Journal of Mormon History - Mormon History Association

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Journal of
Mormon History
July 2015 l Volume 41 l
No.3
Front cover: Elkington, Mrs. Wetekia. Portrait photograph (undated but ca. early 1900s), Nelson
Provincial Museum (Nelson, New Zealand), Tyree Studio Collection: 177223. Wetekia Ruruku
Elkington was a matakite (seer) of Ngāti Koata who joined the LDS Church on Rangitoto
(D’Urville) Island in 1892. She wears a ceremonial fibre cloak (pākē) and holds a spatulate patu
parāoa (whalebone hand club) known as a mere that is adorned with bird feathers near the handle.
These elements denote a high-status person in the historic Māori portrait convention. Used with
iwi and museum permission. Back cover: The weavings are based on Kaoka Maori weavings, “A
symbol of strength coming not only from one but from all.” Cover created by Thayne Whiting.
The Mormon History Association
The Mormon History Association {www.mormonhistory association.org} is an independent nonprofit 501(c)3 organization devoted to all aspects of the Mormon past. It strives to be the preeminent
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The Journal of Mormon History
Publisher: Mormon History Association (founded 1965)
President: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
President-Elect: Laurie Maffly-Kipp
Past President: Richard E. Bennett
Executive Directors/Business Managers: Debra J. Marsh and David B. Marsh
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J. B. Haws (2017)
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Editor: Martha Taysom
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Manuscripts dealing with any aspect of the Mormon past are welcome. Primary consideration is given to manuscripts that make a strong contribution to the knowledge of Mormon history through new interpretations and/or new information. Acceptance is based on originality,
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JOURNAL OF MORMON HISTORY
Volume 41, No. 3
July 2015
CONTENTS
ARTICLES
Introduction: Beyond “Race and the Priesthood”—
Toward a New History of Race and
Mormonism
Max Perry Mueller
1
Introduction: Theorizing Mormon Race Scholarship
Gina Colvin
11
Curses and Marks: Racial Dispensations and
Dispensations of Race in Joseph Smith’s Bible
Revision and the Book of Abraham
Ryan Stuart Bingham
22
“Playing the Whore:” The Domestic and
Sexual Politics of Mormon Missionary
Work on Tahiti Nui and in the Tuamotus
Amanda Hendrix-Komoto
58
William McCary, Lucy Stanton, and the
Performance of Race at Winter Quarters
and Beyond
Angela Pulley Hudson
97
Playing Lamanite: Ecstatic Performance of
American Indian Roles in Early
Mormon Ohio
Christopher C. Smith
131
Matakite, Mormon Conversions, and
Māori-Israelite Identity Work in
Colonial New Zealand
167
Ian G. Barber
CONTENTS
“We Have Prophetesses”: Mormonism in
Ghana, 1964–79
v
Russell W. Stevenson 221
Roundtable Discussion: Challenging Mormon
Race Scholarship
Gina Colvin, editor,
Elise Boxer, Laurie Maffly-Kipp,
Melissa Inouye, and Janan Graham-Russell 258
INTRODUCTION:
BEYOND “RACE AND THE PRIESTHOOD”—
TOWARD A NEW HISTORY
OF RACE AND MORMONISM
Max Perry Mueller
In December 2013, the Church of Jesus of Christ of Latter-day
Saints published on the “Gospel Topics” page of its website an essay
entitled, “Race and the Priesthood.”1 This history lesson about the
evolving place that people of African descent have occupied among
the Mormon people and in the imagination of LDS Church leaders was lauded by many Mormons, Mormon scholars, and scholars
of Mormonism alike. It is the Church’s most frank and comprehensive effort to confront the reality of its racist past. The essay makes
clear that the Church was founded on universalistic ambitions to
unite all of humanity based on the belief that “black and white,
bond and free . . . all are alike unto God” (2 Ne. 26:33). Yet the essay
also acknowledges that for much of the Church’s history, many of
its leaders taught that God does in fact favor “white” over “black”—
teachings that were put into practice through restricting black men
from holding the priesthood and restricting black men and women
from receiving their temple endowments.
