True Blue, Depending on Who’s Telling the Tale: The Redacted Story of Joseph F. Smith and the ?Ruffians?

It?s a powerful story.  The young Joseph F. Smith, fresh off his mission to the Sandwich Islands, is traveling through Southern California on his way home to Utah in late 1857/early 1858.  The Mormons are viewed with mistrust and hostility:  rumors surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre are fresh on everyone?s lips as Johnston?s Army converges on Utah.  Joseph F.?s party is confronted by a band of rough and tumble men on horseback, looking to pick a fight with any Mormons they can find.  Joseph F.?s fellow travelers scatter, and when one burly ruffian pointedly asks Joseph F. if he is a Mormon, the young returned missionary responds, ?Yes, siree, dyed-in-the-wool; true blue, through and through,? diffusing the tense confrontation by staying true to his identity.

But was he really ?dyed-in-the-wool, true blue, through and through??

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The Re-Convergence of Mormon and Indian History

This installment of the JI’s Mormons and Natives month comes from Matthew Garrett, associate professor of history at Bakersfield College in California. He received his Ph.D. in American History from Arizona State University in 2010. He is currently revising for publication his dissertation, “Mormons, Indians, and Lamanites: The Indian Student Placement Program, 1947-2000,”  which should prove to be the definitive history of the ISPP.

When David G. approached me to contribute to this month’s theme, I initially thought the notion of a “Mormons and Natives” field of study seemed a bit odd. I never viewed the two fields with much connectivity, other than a few mid-century works about Jacob Hamblin or Chief Wakara. As I sat down to draft out the separate evolutions of the two fields, the task proved far more complicated than expected, and the only way I could think to articulate it was to take the reader on a semi-biographical journey that follows my own intellectual awakening. I trust that the Juvenile Instructor’s readers will tolerate a little self-indulgence as I relate the divergence and re-convergence of Mormon and Indian history.

My interest in history blossomed on my LDS mission and during undergraduate studies at BYU as I read about pioneers and western heroes such as Porter Rockwell. Like most history buffs, I looked to explorers and battles more than indigenous cultures but I did not understand that my approach mirrored Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis. In 1893, Turner’s nationalistic narrative identified waves of civilizing conquest that ended in 1890 with the settlement of the region by whites. Though essentially silent on Native Americans and Mormons, this foundation served as the methodological origin of Western American history that eventually spawned those sub-fields.

By the mid-twentieth century, Turnerarian history had gained an impressive following of amateur and professional historians interested largely in nineteenth-century topics: mountain men, pioneers, and cowboys and Indians. A new wave of neo-Turnerians gradually focused on individual people and communities, as well as environmental topics; those individual case studies fragmented the monolithic and ethnocentric national narrative.[1] In 1961, the Western History Association organized and soon after began publishing the Western Historical Quarterly (WHQ). Professionally trained Western American historians proliferated over the following decades and other organizations spun off to create even more specific associations, such as the American Society for Ethnohistory (1966) and the Mormon History Association (1965).

Professionally trained scholars including Leonard Arrington, Davis Bitton, and Alfred Bush organized the MHA and laid the groundwork for the New Mormon history; their concern with critical questions and historical inquiry strengthened a field formerly characterized by faith building authors such as B.H. Roberts. Still, they cooperated closely with the Church and the larger Western history field, most evident by Arrington’s service as Church historian, president of the MHA, and president of the WHA.

By the 1970s, recent cultural shifts era had ushered in new academic interests. The New Western History fused social history with environmental history, and eventually redirected the field into twentieth-century topics and oft-ignored ethnic voices. Popular author Dee Brown drew attention to the overlooked victims of longstanding conquest-oriented history in his moving text, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). Meanwhile, trained scholars including Arrell M. Gibson, Angie Debo, Tom Hagan and others paved the way for a new generation of scholars who inaugurated the New Indian History. This ethnographic approach stressed Native perspectives and tackled tribal histories and other Indian topics across time, including the long overlooked twentieth century. In 1972, the Newberry Library created the D’Arcy McNickle Center as academic institutions opened Native American studies programs and interdisciplinary journals, such as American Indian Culture and Research (1971+), American Indian Quarterly (1974+), and Wicazo Sa Review (1985+). Emerging young scholars fit neatly within the ranks of the equally progressive New Western History.

