Unsettling Mormonism
an archive of unsettling histories, mythistories, and mystories
from U.S. & Mormon settler colonialism, white supremacy, and imperialism
from U.S. & Mormon settler colonialism, white supremacy, and imperialism
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“One of the characteristics of trauma is the deep desire to repress it. Until you tell the story, til you face the truth of the horrors that have happened—that harm will haunt you, haunt your dreams as an individual––haunt your collective unconscious as a society.” – Reverend Serene Jones 1  Family Heirloom: “Every Pioneer Parade is a Military Parade” - Stone from St. George Temple quarry, red stripe from a U.S. flag, souvenir brick from the Nauvoo Temple, doily, composted book of mormon, clay, and a white plastic rose. (2022). By nicholas b jacobsen “What is missing.” This is what an artist (who’s name I am missing) answered when asked, “What do you focus on as an artist?” As a survivor of child abuse, I don’t remember my most formative memories. As an assimilated European-settler I am displaced from my ancestral lands and cultures. As an exMormon I’ve left the religious culture of my ancestral family. As a U.S. citizen I was mostly ignorant of my history. As a non-binary person, I spent most of my life missing my gender. “What is missing” references loss yet contains abundance. Homesickness, heartbreak, history, haunting, extinction, erasure, memory, memorials, genocide, ghosts, and grief can all be held within “what is missing”. Missing is a felt absence––an absence made present in that feeling. This land is, and is not, my home. This is where I grew up. It is not where my genetics or language evolved. This is, and is not, where I am from. To make our home in this land my ancestors massacred Goshute, Timpanogos, Pahvant Ute, Nuwu, Shoshone-Bannock, and Diné Peoples in their homes / lands. Then, the memories of these massacres went missing as colonists buried these histories in mythistries of innocence and persecution rooted in cultivated ignorance. These half histories were then set in stone in monuments and memorials and spread over the land. These layers of erasure left ghosts in our memories which “haunt our collective unconscious” as both U.S. and Mormon settlers. This repressive erasure is ongoing and incomplete as settler colonialism is “not an event,”2 but “an ongoing horror made invisible by its persistence”3––made absent through its ongoing presence. This normalization through structural persistence renders settler colonialism natural, inevitable, invisible, relegated to a preferably forgotten past haunted by “ghosts (who) point to our forgetting.” Even as Mormons (and the U.S.) repress much of their origins, the foundational histories and mythistries they do teach are so sacred that they are scripture. In fact, Mormonism is so focused on origins that one of the first questions answered by their Plan of Salvation is “Where do I come from?”.4 This originary emphasis embedded in my origins led me to ask: “Where do I really come from? What are my unsettling origins?” I am the sixth generation of my ancestors to be born and raised Mormon in Utah. But no one ever told me that. Just as the Mormon church attempts to erase their unsettling origins through ignorance, many Mormon families also seek to eliminate the ghosts in their ancestries by simply not talking about them. Because my immediate and ancestral family have this “deep desire to repress” the traumas they enacted and experienced, I didn’t learn much about them at all. These ghosted memories and histories haunted me until I learned and shared them–until I confronted my own “settler horror,” what Eve Tuck and C. Ree describe as, “the looming but never arriving guilt, the impossibility of forgiveness, the inescapability of retribution.”5 In their essay, “A Glossary of Haunting,” Tuck and Ree focus on the persistence and invisibility of settler colonialism. Their “Haunting” is a “relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation… Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop.” My people are haunted by the violent voids we’ve created, covered-up, and perpetuate in the stolen Indigenous lands we call “home”. These lands are haunted by these same violences and voids.  Ahnighito (Cape York Meteorite) in transit to the American Museum of Natural History, 1897. - Charcoal and pulverized meteorite on paper. 42 inches x 56 inches. made in consultation with the Illoqqortoormuit Community and the International Repatriation Project. (2017). By Nina Elder. Artist Nina Elder identifies a haunted void where a solid copper boulder used to be. Through her Non-linear Research and Quantum Curiosity6 project, Elder shares this preferably forgotten settler colonial story of the Ontonagon Boulder. This boulder is revered by Anishinaabe People as a sacred object. They call upon the spirit of the boulder to improve their health and well-being. Colonists found it in 1820. They then stole it, and began buying and selling it to each other, carting it across the United States for the next 100 years “like a mineralogical freak show.” The U.S. eventually bought the Ontonagon Boulder and put it in their Smithsonian Museum. Unlike the boulder’s home, where it