The Church hopes that this essay will be a conversation stopper. Or at least, the Church hopes that it will stop certain con1
No author(s) identified, “Race and the Priesthood,” n.d., but first
posted December 10, 2013, according to web.archives.org (Wayback
Machine), https://www.lds.org/topics/race-and-the-priesthood?lang
=eng (accessed March 7, 2015).
1
2
versations about the origins of these racist restrictions. The essay, which carries the Church’s seal of approval (but notably not
the signatures of any Church officials), empowers Church members to rebut talk of blacks’ spiritual perfidy in biblical and even
premortal times as nothing more than racist folklore—folklore
that might have originated from the Mormon folk but that, over
time, gained the imprimatur of the official Church.2
For the Mormon folk, this official history lesson might come
to define what it means to have an acceptable conversation about
the history of “race and the priesthood” in Mormon meetinghouses and in Mormon homes.3 Yet it should not define con2
See note 14 in the “Race and the Priesthood” essay, https://www.
lds.org/topics/race-and-the-priesthood?lang=eng. In my article, “History Lessons: Race and the LDS Church,” I challenge the “Race and
the Priesthood” essay’s contention that these racist theologies did
not come from the Church’s highest officials, most notably Brigham
Young and Joseph Fielding Smith. Max Perry Mueller, “History Lessons: Race and the LDS Church,” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 1
(Winter 2015): 154.
3
Anecdotal evidence about the impact of this essay among Church
members suggests that it has not reached as far as perhaps the Church
intended. At a BYU-panel discussion following the release of his
groundbreaking book, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015),
W. Paul Reeve observed that around a third of the eighty students in
attendance hadn’t even heard about the essay. And, as he explained to
Peggy Fletcher Stack, because the essays were not signed by Church
officials, were not prominently featured on the Church’s website, and
were not advertised in Church meetings, other panel attendees, including both students and professors “told of stories whereby they
drew upon the essay in church meetings and were met by resistance
from fellow Mormons who said the essays were not official and merely
[church] Public Affairs pieces.” Peggy Fletcher Stack, “New Mormon
Mission: How to Teach Members the Messy Part of LDS History,
Theology, Salt Lake Tribune, March 8, 2015 (accessed March 9, 2015),
http://www.sltrib.com/home/2229999-155/new-mormon-missionhow-to-teach?fullpage=1.
M AX PERRY MUELLER/INTRODUCTION
3
versations about race and Mormonism more broadly conceived
within the Church and within the scholarly community that exists in it and adjacent to it—the overlapping communities that
make up the core constituencies of the Mormon History Association. To further such conversations, co-editor Gina Colvin
and I present this special issue of the Journal of Mormon History,
which attempts to move the study of race and Mormonism beyond the “race and the priesthood” paradigm.
In this introduction, I first detail how a confluence of interrelated developments—one political/cultural, one ecclesiastical,
and one scholarly—has come together to make this time particularly opportune for reconceiving what it means to study race
and Mormonism. And second, I discuss what a history of race
and Mormonism beyond “race and the priesthood” has begun to
look like—and to do so in the pages of this special issue.
