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
 Prophet, Priest, King, Judge, Lieutenant General, Mayor, Presidential Candidate, Seer, Astrologist, Capricorn, Treasure Seeker, Scryer, Fraud and Founder of the Mormonism—Joseph Smith. 38years old. Murdered in Carthage Jail. 1844. This is about Utah Pioneer Day. I start with Joseph Smith ’s martyr story because the one I learned left out some context and it’s the catalyst for all that is Utah Mormonism. Mormons are/were a Zionist religion. They gather. So when they move they bring a political and economic power block. Which upsets the settlers who’ve already claimed the areas Mormons try to settle. I don’t know the details to say yea or nay But people with power displacing People in an established area tends to be unjust. So, it’s so-called 1844, in Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Sioux), Bodéwadmiakiwen (Potawatomi), Ni-u-kon-ska (Osage), Sauk and Meskwaki, Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), and Peoria lands, or so-called Nauvoo, Ill.  Joseph Smith’s a polygamist. He’s got a town of which he is the Mayor and a militia of which he is Lieutenant General (which ~2/5 the size of the U.S. army at the time). People joining in from all over, thanks to men he’s sent off on missions (and then often marries [rapes] those mens’ wives). He’s got a U.S Presidential Campaign running with missionaries campaigning for him across the country and plans to settle in Indigenous lands settlers stole and called Oregon and California.  But he upset some of his inner-circle with polygamy (some felt isn’t wasn’t being taken advantage of enough). These men make a printing press to tell all. As Mayor and Lt General Joseph Smith ordered his militia: “Destroy the press”  The Illinois Governor is then like, “Too far!” And with Missouri breathing down his neck to extradite Smith, he orders for Joseph’s arrest Joseph Smith is about to sneak to the so-called Rocky Mountains with his henchmen Porter Rockwell. But there’s a DM from his wife, Emma urging Smith to return and give himself up, show courage to his friends who accuse him of cowardice.  Detail of C.C.A. Christensen's "Mormon Panorama". 1865. He’s arrested and murdered in his cell by People angry about things that were true and some things that were not true as none of the (white) men involved were respectable. Truth in Mormonism has been an amorphous thing from its origins. 
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 - After the Missouri Executive Order 44, known as the Mormon Extermination Order of 1838 (which wasn't rescinded til 1976). - After their leader was assassinated while in jail (because he, as mayor, declared martial law and ordered the destruction of a printing press that was, to him, a "public nuisance"). - After these people were pushed out of one town after another (leaving most everything they owned, built, planted, etc. behind) They walked and rode, more than 60,000 of them, (and about as many of their cows) halfway across the country, on the Mormon Pioneer Trail (which follows Indigenous trails, which follow animals trails, and the transcontinental railroad followed them all)  They trekked or trespassed (to use the colonizers word) through the lands of: Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Omaha, Pâri (Pawnee), Cheyenne, Sicangu, Oglala, Arapaho, Eastern Shoshone, Apsaalooké (Crow), Bah-Kho-Je (Ioway), and Shoshone-Bannock, and into so-called Mexican territory during the end of the Mexican-American war. Many migrated as refugees into Mexico, into the deserts, to build their Zion – their “Deseret”  ––What if, when the got to the border there had been a wall to greet them and news spreading fear of this “caravan of criminals” [as they were considered criminals in the U.S.] and their eternal families were separated and kids caged? What if what we do unto other had been done unto us?––  - After being pushed from their homes, from the lands they’d tended they pushed the indigenous inhabitants:
