Book of Mormon Stories that my youtube tells to me

Check this out: Epic Book of Mormon Movie Trailer

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CFA Reminder: Summer Seminar in Mormon Theology (In London!)

(We are posting this reminder for the Maxwell Institute’s Summer Seminar, on behalf of good friend Adam Miller, because applications are due next week.)

The Mormon Theology Seminar and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship are pleased to announce the First Annual Summer Seminar on Mormon Theology, ?A Dream, a Rock, and a Pillar of Fire: Reading 1 Nephi 1.?

The seminar will be held at BYU?s London Centre in June 2014. Graduate students, junior scholars, independent scholars, senior scholars, and European-based scholars from a range of disciplines are invited to apply. Full information is included below. A printable PDF of the call for applications can be found here.

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Wandering Significance: Hagoth and the many migrations of latter-day Lamanite/Nephite Identity

This post is adapted from a paper given at the Mormon History Association’s annual meeting held in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in July 2012.

Abstract

Mormon missionaries have been very good at finding the descendants of Book of Mormon peoples–“Lamanites” and “Nephites”–wherever they have been sent in the western hemisphere, and sometimes beyond: throughout the Americas and the Pacific Islands, even as far as Taiwan and Japan. Hagoth has typically been the figure linking these latter-day Lamanites in far-flung areas with their mainland kin. After mysteriously departing from the narrative near the end of the book of Alma, never to be heard of again–or so the writer thought–Hagoth has covered a lot of mileage since then, linking up a considerable amount of geography as a figure of remarkable, if wandering, significance. Using the figure of Hagoth as a narrative motif, this paper will explore how Mormons have constructed racialized readings of various Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the Pacific Islands based on their reading of Mormon scripture, and, conversely, how they have read their missionary successes back onto the “text,” greatly expanding the Mormon conception of to whom (and to how many) the signifier “Lamanite” applies. Further, the LDS church has not been able to contain the wanderings of this signifier. Members of a recently organized religious group–who profess no connection to Mormonism–have published a nine-volume text that purports to be a record of Hagoth’s (or Hagohtl’s) departure from the Land Southward and his migration up the Colorado River to form a heretofore unknown Indigenous group known as the Nemenhah. As a narrative figure, Hagoth has been complicit in multiple revisions of the histories (and sometimes the identities) of Indigenous peoples throughout the western hemisphere–and his migrations show no sign of flagging.

From the Archives: Native Americans and Frederick Kesler

I have decided to work my way through the Frederick Kesler diaries, conveniently available through the University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library, both digitally and by on-demand printing. I just finished the 1874-1877 diary, which included several items relating to Mormon interactions with Native Americans. And while I have no real expertise in Native American history, I thought that the following items would be of interest to the regular readers of the JI, particularly in light of the recent wonderful content. Those more skilled than I may be able to use the material to probe conceptions of blood, literacy, newspaper exchanges, evangelism and more.

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Guest Post: Barbara Jones Brown, The ?Indian Student Placement Program?

Note: This post continues our series on Mormonism and indigenous histories. Barbara Jones Brown is a talented historian who serves on the board of the Mormon History Association with me. She is a wonderful historian who displays compassion towards her historical subjects and to those people she meets as part of everyday life. She has worked extensively on the Mountain Meadows Massacre and on twentieth-century Mormon Indian history. She received a bachelor’s degree in English and journalism at Brigham Young University in Provo and a master’s degree in history from the University of Utah. We are delighted to have her post with us today.

For nearly half a century beginning in 1947, the LDS Church ran a foster program called the Indian Student Placement Program. At the Church?s encouragement and with parental permission, the program removed Latter-day Saint Native American children from their homes on reservations or reserves in the United States and Canada. These children were placed with white LDS families for ten months of each school year and returned to live with their own families for two months every summer. The program?s goals were to provide better educational opportunities for the children while immersing them in white and Mormon culture. [1]

A 1978 Church pamphlet about the placement program opens with a 1941 quotation from historian Kenneth Scott La Tourette:  ?[Native Americans are] a race in process of being engulfed in an irresistible flood of peoples of utterly different culture. Dislocated from their accustomed seats, transplanted again and again, . . . at times demoralized by an excess of well intentioned but ill directed paternalistic kindness, it is a wonder that the Indians [have] survived.?