The first development that brought well-worn conversations
about race and the priesthood into renewed and very public relief was the most recent “Mormon Moment.” This moment was
also a confluence of three interrelated developments: the runaway success of the Book of Mormon musical; the Church’s own
public efforts, through its “I’m a Mormon” campaign, to rebrand
itself as an (increasingly) multiethnic, international community;
and, of course, the Romney presidential campaigns. A corollary
to Mitt Romney’s so-called “Mormon problem” was his Church’s
“race problem.” In contrast to his opponent in the 2012 general
election—America’s first black president Barack Obama—some
of Mitt Romney’s political foes labeled him as the “whitest” candidate in recent memory; his whiteness derived in large measure from his membership in the LDS Church. Critics of both
the Church and Romney described the Church’s foundational text, the Book of Mormon, as espousing a “white supremacist” theology and derided the Church as a “bastion of pre-civil-rights-America whiteness.”4
4
Obery M. Hendricks, “Mitt Romney and the Curse of Blackness,” Huffington Post, January 12, 2012, http://www.huffington-
4
To be sure, many scholars like myself who study race and
Mormonism enjoyed having what is often considered an obscure, niche subject (historically obscure even within the Mormon studies world) become the stuff of headlines in some of
America’s most prominent publications. And we were flattered
when we were invited to pen some of these reports and op-eds
ourselves. Yet to our chagrin, the main questions that we were
called upon to address—whether the Church is, or has been,
racist, and whether the answer to this question should disqualify Romney from the presidency—closed off more than they
opened up the possibilities for critical and meaningful examinations of the Church’s attitude and disposition toward historical
questions of race. However, beyond the public’s (understandable
and attendant) appetite for black and white answers, we discovered that the cause of our sub-subfield’s limitations was in its
historiographic and rhetorical infrastructure, namely how the
study of “race and Mormonism” has long been synonymous with
the study of “race and the priesthood.”
Let me be clear. The pursuit of the historical origins of the
priesthood restriction is arguably the most consequential contribution that Mormon studies has made to the course of modern Mormon history. Such archival and analytical scholarship
helped in very tangible ways to bring about the end to the ban
on full Church membership for people of African descent.5 Yet
post.com/obery-m-hendricks-jr-phd/mitt-romney-curse-blackness_b_1200470.html (accessed March 7, 2015); Lee Seigel, “What
Does Race Got to Do with It?” New York Times, January 14, 2012,
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/whats-racegot-to-do-with-it/ (accessed March 7, 2015).
5
Starting in the 1970s, Mormon scholars, notably Lester Bush,
Henry Wolfinger, and Newell Bringhurst, discovered what I call a
“black Mormon past” in the Church’s own archive. I describe this
scholarship and its influence on changing the official LDS policy, in
“History Lessons: Race in the LDS Church,” 146–48. For the most
thorough discussion of the historical factors that brought about the
end to the priesthood ban, see Armand L. Mauss, All Abraham’s Chil-
5
despite calls for the Church hierarchy to disavow the racist views
and policies authored by its past prophets, for much of the post1978 era, the Brethren continued to insist, as President Gordon
B. Hinckley explained in 1998, that the priesthood revelation
“speak[s] for itself.”6 This second, ecclesiastical non-development
meant that, especially during the 2011–12 Mormon Moment,
the history of the priesthood restriction still exerted significant
gravitational pull. And this was true even when the ecclesiastical non-development finally developed into the publication of
the “Race and the Priesthood” essay in late 2013. The title as
well as the content of this particular, Church-sanctioned history
lesson limited (at least for the short term) what scholars of race
and Mormonism could talk about in public—or at least what we
could talk about in public if we wanted anyone to listen.
Of course, “the public” is not exactly, or at least not directly,
the scholar’s intended audience. Out of the limelight of the public’s Mormon Moment, over the past decade, some of the most
celebrated scholars working on Mormon history today, along
with a cadre of up-and-comers, have been producing groundbreaking research on race and Mormonism. This third, scholarly
development served as the most direct motivation for this special issue. And, now more than two and a half years in the making, in this special issue, Gina and I are very proud to present six
essays, along with Gina’s provocative theoretical examination of
race and Mormonism and an equally provocative roundtable discussion. In their own way, and we hope even more so together,
these essays highlight the limitations of the “race and the priesthood” paradigm and, we hope, begin to move the scholarship on
race and Mormonism beyond it.
Still, the question remains: What do we mean when we call
for a new history of race and Mormonism beyond “race and the
priesthood”? What we mean is that words matter. We mean that
dren: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 212–66.
6
Qtd. in Mauss, All Abraham’s Children, 250.
6
this rhetorical shorthand that scholars have used—and that the
Church continues to use—has at times circumscribed the research questions that we have been able to conceive and seek to
answer.
