Unsettling Mormonism: From a love of nature to a disassimilating from whiteness and settler-colonialism

Hi, I’m nic - a white (mostly British/Danish), ethnically Mormon, US American, non-binary artist who grew up on Church Welfare in Nuwu lands –– lands my people stole & named Utah's Dixie. 
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This project grew from the love I carry for that land–the land I was raised by & through which I redeveloped my spirituality. 

After moving to New Mexico to attend University of New Mexico's (UNM) Art & Ecology graduate program I began studying settler-colonialism & learning about decolonization & Indigenous resistance from UNM faculty, students, and friends here in Tiwa lands of so-called Albuquerque. 

Through this learning, I began to see that the only reason I have access to this land, this love for the land, and my land-based spirituality, is because my ancestors committed genocide, forced displacement, assimilation, and other cultural destructions against peoples Indigenous to this land –– specifically so that I could be born and raised and fed and watered and loved and saved in this land. 

My body & my ancestors’ grew from stolen land,  from the trauma of genocide, & the trauma of justifying, ignoring & gaslighting that truth. It is a part of my people. 

How do I hold a love that grew in a massacre site?

I understood that growing our sense of entanglement with land is necessary for survival & then I began to understand that we settlers cannot reconnect with land until we connect with our ignorance –– what we've ignored. Until we work to remember our settler histories as generational Mormons & U.S. Americans –– until we reckon with what white-supremacy has intentionally whited-out, & swaddled in myths of innocence –– we cannot have a reciprocal-relationship with the land. 

For me, this work is about disassimilating from whiteness & settler-colonialism  through deconstructing the baseline reality that I inherited. Not only because it is my responsibility to reckon with the histories that are the reasons I exist, but also bc 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 people 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.

Who does this?