Timpanogos, Goshutes, Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Utes), Eastern Shoshone Nuwu (Southern Paiutes), Newe (Western Goshutes), Shoshone-Bannock, and Diné (Navajo) out of their ancestral home/lands where they'd been living for millenia. I carry the responsibility and racism of these people with me.  Pioneer day pt 3 "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 ⚠️addresses colonial violence⚠️ 174 July 24ths ago (as of 2021, which was 77years before Mormon President Nelson’s born), Mormon Prophet Brigham Young overlooking the lush lake valley filled with waist-high grasses said, “This is the place.” (He didn’t but this is relatively harmless founding myth). Soon after, Timpanogos Chief Wakara told Young that he and his People were not welcome to settle in Timpanogos home/land. Brigham said they were only passing through to California, needed to overwinter, and would continue in the spring. Three years later, Brigham Young signed the Timpanogos Extermination Order, (12years after the Mormon Extermination Order) which killed 90% of the Timpanogos population. "I say go [and] kill them…" said Brigham Young, "let the women and children live if they behave themselves… We have no peace until the men [are] killed off—never treat the Indian as your equal." My People continued to pour into Indigenous lands at about 3,000 persons per month. About 20,000 Indigenous people were living in so-called Utah when Mormons arrived. 20 years later ~60,000 Mormons had moved in. Settlers disrupted the land’s balance (balanced because of Indigenous care). By diverting streams, culling animals, cutting trees, and their cattle overgrazing on grasses, (sending native animals away), my people desertified this land and committed genocide against its Indigenous Peoples. The church says Complex Circumstances led to Utahs Black Hawk War. “It was the summer of 1847 our lives would be changed, a new people would come, not like the 'big hats' of old. These people would build fences, claim lands and disrupt our culture and way of life. Bringing confusion as they spoke of their God and peace while sharing sacks of flour laced with broken glass. Brigham Young said 'You can get rid of more Indians with a sack of flour than a keg of powder.' Destroying us with what appeared to be acts of kindness. As our Timpanogos tribal leaders Kanosh, Tabby, Washakie, Little Wolf, Wanship, Little Chief, Kone, Blue Shirt, Big Elk, Opecarry, Old Battestie, Tintic, Sowiet, Angatewats, Walkara, Graspero and others extend their hospitality to Brigham Young and his followers, they were unaware of the bloodshed that would follow, some 150 bloody confrontations between 1847-70. (See Utah Black Hawk War; Timpanogos of the Wasatch) “By the year 1909 most of our leaders were killed many of them in the Black Hawk War, our population decreased from approximately 70,000 to about 1,300. Today our population is close to 900. The newcomers called us the "Lamanites" the chosen people, we were chosen to walk knee deep in the blood of our ancestors, to suffer from whitemans' disease, to accept their ways and beliefs or die, fighting to preserve our way of life. What choice did we have? Our ancestors blood covers the Wasatch, and then we were forgotten. We were shoved aside in the name of progress. Yet, with all this we remain. “The time has come for the truth to be spoken. We are still here. We will not be brushed aside. We the Timpanogos people are the indigenous people of Utah, we are Shoshone. The blood of our ancestors cries out to us. They must be remembered for who they really were.” A Timpanogos member said, "What choice were we given? To walk knee deep in the blood of our people? Or give up our sacred land and culture and accept white man's ways? It was a matter of what's right. Our honor. Survival. Why is that so complicated?" During this “war” the Church spent about 113 Mormon lives and over a million dollars (which was reimbursed by the U.S. and the equivalent of about $31 million today) taking ~932 Indigenous lives (in addition all the lives taken through starvation, enslavement, and drought). This continued on throughout so-called Deseret  (breathe)
"May we go forward in repentance, which does not require individual culpability and 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.'" - adapted from Reverend Serene Jones Chosen Whiteness and Indigenous Erasure in Mormonism, pt. 2: Lamanite Placement Program, 1954-20006/28/2022  collage by nicholas b jacobsen “Above all the problems the Indian has, his greatest one is the white man” - Spencer W. Kimball, 1953 The first Mormon missions were to Indigenous nations or as Mormons call them, Lamanites nations. Mormons carried these missions into their manifest destined Zion in the west where they worked to assimilate, enslave, or massacre Indigenous peoples there. These assimilation practices are rooted in the Mormon teaching that Indigenous Peoples and white Mormons share an ancestor in the ancient House of Israel. Similarly, mormons called their enslavement practice "adoption".