Turning now to the second part of this introduction, I will
dissect the constituent parts of “race and the priesthood.” To
start, the category of “race” is often assumed to be a catch-all
descriptive category that can encompass all non-white diversity
in Mormon history. But “race” does not catch all. Mormonism
was born in America. And it thus reflects the American historical and historiographic tendency to conceptualize “race” as
more prescriptive and reductive than descriptive. As such, “race”
is almost always bracketed in what critical race theorists call
the “black/white binary.” This American understanding of race
masks the complexity of the (white) Mormon encounter with
the racial and ethnic Other.7 To be sure, because of Mormonism’s unique theology of and relationship with Native Americans, scholars of Mormonism have been particularly attentive to
native/white Mormon encounters. In this special issue, Christopher Smith’s and Angela Hudson’s studies of white and black
Mormons’ performance of Native Americans help to describe
some of the contours of the “Lamanite” and the “Indian” in the
imaginations of early Mormons. Yet, in an essay that appeared
in the April 2015 edition of the Journal of Mormon History, it is
Ignacio M. García’s observation—and lament—that scholars of
Mormonism have yet to acknowledge and begin to revise the
narrative of Mormonism and race based on the fact that “there
has been no larger and more varied Other in Mormonism than
Mexicans and now Latinos.”8
7
Juan F. Perea, “The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race,” in
Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, edited by Richard Delgado
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 344–53.
8
Ignacio M. García, “Finding a Mormon Identity through Religion and Activism: A Personal Note on Constructing a Latino Time
and Place in the Mormon Narrative,” Journal of Mormon History 41,
no. 2 (April 2015): 85.
7
This special issue does not fill this particular lacuna. However, responding to the call to do so in the “Roundtable” discussion,
this issue does begin to shift the narratives of race and Mormonism south, west, and east from its traditional centers along
what we might call the long-Mormon trail, from New York to
Utah. We also hope that this issue can serve (as a first) response
to the challenge that Jehu J. Hanciles laid out in his Tanner Lecture, also published in the April 2015 edition of the Journal of
Mormon History, to globalize Mormon studies—in particular to
take seriously the reality that changing LDS membership demographics means that the Church is now majority non-American,
non-English speaking, and perhaps even non-white.9
Many of the articles in this special issue are first steps towards a globalized Mormon history. Amanda Hendrix-Komoto’s exploration of mid-nineteenth-century Mormon missionaries in Polynesia, Ian G. Barber’s study of Māori-Israelite identity
in late-nineteenth-century New Zealand, and Russell Stevenson’s study of mid-twentieth-century “indigenous” African Mormonism moves these conversations beyond the American continent altogether. As Hanciles also challenged us, these essays
contextualize the history of race and Mormonism in a global
history of (competitive) Christian missionary work.
We hope that soon such scholarship will go even further. We
hope that soon in Mormon studies and American studies writ
large, scholars will begin “provincializing America,” especially in
relation to the “global south.” As Bruce M. Knauft has recently
explained, to provincialize America means to take stock of the
fact that “American exceptionalism” is no longer exceptional in
an era when “the global eminence of the United States is diminishing relative to non-Western economic, political, and cultural
formations.”10
9
Jehu J. Hanciles, “‘Would That All God’s People Were Prophets”:
Mormonism and the New Shape of Global Christianity, Journal of
Mormon History 41, no. 2 (April 2015): 35–68.
10
Bruce M. Knauft, “Provincializing America: Imperialism, Capitalism, and Counterhegemony in the Twenty-First Century,” Current
8
What’s more, these essays, along with Gina’s call for a theoretical destabilizing of the category of “race” (see her following
“Introduction”) and Ryan Bingham’s meticulous study of Joseph
Smith’s revisions of the Bible and his translation of the Book
of Abraham, demonstrate that “race” is not the best category to
describe Mormon race history. Instead, “race” is an American
framework read onto the unique Mormon project of tracing the
origins of humanity’s various racial and ethnic populations back
to what Mormons have understood as these diverse populations’
spiritual and, at times, literal ancient patrilineage progenitors.