was sovereign and collectively available, the Smithsonain can only house this densely massive boulder in a place “where no one, including Anishinaabe people, can visit it.” In 1991, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community requested the boulder be returned as a sacred object under the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA. But the reparations hearings found insufficient evidence to establish Indigneous “natural objects” as Indigneous sacred objects. When Nina contacted cultural leaders from the Keweenaw Bay Community the Director of Tribal History talked about ownership and commons, he mentioned how the “boulder is not sovereign as a thing, but sovereign as a part of a place.” Because that place has been distrubed, at the center of this entire story he identified a void. “An echoing space left by dominion, colonialism, and exploitation,” added Elder.7  Ontonagon Boulder, basement of the Smithsonian, rejected NAGPRA request #42568 - Charcoal, dirt, and pulverized copper ore on paper. 36 inches x 42 inches. Made in consultation with the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community. (2017). By Nina Elder.  St. George, Utah temple (under construction with red Nuwu sandstone and whitewashed walls visible) - Nuwu basalt, Nuwu sandstone, Nuwu ponderosa wood, and a Nuwu gypsum soil-based whitewash. (1871-1877) Architecture by Truman O. Angell (Photographer unknown). In Nuwu lands, where the Great Basin, Colorado Plateau, and Mojave deserts meet and become one another, my ancestors displaced sacred Nuwu land to build walls in which to enclose a sacred void of their own. My people build temples to create a space in which they may perform sacred rituals. Through these rituals they believe they can live eternally as physical celestial bodies and families. The St. George, Utah Mormon temple is built on and with Nuwu land. It was built on top of a Nuwu spring. Its foundation is made of black basalt extracted from the mesa to its west. The walls are of red sandstone quarried from cliffs to the temple’s north. And Ponderosa Pines, cut from a sacred Nuwu mountain to the south, pitched its roof. These were all rendered pure white with a lime wash, extracted from the gypsum rich soils of the valley floor. Within these gypsum soils grows the endemic Dwarf Bearclaw Poppy. Because of ongoing settler extraction, recreation, and construction in these sacred soils, this white poppy was one of the first plants to be placed on the U.S.’s list of endangered species.8 This temple’s website claims that these sacred Nuwu earth pieces were extracted to help Euro-Mormon-settlers “rise above the material & the earthly.”9 Patrick Wolfe writes that, “settler-colonialism destroys to replace.” Through the construction of this temple my people destroyed sacred Nuwu lands and replaced them with banal raw materials. “When two cultures have such different values there’s dissonance that echoes in that void.” – Nina Elder My ancestors who helped to build this temple were compensated for their time by the Mormon church in cattle meat and dairy. These cattle, paid to this church as tithes, lived on Neung’we Tuvip, homeland of the Kai’vi’vits Nuwu (Kaibab Southern Paiute). Mormon cattle ate Nuwu grasses and drank Nuwu waters.10 When Mormon missionary to Indigenous Peoples, Jacob Hamblin, first saw this Nuwu oasis the grasses were belly high to a horse. Thirty years later he wrote, “The Kaibab are in very destitute circumstances; fertile places are now being occupied by the white populations. The grass & plants that produced food for natives is all eat out by stock.” Mormon settlers built a fort directly over an ancestral Kai’vi’vits spring to protect their animals and themselves from Indigenous Peoples fighting to protect their lives and lands. Mormons cut off Kai’vi’vits from their water. Mormon Euro-cattle cut Kai’vi’vits and their Indigenous animal relatives off from their Indigenous grasses. Indigenous lives were pushed to starvation as Mormon lives blossomed as a rose. “This is the place of our origin. We were brought here by Coyote in a sack. This is where my Sehoo (umbilical cord) is buried, it is my connection to this land. It is the place to which I will return to make my leap into the spirit world.” – Kai’vi’vits Nuwu (Kaibab Southern Paiute) member In only 40 years, the Mormon church, who grazed their cattle which fed the laborers who built the temple, caused a mass death among the Kai’vi’vits People, killing about 1,000 people leaving less than 10% of their former population.11 This co(w)lonial destruction goes on and on with ranching still an environmentally destructive practice in these Indigenous deserts. In 1995, a Kai’vi’vits elder “was going to take (her) daughters out to show them what kind of seeds (her) mother & grandmother used to gather. (Settlers) got some cattle into that area & they just loved all of that. So there were no more seeds.” This red sandstone fort now stands as a memorial to Mormon Pioneer fortitude. There is no memorial to the Mormon-enacted genocide against Kai’vi’vits Nuwu. Though this memory is perpetuated by Kai’vi’vits people themselves through the museum they co-run with the U.S. Department of Interior at Pipe Spring National Monument.
