This is an abbreviated version of a longer review that will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Mormon History (thanks to the editors of the journal for permission to post this in advance of the journal’s version). If you missed it, see here for editor Brenden Rensink’s JI guestpost on the book.

P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink, eds. Essays on American Indian & Mormon History. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. xxxiv + 372 pp. Notes, bibliography, contributors, index. Hardback: $45.00. eBook: $40.00.

            P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) and Brenden W. Rensink have compiled eleven substantive essays that explore themes in the history of American Indians and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Hafen is professor emerita of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, while Rensink is Associate Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University. Most of the essays in the collection were written in conjunction with a seminar hosted by the Redd Center in 2016. The editors’ introduction states that the collection seeks to identify “ways [that] Indigenous thought”—centered around issues such as Indigenous sovereignty, land and resources, colonialism, and decolonization—“interacts with Mormon histories, Mormon arts, and contemporary Mormon practices” (xii-xiii). The introduction notes that previous scholarship has, with few exceptions, focused primarily on white Latter-day Saint views of Native peoples, whereas the featured essays instead reverse the equation by placing Natives at the center of the telling of Latter-day Saint history.

…

The essays are divided into two broad chronological sections, the first for the nineteenth century and the second for the twentieth. …

[The full review discusses each essay. I won’t do that here, but I will note that the book features essays by JI alumni Max Perry Mueller (on Wakara, a chapter from Max’s Race and the Making of the Mormon People), Stanley J. Thayne (a chapter from his dissertation on Cawtawba Mormons), and Farina Noelani King (on Native Hawaiian missionaries serving on the Navajo Reservation and Farina’s personal connections to them). There is also a chapter from Lori Elaine Taylor’s unpublished dissertation that looks at Joseph Smith’s possible connections with Haudenosaunee traditions in New York, work that we have highlighted previously at the JI. All of the essays are excellent.]

Essays on American Indian & Mormon History is a significant intervention in the growing literature that examines the interactions between Native peoples and Latter-day Saint religion. Although some essays more effectively break new ground than others, taken as a whole the collection provides an indispensable introduction to the main themes of that history. This excellent compilation will doubtless provide a solid foundation for future scholarship on Indian and Latter-day Saint history.