Mormon Pioneer Trail

- 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(which wasn't rescinded til 1976).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.