My introduction to the New Indian history came during graduate studies at the University of Nebraska where faculty mentors pointed me to a new world of Indian driven narratives that explored Native voices and perspectives. Still, I moved forward on an unimpressive thesis exploring colonial Kickapoo foreign policy from European records. The final product resembled an awkward and incomplete transition from the neo-Turnerarian framework that still structured my thoughts. I had come a long way from Turner’s omission of Native Americans, and went to the extent of a minor in anthropology that included four semesters of a Native language, but I still struggled to fully represent indigenous perspectives when dealing with a colonial era population that left no written record of their own.

After completing my degree at UNL, I enrolled in doctoral study at Arizona State to work with two leading figures in the New Indian history. One of the first students I met was two years ahead of me in the program. She was studying under another professor who advocated a radical new approach to Native American history: decolonization theory. I was uninitiated and probably in a bit over my head when this fellow graduate student took it upon herself to expose my inadequacies. She aggressively questioned me, particularly on twentieth-century Indian history where my readings were admittedly the weakest, and then she explained that a white man such as I had no business studying Indian history. In retrospect, she probably assumed my unfamiliarity with decolonization equated to an endorsement of ethnocentric Turnerian history. Nevertheless, her overt racism surprised me because it ran so contrary to my expectations of an open-minded academy. That was my first introduction to decolonization studies, and I would not be honest if I did not confess how much it tainted my view of those who practice that methodology.

In theory, decolonization is an interdisciplinary and deconstructionist approach to reveal the mechanisms of colonization and indigenous resistance by use of overlooked Native voices.[2] In practice, the exclusionary methodology often endows Native voices with extraordinary authority while dismissing traditional sources and scholarship as hopelessly corrupted by ethnocentrism. During the 1990s, many senior historians rejected decolonization-based scholarship in tenure evaluations, manuscript submissions, and conference presentations. The conflict came to a head when decolonization advocates publicly challenged senior scholars Patricia Limerick and Richard White at an academic conference, who then responded with critical roundtables, editorials, and even a T-shirt campaign.[3]

Over the past two decades, dejected decolonization activists turned to non-scholarly presses and produced new interdisciplinary journals to publish their work and assert themselves the authoritative voice.[4] Their following expanded and in 2007 a small group launched the Native Americans and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). One year later at the annual WHA meeting, Dave Edmunds directed his presidential address to departing scholars. He offered clear examples of the association’s commitment to Indian history but also stood his ground as he criticized “some Native academics [who] have urged that scholarship conform to a new orthodoxy defined through the rhetoric of post-colonialism.” He continued, “We do not need a new cadre of self-appointed “gate keepers.’”[5] NAISA and the WHA continue to hold separate conferences each year attracting a very different type of scholar to each.

My feeling is that decolonization has much to offer. It brings long needed attention to Native perspectives through interdisciplinary inquiry and introduces post modern study of power structures. However, it cannot be permitted to eject non-native voices or impose a simplistic oppressor-resistor relationship on every historical interaction. While it may often apply, few theories have universal application.

These debates have gone largely unnoticed in Mormon studies because the New Mormon history’s attention to critical revision of longstanding nineteenth century topics like the early Church and polygamy, leaving little consideration for Native Americans in the modern era. Juanita Brooks well represented the sharp analysis of the New Mormon history as she addressed Indians, but even her pioneering work remained largely in the nineteenth century and focused on Mormons more than Native cultures they impacted. It lacked the ethnographic nature of New Indian history and certainly the Native voices championed by decolonization theory. Essentially, Mormon scholarship on Indians remains heavily neo-Turnerarian, while Indian scholarship moved through the New Indian history and now faces a challenge from decolonization.[6]

Despite an increasingly common interdisciplinary inclination among Mormon and Indian history scholars, they speak a different language depending upon their point of origin. While practitioners of the New Mormon history are no strangers to difficult questions, I suspect they will be disturbed by the tenor of decolonization advocates. Like any revisionist movement, it brings valuable new criticisms that can be taken to an extreme at the expense of the past.