Ironically, beginning with the next paragraph, in a tone of ?well intentioned? and ?paternalistic kindness,? the pamphlet goes on to explain how the Indian Student Placement Program benefits Latter-day Saint Indian children by dislocating them from their accustomed homes, transplanting them into white LDS families, and engulfing them in an ?utterly different culture.?[2]

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When Did Mormons Become Straight: The Intersections of Mormon History and Queer Theory

A few weeks ago, I read Mark Rifkin?s When Did Indians Become Straight for a workshop hosted by the University of Michigan?s American Indian and Queer Studies Now Interdisciplinary Groups. I was surprised to see Mormonism mentioned within the text. Rifkin?s key argument is that heterosexuality is defined by more than the number of partners that an individual has. Ideas about racial purity, couplehood, and domesticity also mark what it means to be heterosexual. Because many American Indian groups rejected a focus on the nuclear family as the normative family model, Rifkin argues that they cannot be considered ?straight.? Mormonism serves for Rifkin as an example of a religious faith in the nineteenth century that became ?perverse? because of its rejection of traditional understandings of marriage and domesticity.

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Thoughts on Indigenous Mormon Studies

We are pleased to have this guest post by Professor Matthew Kester who is the author of Remembering Iosepa: History, Place, and Religion in the American West (Oxford University Press, 2013), the university archivist, and an assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University Hawaii.

My training as an historian of Oceania and the American West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and my role as the custodian of archival collections on Mormonism in Oceania, led me to write on interactions between Mormons and Kanaka Maoli, the indigenous people of Hawai’i. Both Oceania and the American West are regions where indigenous people experienced massive, disruptive political, social, and economic change, and Mormon missionaries and settlers played an important role in that change. I want to use this opportunity to reflect on what I feel are some of the more important themes in the study of Mormonism and indigenous people, and suggest some ways that they might be responsibly put to use. Important, because exploring these themes will increase our understanding of these interactions and the communities they created. Responsible, because they do so in a way that represents indigenous people as full historical subjects, and as active historical agents who negotiated (and continue to negotiate) disruptive periods in their history on their own terms, at least within the confines of the larger power structures imposed by colonization, settlement, and in many cases, the erosion or loss of political sovereignty and self-determination.

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Bloggernacle, Meet The Mormon Studies Review

(Cross-posted at By Common Consent. Also, the first three paragraphs should be read in the voice of Billy Mays, and taken in the spirit of the ?Tribute to Doin? It Wrong? video. The pdf of the inaugural Mormon Studies Review‘s Table of Contents can be downloaded here.)

Do you suffer too many sleepless nights, wondering if Mormonism can add anything to the study of ethics?

Struggling to keep up with developments in the seemingly always-nascent (sub)field of Mormon studies? Do you ever walk through the book aisle and think, ?holy fetch, when did that book come out?? Have you ever found yourself wondering, ?what the heck is Mormon studies, anyway?” Or, does a sleepless night rarely go buy without you asking, ?well, how does the study of Mormonism illuminate the translocative elements of religious studies?? Well, you are not alone!

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Indian Removal, Zion, and the westward orientation of early Mormonism

This post is adapted from a presentation given at the 2012 Sidney B. Sperry Symposium at Brigham Young University.*

Ideologies can turn heads. In United States of America, ideological head turning has often been westward. In this post I argue that it was the ideology and force of Indian Removal that turned the heads of early Mormons and oriented them to the West.

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The Oral History of a LDS ?Asdzáánsání in Diné Bizaad

Many Farms Lake

?Asdzáánsání (elderly woman)

Diné Bizaad (Navajo language)

Before reading this post, please note that we faced technological issues with using Navajo diacritical marks on the blog so some of the Navajo here does not directly represent the revised transcript of the oral history. The two symbols that would not appear on this blog were the slashed l and nasal marks. I italicize the l (l) to represent the slashed l and italicize vowels that should include a nasal mark (a, o, and e especially). Different literature often does not follow a standard written Navajo form with consistent use of diacritical marks for terms.

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