Yet race is not the only problematic category we must interrogate. The focus on locating the origins of the “priesthood”
restrictions meant that the scholarship on what might be more
gendered inclusively called the “ban on full black membership”
has not always taken seriously the particular marginalization that
black Mormon women experienced.11 Interestingly, for much the
post-1978 era, because telling her story did not involve the uncomfortable topic of the priesthood ban, in official and quasi-official LDS publications, the Church celebrated Jane Manning
James as the faith-promoting exemplar to which contemporary
black Mormons—male and female—should aspire.12 Until the
publication of the “Race and the Priesthood” essay, early priestAnthropology 46, no. 6 (2007): 781. Thanks to Shreena Ghandi for introducing me to the idea—and potential fruits—of “provincializing
America.”
11
For a noted exception, see Henry Wolfinger, “A Test of Faith: Jane
Manning Elizabeth James and the Origins of the Utah Black Community,” in Social Accommodations in Utah, edited by Clark Knowlton
(Salt Lake City: American West Center, University of Utah, 1975),
126–72.
12
Joseph Walker, “Jane Elizabeth Manning James: A Profile in
Courage, Faith, Resiliency and Courage,” Pioneer, May/June, 1994, 1619. See, among others, “Since Early Church days, Blacks Have Set an
Example,” Church News, June 17, 1978; Linda King Newell and Valeen
Tippetts Avery, “Jane Manning James: Black Saints, 1847 Pioneer,”
Ensign, August 1979.
9
hood holders like Elijah Abel were persona non grata.
However, Mormon scholars of the priesthood working outside the official Church structures have traditionally made black
Mormon men’s experience the focus of their attention. In doing so, this scholarship has often ignored the gendered nature
of the black Mormon past. Because Mormon women’s access
to important Mormon rituals, as well as to Church authority,
has at least formally always been mediated through male priesthood-holders, black Mormon women experienced their exclusion in fundamentally different ways than black Mormon men.
In other words, black Mormon women like Jane Manning James
(probably) never expected to hold, nor did they advocate for a
female priesthood. Yet they too were excluded from essential
Mormon spaces like the temple and Mormon service activities,
like missions and local congregational institutions, all of which
define a Saint’s membership among the Mormon people.13 As
such, even the “and” in “race and the priesthood” is troubling. This
conjunction so couples “race” to “priesthood” that the only—or at
least the most important—studies about race and Mormonism
have been assumed to be about this definitively Mormon office
of ecclesiastical/ritual authority and the exclusion of black males
from it.
Yet as the essays authored by Smith, Barber, Hudson, and
Stevenson included in this issue show, the history of race and
Mormonism is replete with examples of declarations of Mormon authority beyond the priesthood. The claim of spiritual gifts,
of Lamanite and/or Israelite identity, and of a distinctly female
and a distinctly African prophetic calling have been leveraged in
the hopes of gaining access to or even in the hopes of asserting a
higher authority over the (male) priesthood office.
The scholarship on race and Mormonism is ready to move
beyond the inherited assumption that “priesthood” serves as an
13
Max Perry Mueller, “Beyond the Priesthood: Gender and Race
in the History of African American Mormons,” unpublished, Doctoral General Examination Special Topic Essay, Harvard University,
April 2010.
10
effective synecdoche for Mormon identity and Mormon authority. However (and alas), we have no alternative to “race” to propose here. Instead, until we settle on another category, when we
write about “race” we must continually interrogate it, “lest we use
the term too casually,” as my co-editor Gina Colvin warns us not
to do in the second introduction to this issue. In our scholarship,
“race” must always be set off with caution flags, lest we allow the
study of race and Mormonism to slip backwards toward “race” as
something “factual,” “inevitable,” “American,” “male,” and “black
and white.”