In the coming years the LDS church’s twentieth-century Indian policy will surely serve as the battle ground between the new Mormon history and decolonization theory. Indeed, the 2013 meeting of the MHA featured what I believe was the association’s first overtly decolonization-driven interpretation of Mormon-Indian relations. My research tries to preempt much of this debate on what is sure to emerge as one of the focal points: the Indian Student Placement Program. This voluntary foster care program for Native American youths operated between 1947 and 2000. While many Latter-day Saints viewed it as a benevolent opportunity to educate deprived Indians, outsiders criticized Placement as simply another assimilation program. Tensions mounted in the 1970s and though external pressures subsided by the 1980s the correlation movement continued to erode the program until the Church prohibited the enrollment of any new students after 1992.

My approach to this topic is to examine the institutional rise of the program, building on the work of Michael Quinn and Armand Mauss but balanced with ethnographic focus on student experiences. Their thoughts are recorded in over one hundred interviews and other sources. While many participants surely resisted colonizing pressures, a great many others internalized the imposed Lamanite identity as their own. Placement students left reservations and spent years immersed among Mormon host families; they attended schools, church activities, and a barrage of Lamanite-specific activities including dances, leadership conferences, and cultural extravaganzas that promoted a hybrid identity. These students’ experiences demand a more nuanced approach than the sloppy imposition of a binary model of aggressive colonizers and resisting colonizees.

As the fields of Mormon and Native history/studies re-converge, interested readers must carefully evaluate scholarship to ensure the narrative is indeed an honest reflection of the past and not an intellectual exercise in bending it to meet theoretical expectations. Long ago the New Mormon history and Western history threw off their allegiances to a single ideological narrative, and to adopt yet another would constitute a methodological step backward. Decolonization theory does have a role to play and we should follow its council to incorporate marginalized voices; however, it cannot be the singularly authoritative approach that its advocates demand. There must be space for alternative forms of analysis and no singular approach can be complete. The greatest strength of the New Mormon history and especially Mormon studies is its aspiration to achieve intellectual independence, and I hope that characteristic remains the dominant attribute among those who study Mormons and Natives.

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[1] Richard White, “Western history,” The New American History, Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 205; Donald Worster, “New West, True West: Interpreting the Region’s History,” Western Historical Quarterly, vol 18 (April, 1987), 141-156. For an example of early environmental work see Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1931).

[2] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books, 2005), 3, 20. See also Angela Wilson and Michael Yellow Bird, For Indigenous Eyes Only: a Decolonization Handbook (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 2005); Devon Mihesuah, Natives and Academics: researching and writing about American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Devon Mihesuah and Angela Wilson, Indigenizing the academy: transforming scholarship and empowering communities (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

[3] William T. Hagan, “The New Indian History,” in Rethinking American Indian History, ed. Don Fixcio (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 30.

[4] The last ten years has also given rise to open source and other low tier interdisciplinary journals, such as: Canadian Journal of Native Studies (launched in 1981); AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples (2005); Te Kahoroa (2008); Rethinking Decolonization (2008); International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies (2008); Indigenous Policy Journal (2009); Journal of Indigenous Research (2011); Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society (2012).

[5] R. David Edmunds, “Blazing New Trails or Burning Bridges: Native American History Comes of Age,” Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 39:1 (Spring 2008), 14.

[6] For example, over the past year, twentieth century topics constituted only 13% of Journal of Mormon History and 70% of Western Historical Quarterly articles. Likewise, ethnically marginalized individuals or groups were directly addressed in only 9% of JMH articles but in 64% of WHQ pieces. Of course, the JMH is by nature an ethnically specific journal so a broad survey of other ethnic groups is understandably beyond its mission. Nevertheless, their different foci are evident.

Mormon Studies Weekly Roundup

Another week, another list of links from the world of Mormon Studies. Let’s get started:

Those of you who enjoyed last month’s series of posts on material culture will want to read Rachel McBride Lindsey’s post at Religion in American History on a recently-rediscovered quilt auctioned off at her grandmother’s childhood church (Tabernacle Baptist Church in Springfield, Missouri). Lindsey concludes:

My grandmother was a small child in 1938 and her memories of the quilt are probably more collective than personal. The quilt is not a proxy of material culture?that capacious category assigned to the stuff we designate as somehow meriting sustained inquiry?and neither is it a proxy of the tiny hands that have grown soft and arthritic, or the many other hands that stitched hundreds of names and sewed its patches into a single tapestry. It is not an unmediated connection to the past, but it is a connection whose twines are composed of threads and stories. Itself a patchwork, it asks us to piece together not only the history of the church and the ownership of the quilt, but also the many other histories of which it is a part.