“It’s up to us to pass it to the next generation and the next generation after that, just so there is that knowledge carried on.” – Angelita Bullets, Kai’vi’vits Nuwu. Traditionally, many Indigenous memories are memorialized in stories. Stories that are fluid and can change over time. Settler colonists prefer to memorialize their memories in stone. We borrow lithic longevity for our ever-fading memories in an attempt to make them solid, permanent, eternal. But by rendering these memories monolithic many parts of those histories go missing. One such memorial sits at Mountain Meadows. Here my ancestors massacred at least 120 European settler migrants under a false flag of whiteness meant to symbolize surrender, peace, and innocence. The U.S army built the first memorial to this massacre with black basalt stones. These stones, witnesses to this massacre, were gathered, piled in a mound, and topped with a cross cut from a nearby juniper. Mormons destroyed this memorial and about 150 years later, replaced it with one of their own.12
The destruction of the stone memorial mirrors the intentional destruction of the memory of this massacre. My ancestors and their fellow Mormon-settlers hid their whiteness behind red face paint and dressed like Nuwu people. They attempted to hide their settler identity by “Playing Indian” so that they might cause the blame to be shifted from themselves to the “merciless Indian Savages” that the U.S. was already bent on exterminating. Then after their white skin was discovered by the settler migrants, they hid their murderous intent behind a white flag of innocence.13 When this massacre was found out by the U.S., the Mormon church blamed Nuwu. Finally, the Mormon murderers were sworn to secrecy, founding a generational tradition of memories gone missing and so filled with ghosts’ haunting. During the dedication of this church’s new monument to the memory of this massacre the Mormon church expressed “profound regret..for the undue and untold suffering experienced by the victims then and by their relatives to the present time.”14  Current Mountain Meadows Massacre Monument, maintained by the Mormon church - Local basalt stones, mortar. (2007) (photographer and date of photograph unknown). They also offered an “expression of regret” to Nuwu People “who have unjustly borne for too long the principal blame for what occurred during the massacre.” Though they then turned on their gaslight and added, “Although the extent of their involvement is disputed, it is believed they would not have participated without the direction and stimulus provided by local Church leaders and members.” (emphasis added) For Nuwu Peoples, “the extent of their participation” is not disputed. The Tribes have publicly shared that they have no record of their People being involved.15
Family Heirlooms [left to right] “Every Pioneer Parade is a Military Parade”, “‘Venus’ as in ‘Penis’”, “An unstable home” - Stone from St. George Temple quarry, 100% cotton stripe from a U.S. flag, souvenir brick from the Nauvoo Temple, doily, (composted book of mormon, Alabaster Venus de Milo statue) clay, and a white plastic rose. (2022) By nicholas b jacobsen. As a way of “remembering to remember” my people’s preferably forgotten pasts I make mini memorials. Like my people, I borrow from stones potential for holding memory through deep time. By destabilizing these monolithic memorials the permanence and stability of my people’s place here is unsettled. Here my ancestors are bound to this land by blood-red and innocence-white stripes of the U.S. flag. Their belief in their Chosen status in this “Promised Land” is our foundation, tenuous under the weight of our haunted histories. There a plastic, white rose blossoms eternally from the desert’s stone.16 The sacred stones of these Family Heirlooms are stolen from the stolen land quarries from which my ancestors cut to build their sacred temple. Unlike the rituals my family use to permanently bind themselves to each other eternally, the sacred I invite with these stones is meant to change, adapt, and fall apart. The red sandstone cliffs, basalt bluffs, and creeks that cut canyons between them are refuge for the indigenous and endangered desert tortoise.17 As Mormon settlers built their homes, farms and golf courses, they left less and less space at the margins of their imported lifeways for all Indigneous life. This tortoise species, and the dwarf bearclaw poppy are part of a broad network of species that are now endangered or extinct because of colonization. “As humans reshape the landscape we forget what was there before. Ecologists call this forgetting the ‘Shifting Baseline Syndrome’…Forgetting, in itself, remakes landscapes … Yet ghosts remind us that we live in an impossible present––a time of rupture, a world haunted with the threat of extinction.” – Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet 18 We are currently living in the sixth extinction. Just as colonization brought mass genocide around the world, it also brought mass extinction. In the 100 years after Columbus stumbled upon this continent colonists killed 90% of its Indigenous Peoples.19 This mass death of land stewards caused a massive increase in plant growth which pulled so much carbon from the atmosphere that a “Little Ice Age” was started. Today the rate of extinction is estimated at 100-1,000 times higher than background extinction rates.  