INTRODUCTION:
THEORIZING MORMON
RACE SCHOLARSHIP
Gina Colvin
This special issue of the Journal of Mormon History brings together the work of both young and seasoned Mormon scholars who
have sought to disrupt those racial narratives that positioned nineteenth-century Mormonism as a triumphant and uncomplicated
foray into unknown geographies where the strange, the exotic, and
the challenging were experienced with simple grace and faith. This
issue complicates the compelling but flawed narrative of triumphalism and asks its readers to experience these historical interracial engagements with searching questions about the efficacy of an
evangelizing mission that doesn’t fully apprehend its concomitant
colonizing work. These articles point to the brooding tension involved in any religious project that inhabits spaces that it does not
fully understand. Yet there is a shared complexity in these articles.
They point to the messiness of Mormonism, and they refuse to offer easy answers to the hard questions that these narratives arouse.
Mormonism at its heart is a white, American, patriarchal, colonizing tradition that sometimes carves crude and bumpy tracks where
its wagons roll. And this collection is a rich exploration of some of
Mormonism’s largely untold racial transactions.
GINA COLVIN {[email protected]} is Ngāti Porou and
Ngā Puhi. She is a lecturer at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she teaches in the College of Education.
She has published in Sunstone and Exponent II, blogs at KiwiMormon,
has a podcast at “A Thoughtful Faith,” and is coediting with Joanna
Brooks an anthology with the working title Decolonizing Mormonism.
11
12
As editors of this special issue, Max and I did not plunge
into soliciting specific articles that addressed sexual liaisons;
the indigenous body as spectacle; and native identities as performance. Yet we are delighted with the opportunity to include three papers by Christopher Carroll Smith, Amanda
Hendrix-Komoto, and Angela Pulley Hudson that explore
the way in which native identities were embodied, penetrated, displayed, and performed in the heat of these concupiscent
interracial and intercultural moments. In these religious borderlands, the rigid lines between the subaltern and the superior
were habitually transgressed in a constant plunder of the Other for their physical, cultural and spiritual resources. By fate
rather than design Ian Barber and Russell Stevenson’s papers
both address the adaptive prophetic tradition in Aotearoa/New
Zealand and Ghana respectively—proposing powerful questions about Mormonism’s established prophetic orthodoxies,
and the challenge that they raise to local prophetic traditions
that are grounded in the social and political contexts of the
spaces they inhabit, while Ryan Stuart Bingham’s article is a
powerful exposition of the history of racial narratives as they
appear in the Mormon canon of Joseph Smith’s writings.
Finally the Roundtable, including Laurie Maffley-Kipp,
Melissa Inouye, Elise Boxer, and Janan Graham-Russell, which
I moderated, addresses the practice of Mormon history from
our diverse raced and cultural perspectives. As a group of white,
Asian, black, indigenous feminists and womanists, ours was a
wonderful opportunity to address the current state of Mormon
studies and Mormon history from our racial, ethnic, and gendered perspectives. Our conclusion was that Mormon scholarship addressing race would be vastly enriched with more rigorous attention to decolonizing methodologies and critical race
theories that privilege the previously Othered voice.
With this conclusion in mind, I have chosen to introduce this
volume with a brief survey1 of theories of whiteness, colonialism,
1
Some of this theoretical overview is quoted verbatim from my
GINA COLVIN/Theorizing Mormon Race Scholarship
13
and power in an effort to present a framework that draws our
attention to circles broader than the increasingly well-explored
terrain of arguments and propositions that constantly return to
the priesthood ban as the dominant locus of our race preoccupations. It is not that this chapter in Mormon history should not
demand our attention. Rather, it is that there are more conversations to be had than the priesthood ban alone, and put together
we might bring vigorous intellectual resolution to the perplexities in Mormonism’s racial narratives. As Alfred Lopez suggests,
race studies in general would be emboldened by “a broadening
of the comparative focus of the debate on whiteness beyond
a strictly U.S. model—that is beyond a United States centred
model that allows American studies to duck post-colonial issues
and lets the United States off the hook for its own imperialist
history and current colonial practices.”2
Mormon history has been somewhat remiss in its lack of
attention to the theoretical, particularly as it confronts questions of race. Aware of this gap, this introduction urges that we
reframe our conversations about race, whiteness, colonialism,
and power and that we draw on contemporary and racial theories that intersect with our historical preoccupations so that we
can more fully articulate and understand Mormonism’s cultural
impact in diverse contexts. I therefore shape this introduction
to present some dynamic social theories from the literature
that might be helpful in both making sense of this volume and
encouraging further conversations. Furthermore as scholars interested in this work, we also wish to supply a language that
we hope will fill our annals as a compelling and on-going conversation that is so commonplace as to make a further “special
issues” redundant.