Another non-Mormon post of potential interest to JI readers is Ken Owen’s thoughts on historical heroes over at The Junto. His concluding thoughts are certainly relevant to readers of Mormon history: “I?ll keep my heroes, for without them, I?d begin to wonder why history mattered at all. But I?ll remember that heroism is also a mug?s game, and I?ll do my best to keep my eyes open to the broader questions?good and bad?raised by the lives of those I admire.” 

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New JI Addition: Farina King

The JI is pleased to announce that Farina King has agreed to join the JI full-time. See here for her fantastic guest post on the Miss Indian BYU pageant. Here is her extended bio:

Bilagáana nish?? dóó Kiyaa?áanii báshíshchíín. Bilagáana dashicheii dóó Tsinaajinii dashinálí. In Navajo, we always introduce ourselves by our four clans. We are born to our mother and her clan, and we are born for our fathers and their clan. Navajos are a matrilineal society, so the clans represent the maternal family lines. We then introduce the clans of our maternal grandfather and paternal grandfather. I am ?Bilagáana? (Euro-American), born for ?Kiyaa?áanii? (the Towering House Clan) of the Diné (Navajo). My maternal grandfather was Euro-American, and my paternal grandfather was ?Tsinaajinii? (Black-streaked Woods People Clan) of the Diné.

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John Taylor’s Watch: Holy Relic, Cultural Artifact

Alan Morrell, a curator at the Church History Museum, contributes this installment in the JI’s material culture month. Alan is completing a doctorate in American History at the University of Utah, and he has degrees from BYU and Villanova. 

I have an iPhone because I once missed an appointment. I was so engulfed in my research, I forgot about a meeting and didn’t realize it until it was already over. My wife teases me about being absent-minded, but she wasn’t amused when I told her what had happened. After years of marriage to a poor grad student, she was thrilled that I had a paying job. She worried that I’d screw it up so she went out and bought me something that could keep me on track. Now, the time and my schedule are always available, with reminders of upcoming appointments.

In our hyper-connected modern world, we quickly learn to become time conscious. David S. Landes, author of Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World considered the mechanical clock to be “one of the great inventions in the history of mankind: not in a class with fire and the wheel, but comparable to movable type in its revolutionary implications for cultural values, technological change, social and political organization, and personality.”[1]

Historian Alexis McCrossen examined the records of watch repairmen in 19th-century western Massachusetts and observed that “Americans had been living with watches and clocks for decades without fully tapping into the potential they provided for coordination and maximization of time.”[2] This changed in the 1820s when the volume of pocket watches in the United States increased drastically. By the 1840s, the price of a clock or watch had dropped to the point that even a person of modest income could afford one.

John Taylor. Courtesy Wikimedia

This was the world of John Taylor. Born on November 1, 1808 in Milnthorpe, Westmorland, England, he moved to Toronto, Canada, in 1832. Six years later, he was a Mormon apostle. I do not know when John Taylor started carrying a watch. The multiple appointments of a Latter-day Saint leader would have certainly required that Taylor be conscious of the time. The narrative history that Joseph Smith started in 1838 demonstrates that time consciousness was an essential part of the Mormon community. Recorders noted the times of events such as the departure of the “Maid of Iowa” at 10 A.M. on May 1, meetings of Church leaders from 2 to 6 and again from 8 to 10 P.M. the next day, or a court martial at 9 A.M. on May 4.[3]

It is not surprising, then, that on the evening of June 27, 1844, John Taylor was wearing his watch as he sat with Joseph and Hyrum Smith and Willard Richards. The previous days had been busy as he met with the governor, lawyers, and leading citizens in an effort to free the Smith brothers. Readers know the story of the martyrdom. Within minutes, Joseph and Hyrum Smith were dead and John Taylor was severely injured. Taylor described getting shot, “As I reached the window, and was on the point of leaping out, I was struck by a ball from the door about midway of my thigh. . . . I fell upon the window-sill, and cried out, ‘I am shot!’ Not possessing any power to move, I felt myself falling outside of the window, but immediately I fell inside, from some, at that time, unknown cause”[4]. He was badly wounded. Four bullets had ripped through his body, one tearing away a portion of his hip the size of his hand. Willard Richards who escaped the barrage without injury dragged Taylor into a cell, covered him with a mattress in an effort to hide him, and said he hoped Taylor would survive as he expected to be killed within a few moments. The mob, perhaps fearing that the Mormons were coming, fled. Both Taylor and Richards were spared.