This “adoption” practice later morphed into the Lamanite Placement Program (LPP) or Indian Student Placement Program, (1950’s-2000) in which more than 20,000 Indigenous children (from about 63 different tribes in so-called North America, though mostly Diné) were baptized and placed with white, Mormon families for the duration of the school year, every year, until the child graduated or left the program. "The children in the home-placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness... One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood in hopes of accelerating the process.” - Spencer W. Kimball, GC, Oct 1960 In Mormon-written articles, the “success” of the program is measured by how white / Mormon the participants became. Mormon missions, temple weddings, and BYU attendance are all marked as successes. (There was no difference in economic success between participants and their reservation-raised peers)
Seven percent of LPP participants identified themselves as “mostly white” or “totally white.” Their peers who were raised on the reservation were twice as likely to feel that they “completely fit in” with their own people. Assimilation is genocide. One author notes the “undoubtedly well-meaning” motives of the program’s organizers. But these “well-meaning” motives are exactly the problem. How well meaning can you be when rather than acknowledging the cultural / economic / ecological genocide that you’ve enacted on a people, you instead build a program to finish the job, to “Kill the Indian, save the Mormon." And then pat yourself on the back for it. In an NPR podcast on the Lamanite Placement Program, a Mormon man asks: "What is culture? And when is it good and when is it bad? And what's sacred about it? My grandmother came from Denmark." He continues, "She gave up her complete culture to come to America and be a member of The Church. Is that wrong? Is that bad? Which culture did these children give up? Did they give up their original culture where they had the gospel of Jesus Christ in their life? Or did they give up another culture that they came to when they left the gospel of Jesus Christ?" These “undoubtedly well-meaning” “nice white” people are the definition of White Saviorism. There is so much more that could be said about this program and its impact on the Indigenous peoples, like the on-brand cases of sexual assault filed by a few Diné against the church. One individual told his case manager that he was being beat and sexually abused who didn’t show up for 6 months and his boy scout master. Neither did anything. The abuse continued. We could also talk about Indigenous resistance like the American Indian Movement and how they fought the LPP in congress and boycotted the 1973 general conference, beating drums, and demanding that the church donate ten million dollars to Indian social programs and return the native skulls held in the church’s history museum.  Mormonism was Made In The U.S.A. – made on stolen Indigenous lands. Like the U.S. military, car companies, and the Boy Scouts, Mormonism also loves to Play Indian while attempting to naturalize their whiteness and/or Christianity in this land. The mythistoric beginnings of life on earth in Mormonism occur in the Garden of Eden. Like other forms of US protestant-Christianity, Mormon-Adam and Eve are depicted as a skinny, cisgender, hetero, abled, white couple surrounded by charismatic megafauna from all over the world. Unlike other forms of US protestant-Christianity, Mormon-Adam and Eve are created on this continent, in so-called Adam-ondi-Ahman, in so-called Missouri, on Osage, Kiikaapoi, and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ lands.  This is also where Joseph Smith planned to build his own settler-State of Zion to prepare for the Second Coming of Christ. This mythistry serves to both naturalize and deify whiteness and Christianity in this land. And like the Doctrine of Discovery, this narrative attempts to grant the Mormon Church – as the only Church with this supposed knowledge – divine rights to the lands. My Great Grandma’s genealogy record goes back to Adam and Eve – fabricating hereditary ties to these stolen lands – reifying this settler-mythistry in my family history. Mormonism teaches that God purified this continent during the Flood of Noah by committing complete genocide on all of its life. Later, God gives his Promised Land to Lehi’s People – ancient-Israeli migrants who were white and conventionally attractive. God’s People lose the land after all the white Christians in story are killed by the “cursed” brown People. History is blended with fiction in the Book of Mormon when an ancient white Prophet prophecies Columbus's so-called discovery of God's Promised Land. The Mormon-American history narrative continues, teaching that God guided Columbus to restore white-Christianity to His “Promised Land." This narrative doesn't address the fact that in the 100 years after Columbus's invasion of this land, 90% of its Indigenous People are killed by colonialism. Continuing with the Mormon-America mythistry: Columbus's restoration of white Christianity to this land laid the foundation for “Our Divine Constitution” to be written and signed by a group of wealthy, white-supremacist, Christian, human-owning men who were supposedly guided by God to lay the religious-freedom-foundations necessary for the Restoration of the Only True Church. Nineteenth century Indian-fetishes and Indigenous genocide helped Joseph Smith built a religious movement on (mis)appropriation of Indigenous lands and cultures. The Manifest Destiny-era of the U.S. settler project help Brigham Young and my People occupy the “vales of Utah” and build their Zionist State in preparation for the End of Days. This mythistry and history are soaked in the white-supremacist, settler-colonial violence of its time.  collage by nicholas b jacobsen |
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. I take it as my personal responsibility to unsettle what my ancestors settled. and to help my fellow settlers do the same through writing, art, and community building. ArchivesCategories
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