“It’s Ancient Aliens, except its Mormons”Quotes from The Red Nation podcast episode: “Unsettling Mormonism”

Quotes from The Red Nation podcast episode: “Unsettling Mormonism”

“Mormonism has kinda this unique ideology, where it sees its origins here in this land vs. other sections of Christianity or Abrahamic traditions see their origins in places like the Middle East.” - Nick Estes

“And to them this is actually their land. In that (Book of Mormon) frame of mind, ‘This was our land first, we’re just coming to claim it back.’ So, following that (ideology), Indigneous People are the original Mormons.” - Kobi

“But it also so easily lines up with something like Zionism, the ideology of Zionism. I mean, it’s a land without a People, or a People without a land essentially.” - Nick Estes

“(Mormons) believe that this (settler project) was Divinely Ordained:

• That Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, and wherever they were sent after the Garden of Eden, are on this continent. 
• That in the Flood of Noah this continent was separated from a supercontinent and left uninhabited to be saved as a Special Place for God’s Chosen People. 
• That those Chosen People are these Book of Mormon characters and then when all these Chosen People, the white ones, get killed and His ‘fallen’ People are still here,
• He has to send Columbus over. 
• Then He has to send over George Washington.
• And THEN Joseph Smith, because all of these things had to happen for this church to exist.” - nic

“And despite this service (of the Mormon Battalion) the U.S. was still distrustful of the Church and to this day the canons above Salt Lake remain as they were then–aimed at the city, not in defense of it.”
- Jacqueline Keeler in “Standoff: Standing Rock, the Bundy Movement, and the American Story of Occupation, Sovereignty, and the Fight for Sacred Lands.”

“So it’s obvious that Mormonism is intertwined with the US settler-colonial project, but I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that it actually transcends just the US. So, you could even say it is implicated in U.S. Imperialism as well. Like, Richard Hansen who’s going to Guatemala and proposing the construction of a resort and to study the area and the ruins because they relate to the creation stories for Mormons.” - Jen Marley

“Similarly (the Church) owns the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii and has since the ‘60’s. It’s the place that the majority of tourists go to learn about Hawaiian culture, they learn from a Mormon-owned and Mormon-curated space and so (the El Mirador resort) would essentially be just another one of those.” - nic

“The whole BYU department of archeology was started and actually the whole Meso-American archeology as an academic profession was started by Mormons trying to find proof that the Book of Mormon was real. So that has sent out countless archeologists, myself included, in this like settler-colonialism taste for adventure.” - Kobi

“It sounds like Ancient Aliens.” - Nick Estes

“It’s Ancient Aliens, except its Mormons” - Jen Marley

“We know the role of the Catholic Church in all this, but there’s also the role of the LDS Chruch in this, assimilating children, taking them from their families, coercing mothers to give up their children at childbirth–it’s a form of genocide. The removal of children from one group and the placement into another, it’s the legal definition of genocide. And it happened (the Lamanite Student Placement Program) like literally nine years after the genocide convention began.” - Nick Estes