Installation view of We of the Benthos. (2018). By bug carlson. Artist and researcher, bug carlson, created an ever-changing memorial to the endangerment and extinction of freshwater mussels, the most endangered family of animal in so-called North America.20 bug’s memorial is an installation of 220 paintings of nearly every species of mussel “that is endangered or threatened in the United States”. These paintings are chained together “to form a linked ‘barrier.’” As these mussel species go extinct their painting is removed from the chain and their image is engraved onto glass. This yet-to-exist, present but absent curtain asks “where do species go when they go extinct?”  Close up of We of the Benthos. (2018). By bug carlson Despite all its answers to life’s greatest questions, Mormonism, as far as I know, doesn’t answer this one. Though, global extinction is an essential part of their Plan of Salvation.21 Mormonism teaches that the nesting doll of existential crises we’re living with is a necessary antecedent to Jesus’s Second Coming. Climate collapse, extinction, wars, famines, fires, floods, and plagues are all signs of things going according to Plan. Then once all the Chosen Ones are ascended, Jesus (in keeping with God’s promise to never commit global genocide again with a flood) will burn the earth and all life upon it in a fire so hot it will purify the earth to glass. Even in their End Times fantasies, their ideologies follow the settler colonial logic which “destroys to replace.” As I close I wonder: What is missing between where my beliefs in the importance of death, decay, transformation, loss, and absence meet with my raging against settler destruction and erasure? I also believe in destruction and change. How is this different from settler logic? Unlike my eternity-seeking settler ancestors, I accept that death is an essential part of life and I avoid causing it. Mormon settler-colonialism seeks to live forever and enacts mass death in its pursuit of permanence. Unlike the memorials and monuments my ancestors built, my mini-memorials aren’t meant to be eternal. They are built to be impermanent. I ask permission from the stones before I took them. I asked them to share their memories of this land and my people’s occupation of it. And promised to return the stolen land stones to their homes when we finish. This is an act of remembrance and an act of letting go. Mormonism teaches practitioners to “cling to the iron rod” and follow the “strait and narrow path”22 of the “One True Church” through which they can escape death and suffering and achieve immortality. Buddhist monk Pema Chödrön, teaches that “the truth you believe in and cling to makes you unable to hear anything new.” Through Buddhism, Chödrön teaches that death is neither to be sought or avoided, as it is clinging and avoidance which creates suffering. “By learning to relax with groundlessness, we gradually connect with the mind that knows no fear.”23 Chödrön writes of groundlessness as the experience of impermanence. Groundlessness is comfortable being unsettled. And in this way we can be liberated from fear––fear which destroys, represses, and erases in its avoidance of death. Everything is changing. Nothing is permanent. And that hurts. Everything is changing. Nothing is permanent. And that is a relief. My ancestral culture holds a deep desire to repress the potential traumas of impermanence. They express this desire through rituals which they believe will guarantee them eternal life. And in the pursuit of their permanence they’ve enacted genocide, extinction, and a myriad of erasures. They desecrate sacred land to build these death-avoidant spaces. They destroy Indigenous families, plants, and animals in their own homes/lands to build a home for their settler families, plants and animals. They destroy, not only to replace, but to cling and avoid. “Care is an ongoing assumption of responsibility in the face of continuing violence and peril.” – Deborah Bird Rose 24 As I shed the identities and baseline realities I was assigned at birth, I seek culture that doesn’t avoid responsibility, but seeks care “in the face of ongoing violence and peril”––that seeks to plant seeds in groundlessness––that seeks to sit in the unsettling space of learning and unlearning that we might become able to “tell the story”––that seeks to reckon with “the truth of the horrors that have happened.” I seek a culture that marvels, mourns, and is responsible to “what is missing”. “May we go forward in repentance, which does not require individual culpability & shows how a community owns and understands the reverberations of its actions and its realities. May we seek repentance, which means to walk in a different direction. It’s so much more than, ‘I’m sorry.’” – Reverend Serene Jones 25  Family Heirlooms… - Text and Digital collage. (2022). By nicholas b jacobsen This essay was originally published at Un-Varnished. Check out these artists’ mentioned in the article: nicholas b jacobsen , Nina Elder , bug carlson. Sources
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AuthorI am nicholas b jacobsen, an artist, researcher, historian, educator, and organizer. I am a trans-non binary Euro-settler raised in the Nuwu lands of so-called Utah. My family has been Mormon and Utahn for as long as either of those concepts have existed. My ancestors sacrificed everything--their identities, homelands, jobs, health, & safety to become Mormon, Utahn, U.S. American, & white--to settler their Zion. They also sacrificed their humanities as they committed genocide against Kuttuhsippeh (Goshute), Timpanogos Shoshone, Shoshone-Bannock, Eastern Shoshone, Ute, Nuwu (Southern Paiute), and Diné (Navajo). Because my ancestors made my home through Indigenous genocide in their home/lands––I take it as my personal responsibility to unsettle what my ancestors settled, while helping my fellow settlers do the same through reading, writing, art, and community building. Archives
June 2023
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