PhD thesis: Gina M. Colvin, “The Soliloquy of Whiteness: Colonial
Discourse and New Zealand’s Settler Press 1839–1873” (PhD thesis,
University of Canterbury, 2009).
2
Alfred Lopez, ed.. Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race
and Empire (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 19.
14
RACE
To begin, the very idea of “race” needs to be interrogated lest
we use the term too casually and imagine that there is something
inevitable about “race.” Simon Cottle3 and Ivan Hannaford4
agree that race is a social, cultural, and political construction.
While our label here is “special race issue,” it is important to note
that we do so advisedly. Race is an “empty” category that, when
excavated and deconstructed, is an unstable and problematic signifying system bearing no relationship to the “fact.” Race thus is
a construct and a reality, particularly for those whose “racialization” has resulted in reduced life chances, unnecessary reductions
in the quality of life, or even the loss of life itself. However, while
there is a painful correlation between skin color and reduced life
changes, the causes are not skin color. The causes are political,
economic, social and cultural. The term “race” in this volume will
therefore be employed as a way of expressing a complex of racial
systems and formations that have worked over time to form social divisions and reproduce race-based power structures.
Unfortunately in Mormon theology, up until the recent
“Race and the Priesthood” essay,5 black skin color historically
served as a sign of spiritual undeserving—until 1978. As Max
has recently argued, subtly and with some rhetorical hedging,
shifting the blame for Mormon racial narratives from a heavenly
class system to the mortal fallibility of Mormon leaders, and the
seduction of a generalized American racial system that privileged
whiteness is a momentous gesture for the Church—one that will
require a tremendous amount of fortitude to massage into Mor3
Simon Cottle, Ethnic Minorities and the Media: Changing Cultural Boundaries (Buckingham, England: Open University Press, 2000).
4
Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press, 1996).
5
No author(s) identified, “Race and the Priesthood,” n.d., but first
posted December 10, 2013, according to web.archives.org (Wayback
Machine) https://www.lds.org/topics/race-and-the-priesthood?lang=
eng (accessed March 2, 2015).
15
mon discourse and thought.6 In Mormon scholarship and popular discourse the idea of “race”—while somewhat narrow in its
application, continues its slow burn; but until recently, the idea
of whiteness in Mormonism has received little attention.7 This
is not surprising. White hegemonies tend not to draw attention
to their recondite skin color exclusions—however conspicuous
they might be. A theorization of whiteness is thus profitable, for
only in understanding whiteness do we come to understand the
character of Mormonism’s racial systems.
WHITENESS
As Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues: “The discursive formation of Anglocentric whiteness is a relatively uncharted territory that has remained invisible, dominant and pervasive.”8 In
referring to whiteness I am stating that white colonial hegemony
is a political, cultural, social, economic, and theological activity
that involves the continuing struggle of the powerful to win the
consensus of the socially subordinate for its role in reproducing a social hierarchy where the benefits accrue to white folk.
Having said that,however, whiteness must be understood in the
Mormon context—in a broader sweep than its racialized ban on
black male priesthood ordination. It is imperative that we add
some complexity to our racial theorizing by considering the constitution of a white colonial hegemony in Mormonism.
COLONISATION
Colonisation is the practical realisation of the doctrine of
white ascendancy. Thus, white hegemony and colonisation rest
inseparably upon each other. The practical business and exigen6
Max Perry Mueller, “History Lessons: Race and the LDS
Church,” Journal of Mormon History 41, no. 1 (2015): 139-55.
7
W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon
Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
8
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ed., Whitening Race: Essays in Social
and Cultural Criticism (Canberra, Australia: Aboriginal Studies Press,
2004), 79.
