Gender and Colonialism pt 6: White Science

Adam and Eve, by Lowell Bruce Bennett

So 100 years before Normman and Norma were carved another pair of men, Josiah Clark Nott & George Gliddon, used their sciences and a sculpture to address their ideas about human bodies, race, divinity, perfection, normalcy, and Christianity.

These men were contemporaries of Joseph Smith (born one and four years apart from Joe) who like Joseph wanted to make the so-called Americas fit the Bible stories. This way of think is exemplified in this quote form Thomas Loraine McKenney, the US superintendent of Indian Trade from 1816 to 1822, who wrote in his memoir concerning the origins of "Native Americans": "There is however, but one source whence information can be derived on this subject- -and that is the Bible.”

Josiah Clark Nott in the 1860s

Josiah Clark Nott (1804- 1873) was a US American surgeon and anthropologist. Nott, who owned humans in enslavement, used his scientific reputation to defend the institution of slavery Nott was influenced by the racial theories of Samuel George Morton who collected hundreds of human skulls (most likely robbed from graves and tombs) from around the world and tried to classify them in his attempt at phrenology (a pseudoscience which involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits.)

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Samuel George Morton from "Types of Mankind" by Nott and Gliddon

Morton, after inspecting three mummies from ancient Egyptian catacombs, concluded that Caucasians and other races were already distinct three thousand years ago. Since the Bible indicated that Noah's Ark had washed up on Mount Ararat, only a thousand years before this, Morton claimed that Noah's sons could not possibly account for every race on Earth. According to Morton's theory of polygenism, races have been separate since the start.

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A Facsimile from the Book of Abraham, No. 2

Keeping in mind Joseph Smith's Egyptology fetish and the mummies he'd owned and made the Book of Abraham from a scroll stolen from those stolen mummies and that the church owned and exhibited Indigenous ancestors' skulls in their museum well into the 1970's. (The American Indian Movement fought the Lamanite Placement Program in congress and boycotted the 1973 general conference beating drums, and demanding that the church donate $10 million to Indian social programs and the return of native skulls held in the church's history museum.)

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So, Nott with his Christian Eqyptologist collaborator, George Gliddon, took the white / Christian-supremacist work of Morton and expanded in it, writing two books 
Types of Mankind and Indigenous Races of the Earth

To show the supposed superiority of white people Nott and Gliddon used the head of the Apollo Belvedere, a Roman marble sculpture. For centuries the sculpture had epitomized the ideals of aesthetic perfection for Europeans and westernized parts of the world.

Drawings from Josiah C. Nott and George Gliddon's "Indigenous races of the earth" (1857)

Though they believed God had created each race, Nott and Gliddon also argued that the races of mankind did not originate from a single pair of ancestors. Nott and Gliddon, believed that the biblical word "Adam" means "to show red in the face" or "blusher" and since only light skinned people can blush, the biblical Adam is the original ancestor only to the white race.

Gliddon, popular lecturer and researcher on Egyptology, also concluded that the Egyptians had been white. (Which does not align with Mormonism own Egyptology theology).

"The Prophet Joseph Smith" by Gittens

During this same time another white-supremacist settler had decided that ancient people of this land were also white, given the kinds of cultures and architectures they were able to build and went on to create his own theory for how the racialized Indigenous People lost their ancestral whiteness these histories have histories

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