Summer 2021
Our Summer 2021 Issue is focused on Indigeneity and Mormonism. Includes such important articles as The Lamanite Dilemma: Mormonism and Indigeneity by Monika Brown Crowfoot and The Complications of Columbus and Indigeneity at BYU by Farina King as well as To Be Native American--And Mormon by Lacee A. Harris. And every review looks at recent Native American/Mormonism scholarship. This promises to be an issue you will go back to again and again.
In February 2008, then prime minister of Australia Kevin Rudd stood before the nation and apologised to Indigenous Australians, people of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent, for the so-called “Stolen Generations.”[1] These infamous eugenicist…
When Mormon settlers entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, they brought with them their institutions and attitudes. These included a perception of Native Americans as fallen Israelites who, the Book of Mormon promised, would…
Podcast version of this Personal Essay. Many times throughout my childhood, I heard various church members or my parents tell me that we had to choose between being Navajo and being Mormon. Our family went…
From my youth I was blessed with a God-shaped hole in my identity. I knew I came from somewhere, that my ancestors were whole and bore a cultural armor that it was my right to…
Podcast version of this Personal Essay. “They say that they are like firemen. They know what they signed up for. They must fulfill their call for duty.” This is what my mother told me when…
“Lamanite! I am not a Lamanite. They are a wicked people. I am not a wicked person.” I can well remember my father, Albert H. Harris, saying this, both in church and to anyone else…
Uncle Akumu has tattoos. Big, thick pe’a lines shout his ancient Samoan genealogy as they crisscross his thighs. On his arms he carries his own story. There’s Aunty Lani’s name surrounded by vines and pua…
VII. Sometimes I kneel down to play a gamefrom my childhood. Only then can I feelgrains of gravel, each pebble digs in so real.Sometimes I act as though I am the same,a young girl, rope…
Already the heart-shaped dish on my end tablelies combed bare: long strips dug out============== a cleaning out============== a scratch in grain, table scraps lain out so comely, meaning to loveor hold cacao or almonds—those striaeof…
Will Bagley is a historian who has written and edited more than a dozen books on Mormon (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) history and the American West. His best known work is…
Although Darren Parry claims to not begrudge the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he does not hold back when addressing the injustices and wrongs that his people have faced at the expense of…
I struggle with beginnings. I always just want to get to it. However, allow me to take a bit of time to introduce myself before I tell the story of my experience with the collection…
Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon cannot quite be described as “groundbreaking.” It covers ground, the editors acknowledge right up front, that has been broken many times before. In their introductory essay, Elizabeth Fenton…
A book of essays has an upward inflection; it sounds like a question. To essai, in French, is to attempt. To try. But this is not the essay’s reputation. Ideals of ironclad arguments, footnoted discoveries,…
Alphabetize yourkarma, sever your qigong,jinx your wifi code. Disparates, 134 I want to suggest that Disparates is less disparate than it claims to be, that there is a running theme or a coherent message that…
The Hope of Nature is structured with three sets of three (I might be tempted here to make a Star Wars three trilogies joke, but I will refrain for the sake of a serious forum).…
After his death and resurrection on Earth, Jesus Christ traveled to New Zion—a planet in the Kolob star system—and appeared to its six-eyed alien inhabitants, whom he named the Othersheep. He explained to the Othersheep…
O Holy People, show me how I am human,how I am soon to sliver. Stay please, for womanor man’s sake. Succor me from a telestial state,where I long to be self-luminous in a slateof granite.…
When Brigham Young University (BYU) hosted Clark B. Hinckley’s presentation about his book Christopher Columbus: “A Man Among the Gentiles” for Education Week 2019, many community members responded with concern. In his presentation, Hinckley claimed…
The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have held their own sets of values and beliefs since time immemorial. Indigenous peoples have rejected the Doctrine of Discovery because it suggests that the United States government is…
In 2017, the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a statement condemning “white supremacist attitudes.” As a member of the Church who also knows the history, erasure, and pain…
The year was 1984 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and an elementary school was practicing for a Thanksgiving play. Children were on stage dressed as Pilgrims, Native Americans, pumpkins, and turkeys while teachers rushed around helping excited…
As I approach the subject of the legacy of Columbus, I want to start by saying that we, as Indigenous people, seek to bring light and truth to the world. As a child, I learned…
Fall of 2010 was the beginning of my last year as an undergraduate at BYU studying public health. I had just returned from an internship in Washington, DC with the Office of Minority Health (OMH).…
For me, as a Native American member of the Church, I approach the hero worship of Columbus perhaps more critically and apprehensively than the average member would. I was taught that he was a man…
I am not a member of any Native American tribal nation, neither do I claim Indigenous heritage. I am a white American, and three of my four grandparents trace their family back to Mormon pioneers.…
I begin in the New Testament, in the book of 1 John, a text written by someone presumed to be John the Beloved: My dear children, I write this to you so that you will…
