Mormon Settlers and the Nuwu: Assimilation and genocide

collage by nicholas b jacobsen

From 1884-today everyone in my family line has been born and buried in Nuwu (Southern Paiute) land. Nuwu are descendants of Ancestral Pueblo People. They’ve been with their lands since time immemorial and still occupy parts of their lands in reservations my people helped corral them into.  

Unfortunately,  my People's settler violence was not new for the Nuwu. 

Beginning with Spanish colonization, some Indigenous tribes assimilated to Spanish enslavement economies, exchanging stolen Indigenous people for Spanish horses which made these equestrian tribes more powerful and dominant. Nuwu people did not assimilate to the Spanish economy and so were preyed on by other Indigenous tribes with Spanish horses and sold into enslavement at Spanish markets in Santa Fe.

Mormon settlers also participated in this human trafficking and enslavement buying stolen Nuwu women and children and making them work in Mormon houses. Mormons called their Indigenous enslavement practice "adoption" and Mormon historians will claim that Mormon settlers were good to the people they'd enslaved, but other historians identified that over half of these "adoptees" died in their early 20s.

Mormon settlers continued this violence through genocide against Tonaquint and Kaibab Nuwu. Mormon settlers excessively diverted Tonaquint waters as they tried to make this edge of the Mojave desert "blossom as a rose" and in the process desiccated Tonaquint land and starved the people. In Kaibab lands the Mormon church overgrazed their cattle which depleted the native seeds, drove away the game animals, and desiccated this oasis in the desert. Through this my people caused mass death, killing 90% of the Kaibab people in under 40 years. 

Information from Pipe Spring National Monument which is on Kaibab lands and co-managed by the tribe.

Large ungulates like cattle aren't indigenous to the so-called Southwest. So, as settlers overgrazed these lands they desertified them. The tumbleweeds and sagebrush that symbolize the West for so many People today are only dominant in these lands because settlers overgrazing their cattle displaced the native grasses. 

Where I was raised in so-called Utah's Dixie, Indian Agent, Mayor, and Mormon Apostle – Anthony W. Ivins, with one of the largest herds on See’Veets Eng land, persuaded the people to move from their homeland along the north rim of the so-called Grand Canyon to lands left vacant after the Tonaquint genocide. 

This was also an attempt to assimilate Nuwu, to get them move closer to settlers and learn to “live like white people." These assimilation programs are ongoing:

• 1898 - Nuwu day school established in Utah’s Dixie. 
• 1904-1909 - Paiute boarding school operated at Panguitch, Utah. Children's bodies are still being found buried there.
  
• 1947-2000 - Lamanite Placement Program or Indian Student Placement Program tooks some 20,000 Indigenous children from their People and put them in white Mormon homes for the entire school year for most of the child's middle and high school education. This program acted much like any other U.S. settler boarding school as they used Christianization and cultural assimilation as a part of the process. Students were baptized and discouraged from practicing their culture when they'd return home for the summers.
  
• 1954-1980 - Federal “termination” of Tribal sovereignty legislation passed. This work was led by Utah Senator Watkins with a focus on Nuwu tribes. ​

"Baptism of Shivwits Indians," 1875

This 1875 photograph, “Baptism of Shivwits Indians,” shows a See Veets'Eng man being baptized by Mormon leader Daniel D. MacArthur in front of 130 other See Veets'Eng People. Nearly every person in the image is next-to-naked and has a bob-style haircut. 

​Shannon Martineau Anderson, a See Veets'Eng member says, "When you're in mourning you cut your hair... (If) you look at the pictures before the 1800's, we had long hair, that was before death hit us... every one of them (in this photo) had recently lost...an immediate family member."