Lamanite Placement Program & Tribal Termination: Beginnings to the ‘50s (part tw0)

Spencer W. Kimball with Diné Lamanite Placement Program students

In 1947, Diné girl Helen John stayed w/ a white, Utah-Mormon family to go to school. This is marked as the unofficial beginnings of the Lamanite Placement Program. I place it w/ the beginnings of this church. 

In 1830, Joseph Smith sent Mormon leaders to convert, marry, & save Lamanites so “that their posterity may become white & delightsome.” 

Twenty-one years later, Brigham Young called on members to buy, adopt, educate, and convert Indigenous women and children thru enslavement so that they “become a white & delightsome people.” 

In the 1850s-Emancipation, after the Pioneers massacred an Indigenous village, they’d “adopt” the surviving women & children in order to enslave, marry, educate, & “teach them the gospel.”

In the 1950s, “Adoption represented the ultimate solution to the Indian problem (in the U.S.) Children would have no contact with other Indians, & they would grow up in middle-class homes. Thus, officials believed, Indian children would become truly assimilated into mainstream American society.” (Margaret D. Jacobs)

From 1947-1954, the Lamanite Placement Program was run illegally. When the Relief Society finally got licensed to run the Program, 68 children were already placed.

Arthur Vivian Watkins, by Granger. 1951.

​In the early ‘50s Utah Mormon, US Senator Arthur Vivian Watkins was working to pass Tribal Termination legislation to end reservations and force Indigenous Peoples to integrate and assimilate into settler-society, thus destroying the Indigenous Nations. Sen. Watkins thought he was helping by destroying collective Tribal identities, and replacing them with settler individualism. Watkins even compared Tribal Termination to the Emancipation Proclamation. 

In 1953, Tribal Termination became law. In 1954 Watkins wrote to Church leaders:
“the time has come…to help the Indians stand on their own two feet and become a white and delightsome people as the Book of Mormon prophesied they would become. Of course, I realize that the Gospel will be the motivating factor, but it is difficult to teach the Gospel when they don't understand the English language and have had no training in caring for themselves.”

“I firmly believe that tomorrow there will be no reservations… I believe that integration into our economy and community life is essential and I look forward to the day.”
- Spencer W. Kimball, ‘62.

By the 1960s, 25%–35% of Indigenous children were living apart from their families and People.

The Lamanite Placement program became official the year after Tribal Termination was legislated. Tribal termination and the Lamanite Placement Program were both Mormon-created programs meant to assimilate Indigenous Peoples to white-settler society by destroying their tribal identity as Indigneous persons.

To read the full length essay with sources see “Mormonism and Indigenous Assimilation”