Earth and Heaven: An Ecological History of the St. George Temple – or one People's earthly material is another's stolen land and life.

Or if we thank the people for their labor, why not thank the land for its labor? Or does faith in a patriarchal, creationist God make it harder to directly relate with the (feminized) land? Or does belief in Jesus's Second Coming and its related terraphobic myths of antecedent global destruction cause its believers to do little about the intersecting climate, biological diversity, and extinction crises?

"St. George Temple Distance" by Al Rounds

To understand settler-colonialism, first understand that everything is land and that Christian and Western philosophy helps us ignore this.

“Land is life. Thus contests for land can be contests for life.” - Patrick Wolfe

St. George Utah Mormon temple under construction

St. George Utah Mormon temple under construction

St. George Utah Mormon temple under construction

The oldest continually used Mormon temple was built with and on stolen Nuwu land and caused the genocide of the Kaibab Nuwu. Its website doesn’t mention this, but does say that Mormons “used earthly materials to rise above the material and the earthly.”

"Silkworm Workers," 1896. Women processing silk, some of which is used to make decor for the temples. (also present, adorably chubby dog)

Men working on the St. George Temple, standing among cut Navajo Sandstone blocks with the finished basalt foundation to left side of the image.

Its foundation is Nuwu basalt cut from the mesas to its west. Its walls are Nuwu sandstone cut from the endangered desert tortoise habitat to its north. Its roof and steeple are Nuwu ponderosa pines cut from a sacred Nuwu mountain to its south. Its decor is made from cotton seeds grown in Nuwu soils and irrigated with Nuwu waters, and from silk taken from silkworms, who were boiled alive after being fed on mulberry leaves grown in Nuwu land. 

This temple’s website offers no thanks to the Nuwu for their land, nor to the silkworms, mulberry trees, cotton plants, ponderosa pines, sandstone, or basalt. Though they do express gratitude to their God who “didst provide.”

Laborers who built this temple were paid mostly in cattle meat and dairy. The cattle (paid to the church as tithes) lived on Kaibab Nuwu grasses and waters at Pipe Spring.

When Jacob Hamblin first saw this oasis the grasses were belly high to a horse. 30-years later he wrote, “The Kaibab are in very destitute circumstances; fertile places are now being occupied by the white populations. The grass and plants that produced food for natives is all eat out by stock.”

In 40-years, the Church who grazed the cattle that fed the laborers who built the temple caused mass death among the Kaibab Paiutes, more massive by % of population lost than the prior ~400 years of Spanish colonization.

This temple’s website says that the work done within “rise(s) above the material and the earthly” toward something sacred.

Patrick Wolfe says that “settler colonialism destroys to replace”

Interior view of St. George Temple under renovation, 2021.

Mormon Prophet Brigham Young once said, "There are multitudes of spirits in the world. Everything we see (...) has got its own peculiar spirit (...) Is there life in these rocks and mountains? (...) There is."

Yet today, this church refers to these stones as raw material. Why and when did the earth become so lifeless in Mormonism?

Additionally what stories are being unspokenly told when we cover black basalt and red sandstone with white plaster to render them pure and holy?