LDS American Indians in Their Tribal Communities

Here is a guest post from Megan Falater who is researching the interactions between nineteenth-century Mormon ecclesiastical authority and doctrine related to the family for her dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also a longtime lurker of Juvenile Instructor. For this post, she revisits an undergraduate project on the LDS Indian Student Placement Program.

In 1971, Victor Selam complained in Diné Baa-Hani, an underground newspaper published in the Navajo Nation, that Brigham Young University limited American Indians? expression of their identities. Selam recounted a conversation he held with a member of the University Standards Office prior to his dismissal from the school:

I reminded the ?Man? that in Mormon prophecy the Indian people would ?rise up and blossom as a rose in the latter days.? I said that I fully agreed with the prophecy and that it also exists among the Indian people, only in different words in a different language. But how can this rose ?blossom? if it doesn’t push and pull itself up? How will Indians rise up if they sit back, quote prophecy, and do nothing like some people at B.Y.U.? And furthermore, what of those Indians who cease to exist as Indians-who want to be white people and act accordingly and forsake their own people?[1]

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Plant and Fungus Metaphors

A few months ago I wrote about the Upas Tree as a metaphor for Mormonism in the nineteenth century. Today I would like to follow-up briefly with some examples of non-Upas plant or fungus metaphors.

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Guest post, Spencer Lincoln Green, Savage Nobles: Childhood in America and LDS Culture

For our monthly series Childhood, Children, and Youth, we are excited to have a guest post from Spencer Green. Spencer is finishing a PhD in American Studies at Penn State Harrisburg. He focuses his research in folklore and environmental humanities, but as a past president of the Children’s Folklore Society, he makes frequent forays into LDS children’s folklore as well.

An article I wrote which is coming out in the next issue of the Children?s Folklore Review has made me think more about how Latter-day Saints in America view children and childhood. Nearly half of all speakers in General Conference will mention a child?s exemplary actions. This of course follows many scriptural precedents where members are instructed to ?be as little children.? The conspicuous absence in scriptures or general conference addresses of the crying, willful children present in pews every Sunday is understandable, but interesting. Pre-modern Europeans viewed children as little imps, devils or ?hellions? as my mother was fond of saying. Despite all the facebook updates about how wonderful our children are, the popularity of sites like reasonsmysoniscrying.com attests to some recognition that this is more than a medieval view, so why the reluctance to speak of our little angel?s darker natures?

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Southwestern States Mission: The Naming and Blessing of Children

Since we?re looking at childhood, children, and youth this month, I thought I?d look at the ordinance of ?naming and blessing? children as practiced in Texas in the very early 1900s.

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Adolescence, Gendered Anxieties, and the Emergence of the YLMIA and YMMIA

As I have been writing (or trying to write!) my dissertation of conceptions of and conversations about Mormon girlhood from the 1860s to the 1930s, I have been doing some thinking about how the development of adolescence as a new age categorization overlapped with Mormon concerns about youth. As part of the monthly series Childhood, Children, and Youth , I have offered some, perhaps, scattered historiographical thinking below about the development of the YLMIA and YMMIA in relationship to the emergence of age categorizations in gendered terms.

As many of us know the story: on November 28, 1869, Brigham Young stated the following:

There is a need for the young daughters of Israel to get a living testimony of the truth. Young men obtain this while on missions, but this way is not opened to the girls. More testimonies are obtained on the feet than on the knees. I wish our girls to obtain knowledge of the Gospel for themselves. For this purpose I desire to establish this organization and want my family to lead in the great work.^[1]

The fact that young women did not have the same opportunities to learn about the religion that young men gained through serving missions was not lost on Brigham Young. However, instead of instituting a missionary for young women, to Brigham Young the most suitable solution for him seemed to put his most trusted female church members, his wives, daughters, and their close friends, to the challenging task of forming a new organization, the Retrenchment Association, which would later become the Young Ladies? Mutual Improvement Association.

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Guest Post, Amy Moore, “The Flapper Rose” and Other Warnings

We are delighted to have  guest post written by Amy Moore  in our monthly series Childhood, Children, and Youth.  Amy writes ?I graduated in 2011 from BYU with a bachelor?s degree in History Teaching.  Church history has always interested me, partly because I grew up near Kirtland, OH and was inspired by the lives and legacy of the early Saints.?

In the May 1929 issue of the Young Woman?s Journal (YWJ), Ruth May Fox wrote of an experiment.  After hearing that the life of a rose could be extended by applying heat, Fox took a ?half-blown? rose she had received as a gift and held it to her heated stove.  The rose bloomed quickly and its color remained, but to her dismay, the rose lost its freshness and its life.  By forcing the rose to bloom prematurely, Fox destroyed a fundamental element of the flower?s beauty.  As president of the Young Ladies? Mutual Improvement Association (YLMIA), the young women?s auxiliary of the LDS Church, Ruth May Fox extended the lesson of her rose to adolescent girls: ?Oh, I thought, how like the girl who has failed to appreciate and preserve her innocent beauty, but, longing to be grown up, has blossomed before her time.?  Fox called her experiment ?The Flapper Rose.?^[i]   

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Guest Post, Lisa Tait, Thinking Generationally

As part of our monthly series Childhood, Children, and Youth, we are very pleased to have a post from Lisa Tait. She has recently joined the staff at the LDS Church History Library as a Historian and Writer, working on projects to expand the Church history web site. She has a PhD in American Literature from the University of Houston and researches late nineteenth/early twentieth century Mormon history, focusing on periodicals, women writers, and generational dynamics. She also serves on the executive committee of the Mormon Women’s History Initiative. In her spare time (which amounts to about ten minutes every other Saturday), she thinks about how much she would enjoy doing some hiking with her dog.

Graphical Representations of Hooded Mormon Vigilantes

Second only to polygamy, Mormons in the second half of the nineteenth century were known for violence. Paramilitary groups of ?Danites? or ?Avenging Angels? allegedly surveilled, threatened, and/or killed as directed by Church leaders. In three instances that I know of, non-Mormons portrayed members of these groups as using robes, hoods, and masks like those of the Ku Klux Klan. The purpose of this post is to put all three instances on the same page at the same time.

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Women in the Academy: Naomi Watkins

Naomi Watkins is an assistant professor in the Department of Education and Teacher Development at the University of La Verne, which is located in the Los Angeles area. She conducts research in adolescent literacy and children?s literature and teaches literacy pedagogy courses to teacher credential students. In June of 2013, she co-founded Aspiring Mormon Women, a non-profit organization and web site with the purpose to encourage, support, and celebrate the educational and professional aspirations of LDS women. 

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Measuring Scholarship: The Size and Shape of Books

Forgive this post for being more of a smattering of ideas than a cohesive analysis. I’ve recently been considering the size and importance of books, both in the academic field of history in general and Mormon studies in particular. This reconsideration was inspired by an essay in Perspectives on History, the magazine for the American Historical Association. (I strongly recommend reading it before reading this post.)

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