Unsettling Mormonism: From a love of land to disassimilating from whiteness & settler-colonialism

Hi friends, comrades, and accomplices 👋🏻

This is a story of where i come from.

I’m nic. I was born and raised Mormon. Every person in my direct family line was occupying stolen Indigenous lands (mostly Nuwu aka Southern Paiute lands) by 1884. Thereafter they were all born and buried in these lands we genocidally stole. And 100 years later I was born and raised there.

This project started as a graduate thesis project for my MFA. I wanted to understand better what the foundations of my baseline reality are in order to have a more holistic relationship with these stolen lands that I love.

I end up finding so much information that I was never taught in school, at church, or at home. So, I felt that as a descendant of these settlers, it was my responsibility to share this information with my community. To work to unsettle what our ancestors worked to settled. To make ourselves whole by addressing what we’ve generationally ignored, whited-out, and swaddled in myths of divine innocence.

And some of this information goes beyond historic and into the mythic. Like the settler ideologies held in the Lamanite identity, it’s supposed curse of “a skin of blackness” and white-supremacist-savior promise of a return to “white and delightsome”-ness.

Add this to the anti/philosemitic ideologies that claim Euro-settlers are blood related to Indigenous Peoples of this continent thru a mythic Israelite ancestry in the Tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh.

Top it all off with end times beliefs that say the world is supposed to be destroyed which often serves to create an apathetic or even optimistic view of our current nesting doll of extinction level crises. As Jesus’s second coming denotes beginning for Mormon practioners and a scorched earth desth for all us queers, commies, apostates, non-Mormons, and of course all the plants, animals, and beyond human life as Jesus burns the earth in a fire so hot it turns the globe to glass.

Who does this?

I, nicholas b jacobsen, having been born of an abusive father & loving mother have been making a partial record of my people and the land I was raised with/in. 

I’m a 7th generation UtahMormon, a white (mostly British/Danish) settler, U.S. American, trans non-binary artist who grew up on Church Welfare in Nuwu lands––lands my people stole & named Washington County, Utah. This project grew from the love I carry for that land–the land I was raised by & from which I redeveloped my spirituality.

After moving to New Mexico, studying decolonization & learning about settler colonialism & Indigenous resistance from Native, Black, & Brown friends here, I began to see that the only reason I have access to this land, this love, my spirituality, is because my ancestors committed genocide against the Peoples Indigenous to the lands.

My body & my ancestors' grew from stolen land, from the trauma of genocide, & the trauma of justifying, ignoring & gaslighting that truth. It is in our DNA. How do I hold a love that grew in a massacre site?
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I understood that growing our sense of entanglement with land was necessary for survival, & I began learning that we settlers cannot reconnect with land until we connect with our ignorance––until we work to remember our histories as generational Mormons & U.S. Americans. 

Until we reckon with what whiteness has intentional whited-out, & blanketed in myths of innocence, we cannot have a full-relationship with the land, we cannot heal & we will certainly continue to live ignorantly continuing the collapse of the livability of this planet for ourselves & our fellow earthlings.

For me, this project is about disassimilating from whiteness & settler-colonialism by deconstructing the baseline reality that I inherited. Not only because it is my responsibility to unsettle what my ancestors settled, but also because white-supremacy & settler-colonialism hurts us all. 

Too often we ask: "how could this have happened?" holding pity or shame in our hearts. Now I ask, "who does this?"

Because white supremacy & settler colonialism are our issues. Our Peoples made them, rendered them in scripture & law; built schools, churches, & government buildings to house them; made art to romanticize them; & built militaries & police departments to enforce them. And we fill these spaces with our hearts, minds, & bodies.

Again Who does this?