John Taylor’s Watch. Courtesy PBS

Willard Richards had John Taylor moved to Hamilton’s tavern and then went about the business of preparing for the removal of Joseph and Hyrum Smith’s bodies. When Richards left for Nauvoo, John Taylor asked him to take his watch and purse with him, as he feared they would be stolen. Several days later, Taylor was at his home in Nauvoo still convalescing when he was once again reunited with his watch. At this moment, the watch was transformed from a mere timepiece to a holy relic. His family discovered that the watch had been “struck with a ball” and examination of his vest revealed a cut in the vest pocket that had contained his watch. He later explained, “I was indeed falling out [of the window at Carthage Jail], when some villain aimed at my heart. The ball struck my watch, and forced me back; if I had fallen out I should assuredly have been killed, if not by the fall, by those around, and this ball, intended to dispatch me, was turned by an overruling Providence into a messenger of mercy, and saved my life.” He concluded, “I felt that the Lord had preserved me by a special act of mercy; that my time had not yet come, and that I had still a work to perform upon the earth.”[5]

The story of John Taylor’s miraculous preservation spread quickly. Within a few weeks, several accounts mentioned that Taylor’s watch had been hit by a ball.[6] The watch become an integral part of the telling of the martyrdom; the story spread wide and far. The relic remained in the family until 1934 when John Taylor’s grandson, Alonzo Eugene Hyde, Jr., gave it to LDS President Heber J. Grant, who forwarded it to the museum at the Bureau of Information, a precursor of the Church History Museum.[7] Since 1990, the John Taylor watch has been on public display at the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City, a highlight for visitors of the museum’s “A Covenant Restored” exhibit.

By the latter part of the 90s, several individuals began to research and write about their questions surrounding the long-accepted story of the John Taylor watch. They could not believe that a musket ball would do so little damage to a watch. In Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, A People of Promise, Historian Glen Leonard cited the unpublished research of Neal and Gayle Ord when he wrote that after John Taylor was first shot in the leg, “He collapsed on the wide sill, denting the back of his vest pocket watch. The force shattered the glass cover of the timepiece against his ribs and pushed the internal gear pins against the enamel face, popping out a small segment later mistakenly identified as a bullet hole.”[8] Joseph L. and David W. Lyon’s 2008 BYU Studies article “Physical Evidence at Carthage Jail and What it Reveals about the Assassination of Joseph and Hyrum Smith” is probably the most exhaustive published scholarship arguing this position.[9] A couple years later, Joseph Lyon’s scholarship received popular attention after his presentation at BYU Education Week.[10] Kenneth W. Godfrey’s interview for the KJZZ Joseph Smith Papers television series furthered this narrative for a popular audience.[11]

A search of sources, both popular and scholarly, online and in print, shows that both stories are alive and well today. This begs several questions. Has the window sill explanation become the new master narrative for scholars? Has this narrative moved out of scholarly circles into the Mormon mainstream? Does the window sill remove the miraculous from the story? Do some individuals use this as another example of scholars just trying to destroy faith? Is there any evidence of deceit by those who originated or propagated the original story? Regardless of the answers to these questions, we should be grateful that John Taylor believed the watch saved his life. It may be the only reason it is still around. What good is a watch that doesn’t keep time?

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[1] David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1983), p. 6.

[2] Alexis McCrossen, “The ‘Very Delicate Construction’ of Pocket Watches and Time Consciousness in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Winterthur Portfolio Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 2010)

[3] Historian’s Office history of the Church 1839-1882. http://eadview.lds.org/findingaid/CR%20100%20102, Book F1

[4] “The Martyrdom of Joseph Smith” by President John Taylor (http://archive.org/stream/cityofsaintsacro00burt#page/517/mode/2up), Appendix III.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Jenetta Richards letter to her family, 8 July 1844, in Our Pioneer Heritage, vol. 3, p. 130; Times and Seasons 15 July 1844; Nauvoo Neighbor 24 July 1844; and Times and Seasons 1 August 1844

[7] Deseret News, 8 November 1934

[8] Glen M. Leonard, Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, A People of Promise, Deseret Book, 2002, pp. 397-98.

