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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Figurative Mormons, or Something

As of last Sunday, I have posted every week for fifty-two weeks in a row. Posting every week didn?t start out as a thing, but it became one somewhere along the way and, proportionate to its actual importance in the world, I?m pretty dang pumped about completing a year. In particular, now that it?s done I can have Saturday evenings (and lately, Sunday afternoons) back: as of today I?m shifting to a once-per-month or once-per-two-month schedule.

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Guest Post: James Egan, ?Sermonizing with Heathens?

JI would like to welcome James Egan. He is a third-year law student at Brigham Young University who studied literature and political philosophy at the University of Utah.  He reads JI  regularly and loves jazz music. 

I must confess at the outset of this post that I am most definitely an amateur when it comes to Mormon history. (If I had the guts, I?d confess that I am in fact a law student.) So with the all-too-convenient excuse for ignorance that my amateur status afforded me (I trust I haven?t lost it yet), I thoroughly enjoyed participating in the annual Maxwell Institute Seminar, which gave time to dive into the deep well of early Mormon primary documents. I spent a good portion of my time in the Utah sermons of the latter half of the 19^th century, and my paper for the seminar?s symposium[1] grew out of a fascinating remark in one of Brigham Young?s earlier sermons. During one of his many calls for gathering truth from every corner of the world, Young pointed the saints to ?pagans of all countries? and made the remarkable claim that ?in their religious rights [sic] and ceremonies may be found a great many truths which we will also gather home to Zion.?[2] I ended up writing about the elements of Mormon intellectual history that made it possible for Brigham Young to entertain the possibility that pagan or heathen[3] ritual would be a part of Mormon gathering, but along the way, I spent a little time considering how other invocations of heathen nations functioned rhetorically in Young?s sermons.[4]

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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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Graphical Images of Horned Mormons

I am writing (very slowly) an article on Mormon horns. The way things look to me now, it seems that ?Mormon horns? were mostly a verbal, rather than graphical, phenomenon. That is, the idea that Mormons have/had horns seems to have been transmitted mostly through oral and written accounts rather than by the distribution of images. Such images did exist, however, and the purpose of this post is to collate all the horned-Mormon graphics I have identified and solicit further examples. (Note: clicking on most of the images below will link to higher resolution graphics.)

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