Brenden W. Rensink[1]

In 2019, P. Jane Hafen and I published an anthology of essays with the University of Utah Press entitled Essays on American Indian and Mormon History. I am happy to take a few moments here to explain the how this volume came to be and the principles that guided our editorial approach.

Despite the centrality of Indigenous peoples to the founding, scripture, and theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, modern understandings of how American Indian and Mormon histories intersect is surprisingly shallow. Excepting a handful of recent works, many of the existing studies of this topic have foundations in outdated models that recent decades of New Western History, Indigenous Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, and other fields have interrogated, revolutionized, and enriched. With this background, Prof. P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo and Professor Emerita of English, University of Nevada – Las Vegas) proposed in 2015 that the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University host a seminar and publish a volume on the topic. I shared Hafen’s conviction that the fields of Indigenous and Mormon studies had much to teach one another and enthusiastically agreed to co-host a seminar and co-edit a volume of essays on the topic.

A number of principles guided our framing of the project and selection of scholars to participate. First, Hafen proposed from outset the that our authors needed to intentionally engage with Native peoples as “subjects who exert their own agency, construct their own identities, and internalize their own perspectives of their Mormon experiences,” not just present them as “objects of study” within broader Mormon narratives.[2] This meant that simply finding scholars writing about American Indians and Mormons would not suffice. We needed to find authors who matched this methodological approach, foregrounded Native voices and perspectives, and used them to reveal new histories and understandings. Further narrowing our scope was the desire to clearly delineation between indigeneity and race. Native peoples are often citizens of sovereign Indigenous Nations with unique legal status, land rights, and particular languages, cultures, and histories. Presenting them as simply one of many racial/ethnic minority groups in Mormon history obscures these facts. Excellent work has been published in recent years on Indigenous Mormon experiences among Pacific Islanders and in South and Central America, but we opted to focus our volume on the Native North American experience. We further privileged authors who were undertaking such research as a new endeavor rather than revisiting or rehashing their previously published work. Needless to say, these and other criteria made for a challenging search, and we spent months finding our group of scholars to invite.

            The Redd Center seminar was held in June 2016, and opened with a stirring poetry reading by Diné poet, Tacey Atsitty. Our group consisted of ten scholars who workshopped their essays, and a handful of others who presented to the group, served as workshop facilitators, and provided feedback to authors. It was an intellectually invigorating and challenging experience for all. In the months that followed, Jane and I worked with authors as they revised and polished their essays. As authors and editors alike juggled the revision process with other academic and professional endeavors, we progressed slowly. I will shoulder primary blame for any significant delays, but we eventually moved the collection of essays through our own editorial process, external reviews facilitated by the University of Utah Press, subsequent rounds of editing, copyediting, and final touches before the volume was published in summer 2019.

            The essays in this volume will challenge readers, Native and non-Native, Mormon and non-Mormon. They explore difficult religious and historical terrains and require readers to set aside prior assumptions and understand in order to consider new questions, approaches, perspectives, and topics. How does one reconcile potential cognitive dissonance between Church rhetoric concerning “Lamanites” and the historical experiences of Native peoples within and adjacent to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? How do Native tribes respond to Mormon participation in settler colonialism and western expansion? How do we weigh historical usage of the Book of Mormon to both proselytize and serve Native communities, but also justify systematic racism against them? How might Indigenous readings of scripture or Mormon history change prevailing narratives of the faith’s beginning, interceding history, and present? How might historical experience of Native people, positive and negative, inform present challenges between disparate groups – as exemplified by the Wellsville Sham Battle, voter suppression in San Juan County, or conflicted identities of individuals straddling Native and Mormon worlds? There are no easy answers to these and other questions, but the essays in our volume seek to start conversations, lay groundwork for further inquiry, and bring unfamiliar constituencies into conversation with one another.

In my concluding chapter, I quoted early-nineteenth-century Pequot Methodist minister William Apess, who Samuel Smith said had resolved to give Mormonism “a candid investigation.”[3] P. Jane Hafen and I present this volume in similar spirit. There is nothing easy about these interconnected histories and experiences. They are thorny and uncomfortable more often than they are simple or conciliatory. But that is the purpose of such scholarship, to ask the difficult questions and provide sound methodology and careful research to guide readers. For every solution or answer these essays guide readers to, we hope they will reveal a multiplicity of additional questions and quandaries – inspiring further inquiry, searching, and dialog. These essays only begin to scratch the surface of timely and pressing topics that we hope others will pursue further.

            Essays on American Indian and Mormon Historycontains 11 full chapters, three short introductory contributions by Indigenous Mormons, Tacey Atsitty (Diné), Michalyn Steele (Seneca), and Darren Parry (Shoshone); and introduction and conclusion chapters by Hafen and myself. The contributors include Elise Boxer (Dakota), Thomas W. Murphy, Lori Elaine Taylor, Max Perry Mueller, Michael P. Taylor, Stanley J. Thayne, Erika Bsumek, Farina Noelani King (Diné), Jay H. Buckley (and student co-authors Kathryn Chochran, Taylor Brooks, and Kristen Hollist), Megan Stanton, and R. Warren Metcalf.

Volumes to emerge from Redd Center seminars and events include the following:

• Brenden W. Rensink, ed. Modern Frontiers: Essays on the American West in the Twenty-First Century (working title). University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming.

• P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink, eds. Essays on American Indian and Mormon History. University of Utah Press, 2019.

• Jedediah S. Rogers and Matthew C. Godfrey, eds. The Earth Will Appear as a Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History. University of Utah Press, 2019.

• Clyde A. Milner, II and Brian Q. Cannon, eds. Reconstruction and Mormon America.University of Oklahoma Press, 2019.

• Marian Wardle and Sarah E. Boehme, eds. Branding the American West: Paintings and Films, 1900-1950. University of Oklahoma Press, 2016.

• Jessie L. Embry and Brian Q. Cannon, eds. Immigrants to the Far West: Historical Identities and Experiences. University of Utah Press, 2014.

• Jessie L. Embry, ed. Oral History, Community, and Work, in the American West. University of Arizona Press, 2013.

• Brian Q. Cannon and Jessie L. Embry, eds. Utah in the Twentieth Century. Utah State University Press, 2009.

[1] Brenden W. Rensink (Ph.D., 2010) is Associate Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and an Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is author of the award-winning book Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands (2018), author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of multiple books and articles on the histories of the American West, borderlands, Indigenous peoples, genocide studies, and religion, Project Manager and General Editor of the Intermountain Histories digital public history project, and Host and Producer of the Writing Westward Podcast.

[2] P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink, “Introduction,” in Essays on American Indian and Mormon History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019), xii.

[3] Brenden W. Rensink, “‘A Candid Investigation’: Concluding Observations and Future Directions,” in Essays on American Indian and Mormon History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019), 246.

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For a JI review of Essays on American Indian & Mormon History, see here.