[9] Joseph L. Lyon and David W. Lyon, “Physical Evidence at Carthage Jail and What It Reveals about the Assassination of Joseph and Hyrum Smith,” BYU Studies 47:4. https://byustudies.byu.edu/showTitle.aspx?title=7980

[10] “Education Week: Separating Facts from Fiction about the Prophet’s Death,” Deseret News, Sept. 7, 2010, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705385933/Education-Week-Separating-facts-from-fiction-about-the-Prophets-death.html?pg=all

[11] “John Taylor’s Watch ‘The Real Story” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOlH26SE55k

Miss Indian BYU and Material Culture

This installment in the JI’s material culture month comes from Farina King of the Kinyaa’áanii (Towering House clan) of the Diné (Navajo). She is a second-year graduate student in the U.S. History Ph.D program at Arizona State University. She received her M.A. in African History from the University of Wisconsin and a B.A. from Brigham Young University with a double major in History and French Studies. King has written and presented about indigenous Mormon experiences in the twentieth century, drawing from interviews that she conducted for the LDS Native American Oral History Project at BYU. Her doctoral research traces the changes in Navajo educational experiences through the twentieth century. She was the last Miss Indian BYU crowned in 2006. King is also a dedicated wife and mother to two toddlers. A version of the following will appear in a special issue on Miss Indian pageants, forthcoming in the  Journal of the West .

The Tribe of Many Feathers (TMF), the BYU Native American student organization, hosted the Miss Indian BYU pageant for twenty-three consecutive years until 1990. TMF restarted the pageant in 2001. I was the last crowned Miss Indian BYU in 2006, since the TMF Council cancelled the pageant again in 2007. I had the opportunity to interview several former Miss Indian BYUs about their experiences as title-holders and pageant contestants including Vickie Sanders Bird and Jordan Zendejas who I feature in this blog post. The Miss Indian BYU Pageant and its winners’ memories reveal the ways that Native American LDS youth engaged and transformed material culture in the effort to represent BYU Indian students.

2006 Pageant. Farina is on the left.

Dr. Janice White Clemmer, a Wasco-Shawnee-Delaware and the first “American Indian woman in the United States to earn two masters degrees and two doctoral degrees,” worked with the BYU Native American Studies and Multicultural programs when TMF invited her to judge for Miss Indian BYU pageants during the 1980s. [1] According to her, the pageant “[celebrated] young American Indian womanhood.” [2] She elaborated on the criteria that the judges used to evaluate Miss Indian BYU contestants: “How does she look in her regalia? How does she carry herself? How fluent is she about her tribal knowledge? [Miss Indian BYU has] LDS standards and demonstrates best of both worlds, of all worlds . . . someone who represented her tribe, other tribes, school, and gospel.” [3] The Miss Indian BYU Pageant typically consisted of the following parts: presentation of traditional regalia, traditional talent, modern talent, and question and answer. The ability to wear and describe traditional clothing demonstrated knowledge of the contestant’s tribe and people. For example, I remember wearing a biil (Navajo rug dress), moccasins, and a squash blossom necklace for the first part of the pageant in 2006. I explained that the squash blossom once belonged to shinálí ‘asdzáníígíí (my grandmother). Shibízhí (my aunt) had made the necklace for her using the sand-casting technique. I wore the moccasins of a Yébíchai (Yei Bi Chei ceremonial) dancer. The clothing represented our people and cultures, and so the judges wanted to see how we (as contestants) would understand and convey the connections between how we appeared and what we emblematized–indigenous identity in a LDS school context.

Vickie Bird, Miss Indian BYU, 1972

As Miss Indian BYU in 1972, Vickie Bird Sanders (Mandan-Hidatsa) enjoyed meeting with different groups to share her culture and serve as an ambassador. She recalls, “When I was chosen, I felt like it was a very special calling to be able to represent the population of all of the Native Americans and represent BYU. I did a lot of speaking. I was going to Boy Scout clubs, going to schools, going to women’s clubs, and performing for General Authorities.” [4] During one of her visits to an elementary school, she frightened a little girl who closed her eyes tightly to avoid looking at her traditional regalia. Sanders explained to the girl that the rabbit fur hanging on her long hair was not alive, and then the girl became excited to touch the fur and hugged her. She remembered, “That’s when I realized that I wanted to keep doing that, I wanted to keep going to the elementary schools, meeting with the little children and having them give me hugs and wanting to touch my rabbit skin.” [5] Sanders later became a schoolteacher and continued to present at some public schools. In her presentations, she first appears to the children in “everyday modern” clothing and then changes into her traditional dress in front of them while describing the cultural meaning of each clothing piece. She prepares her presentations this way to show and complicate the meanings of “a real live Indian.” [6]

