The abuse continued.

We could also talk about Indigenous resistance like the American Indian Movement and how they fought the LPP in congress and boycotted the 1973 general conference, beating drums, and demanding that the church donate ten million dollars to Indian social programs and return the native skulls held in the church’s history museum.