Sanders also explained that Janie Thompson, the director of Lamanite Generation (a BYU student performance group), designated

TMF Ladies and Float

her as a “spokesperson” because of her title. “I always had a part in the show where I could express thoughts about BYU and where we were at that time wherever we were performing,” she added. [7] Phillip Smith (Navajo), a member of TMF during her reign, remembered seeing Sanders speak publicly to students. She impressed the BYU community with her personal story of reprimanding some relatives for wearing BYU icons and clothing in disrespectful atmospheres such as bars and clubs where alcohol was distributed. After witnessing the bereft of her people and family due to alcoholism, Sanders beseeched students to reject alcohol completely. [8]

During her service as Miss Indian BYU, AIM activists especially criticized Sanders and told her, “[You’re] Apple Indians, you’re red on the outside but white on the inside and you’re not really an Indian.” Sanders remembered, “So many of them took pride in ‘why don’t you wear something that identifies you as native? Why don’t you wear a feather in your hair’” She responded, “That to me is not what needs to set me apart from who I am. I don’t need to grow my hair long or wear it in braids or wear a feather or wear my Indian dress to show people that I’m proud of who I am.” [9]

In the twenty-first century, Miss Indian BYU still sought to shape popular images and material culture of American Indians. Miss Indian BYU 2004-2005, Jordan Zendejas (Omaha), visited public schools in her formal mainstream attire to relate better to children. Zendejas recounted,

My year, my focus was on education and the youth, and so I would educate them about Native American people and how we are different tribes and how were different then and how we are now. I like to emphasize the now part, because some people believe I wear my regalia every day to school, so I even wore a pant suit one time and they were like that is not what you wear, and I was like “yeah it is” that was my main issue to many schools. [10]

Adult supervisors at some schools complained that she did not wear feathers in her hair, hold a tomahawk, or portray other such stereotypical images of Indians. She explained, “There would be people who think, ‘You’re not Indian enough. You don’t look Indian enough. Do you take being Indian seriously’” She continued, “I remember this one class, I walked in there and to my horror all the students were wearing fake leather and fringe and putting on war paint and feathers in their hair . . . [one] mom was like you don’t look Indian. “Neither does your son, but you dressed him up.” I didn’t say that, but in my head I wanted to.” She added, “I wasn’t necessarily wearing my regalia every time that I went to schools just to show them how we were just normal people now, we don’t wear regalia all the time.  . . . I had my own agenda set out, and I guess the teachers had in their mind their agenda of what they wanted me to do, so when I didn’t do it they would get mad.” [11] Zendejas used such encounters to teach people that she was a contemporary Native American and not a relic of the American past and fantasy of “the frontier.” Zendejas attended BYU Law School, aspiring to follow her father’s footsteps as a lawyer. Refusing to appear in traditional regalia for her presentations, Zendejas wanted to show that American Indians were a changing and developing population like peoples throughout the world.

Like the little girl who was afraid of Vickie Sanders’s rabbit fur in her hair, Zendejas confronted misconceptions about American Indians through her attire and presentation. Zendejas, similar to Miss Indian BYUs decades ago, was determined to dismantle prejudices and worked to alter material images of Native Americans and LDS indigenous people in particular.

______

[1] Janice White Clemmer, “Native American Studies: A Utah Perspective,” Wicazo Sa Review 2, no. 2 (Autumn 1986): 18.

[2] Janice White Clemmer, interview by author, Salt Lake City, Utah, March 26, 2007, recording in personal possession of author.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Victoria Bird Sanders, interview by Farina King, Provo, Utah, March 27, 2008, transcript, LDS Native American Oral History Collection, Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library, Provo, Utah.

[5] Vickie Bird Sanders, interview by author, Provo, Utah, 24 March 2007, recording in personal possession of author.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Sanders, interview, 2008.

[8] Phillip Smith, interview by author, Monument Valley, Utah, August 10, 2013.

[9] Sanders, interview, 2008.

[10] Jordan Zendejas, interview by author, Provo, Utah, March 24, 2007, recording in personal possession of author.

[11] Ibid.

Remember Zelmo Beaty: Race, Religion, and Basketball in Salt Lake City

Michael J. Altman received his Ph.D. in American Religious Cultures from Emory University and is an Instructor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. Mike’s areas of interest are American religious history, theory and method in the study of religion, the history of comparative religion, and Asian religions in American culture. He is currently completing a book manuscript analyzing representations of Hinduism in nineteenth century America. This post originally appeared at Mike’s personal blog. He graciously allowed the Juvenile Instructor to repost it in its entirety.

One of my favorite weekly podcasts is Slate’s Hang Up and Listen, a sports podcast that deconstructs sports media and culture with a wry wit that deflates American sports of all its self-seriousness. If sports talk radio is Duck Dynasty, Hang Up is 30 Rock.

Every week host Josh Levin signs off with the phrase “remember Zelmo Beaty.” Beaty, a basketball star in the 60s and 70s passed away recently and this past week Hang Up and Listen reminded us why we should indeed remember him. Stefan Fatsis’ obituary of Beaty opened by staking out Beaty’s importance as a pioneer for black players in professional basketball. But what caught this religious historian’s attention was the confluence of race and religion that surrounded Beaty’s move to Salt Lake City to play for the Utah Stars of the American Basketball Association in 1970.

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Elder George P. Lee and the New Jerusalem: A Reception History of 3 Nephi 21:22-23

?Do you think President Kimball approves of your action?? This question, asked by an unnamed general authority of the soon-to-be excommunicated Elder George P. Lee of the First Quorum of the 70, captured the lingering tensions over the rapid decline of the ?Day of the Lamanite? that had marked Mormon views of Native Americans in the second half of the twentieth century. Lee, the first general authority of Native descent, was himself the product of several of the programs instituted under the direction of Apostle Spencer W. Kimball designed to educate American Indians and aid their acculturation into the dominant society. Even at the time of Lee?s call to the 70 in 1975, the church had begun reallocating resources away from the so-called ?Lamanite programs,? but the full implications of these decisions were not apparent until the mid-1980s. Lee responded to the question posed above by laying out a distinct interpretation of 3 Nephi 21:22-23, an interpretation that he argued Kimball had shared and that the General Authorities in the 1980s had abandoned. The 1980s, known as the decade when Church President Ezra Taft Benson challenged the Saints to increase and improve their devotional usage of the Book of Mormon?a challenge that saw marked results, at least as measured by the significant increase of citations to the work in General Conference talks?was also a decade of debate over the meaning of the book?s intended audience and purpose.[1]

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Joseph F. Smith and the New York City Draft Riots, Part 3: 15-18 July 1863

This is the third in a three-part series of posts about Joseph F. Smith?s experiences during the New York Draft Riots of July 1863.  See the first two parts here and here.

Map of Manhattan Island:  the cluster of attacks on property in the southwestern portion of the island is close to the Stevens House, where Joseph F. was staying with John W. Young.[1]

In the previous post I argued that Joseph F. Smith seemed to be simply an observer for the first two days of the draft riots.  Late in the night on July 14, 1863, however, the riots came dangerously close, momentarily changing the nature of his relationship to them.  In this last post of my brief series, I have transcribed Joseph F.?s diary entries for the last few days of the riots and their aftermath.  I think they provide an interesting, if brief, look into how the riots affected him. 

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“Milk Strippings” Story Redux: Thomas B. Marsh’s Reconciliation with George W. Harris

Every four years, the Sunday School curriculum cycle hits D&C/Church History. It’s during this time that we’re reminded of the story of Thomas B. Marsh, first President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, who left the church in 1838. According to Apostle George A. Smith, whose 1856 telling of this story became the basis of subsequent renditions, in 1838 Elizabeth Marsh got into a dispute with Lucinda Harris over a pint of milk skimmings [1]. Believing that his wife’s good name was at stake, Marsh defended Elizabeth in a series of investigations held, according to Smith, by the Teachers Quorum, the Bishopric, the High Council, and the First Presidency. Smith indicated that, humiliated by each quorum’s decision against Elizabeth, Marsh left the church and swore in an affidavit that the Saints were “hostile towards the State of Missouri.”  In Smith’s account, “That affidavit brought from the government of Missouri an exterminating order, which drove some 15,000 Saints from their homes and habitations, and some thousands perished through suffering the exposure consequent on this state of affairs.”

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