16
cies of colonisation, along with its justification and rationale, are
intertwined with a rhetoric that excused the sometimes horrific material consequences visited upon non-white Others simply
because the executors were white. Colonisation inevitably lead
to a significant reordering of indigenous affairs and a sometimes
coercive demand for conformity to this hostile and alien way of
life. Thomas Gladwin and Ahmend Saidin assert: “Most white
men have a conviction which amounts to absolute certainty that
all white people are by their natures more intelligent, and are
worth more as human beings than brown men in similar circumstance.”
The settlement of Utah must therefore be understood as an
exodus of a persecuted people seeking to build a new Zion and
also as an aggressive colonial incursion into the sacred homeland
of other peoples. In their Church’s corporate operations to organise the political, ecclesiastical, and economic affairs of the region,
the Mormon pioneers drew upon well-established American as
well as novel Mormon racial discourses to justify the erasure of
indigenous knowledges, economies, as well as indigenous bodies
from the lands they believed Providence had promised them. In
so doing, the LDS Church also created exclusions around black
labour, black political, and black ecclesiastical integration in order
to pursue the economic aspirations of a Western capitalist colonial enterprise. Creating a theological justification for the practice
of racial segregation in Mormon country served an ideological
purpose. It provided a religious imperative to structure the everyday social life of the Saints across racial lines, thus maintaining a
white Western colonial hegemony ensuring that Utah looked and
behaved—at least in this respect—as if it belonged to the white
American republic. With this understanding in mind, it is imperative that we understand the Church’s operations in “American”
and other indigenous spaces as highly problematic.
POWER AND KNOWLEDGE OF THE RACIAL OTHER
According to Michel Foucault, the exercise of power attaches itself inseparably to the pursuit of knowledge. For power
17
to be operational it depends upon “systems of thought” that
produce social control in which these “ways of knowing the
world” are legitimated and institutionalised.9 In other words,
knowledge is not innocent of power. Furthermore, if identity
is dependent upon knowledge, then identity formation is also
linked to power. A “system of thought” (or a “way of knowing”)
that dominates or has power in society will also provide for all
social participants, ways of knowing each other and themselves
that are invariably politically positioned or vested with degrees
of power.
Mormon racial identities according to this thesis are therefore constituted within knowledge transactions—be they
through Church curricula, Church general addresses, or Church
policies—that make visible the prevailing system of Mormon
thought. And these systems are in turn linked to hierarchies of
power that are constituted to establish and maintain social control and cohesion. Publishing the “Race and the Priesthood” essay provides evidence that the corporate Church wishes to abdicate its prior position.
To be sure, the good will of individuals seeking to right historical wrongs must be acknowledged. However, institutions are
inclined to make these discursive adjustments only when the
costs of maintaining their current practices or ideas are too high.
In the case of the current LDS race debates, Official Declaration—2, which opened priesthood ordination to worthy black
men in 1978, was accompanied by a wholesale and swift relinquishing of the teaching that God was behind the prohibition
on black male ordination. But the precursor to this change was
probably exogenous to the formal institution. In an organisation
that relentlessly seeks for continuity rather than transformation,
it is likely that a number of competing forces, including the intellectual work of notable Mormon race scholars such as Lester E. Bush and Darius A. Gray, the rise of social media, mass
9
Gary Gutting, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press 2005), 231.
18
media interest in Mormonism as a result of the Romney presidential campaigns, and sensitivity to the potential for damage
to the Mormon brand along with the exponential growth of the
Church in some African nation states made old racial theologies
a liability.
This does not mean that, with the essay’s publication, we have
seen the immediate collapse of traditional racial hierarchies. Systems of thought are often intransigent and are wedded to broader social and historical cultural dynamics.
In the colonial and even post-colonial era, racial knowledge
begot racialized hierarchies of power. Daniel Goldberg10 suggests that anthropological and biological interest in difference led to the construction of an historical racial order. These
renderings were, of course, attached to the West’s interest in
appropriating the world’s resources. In other words, a way of
knowing the world was offered by science, using the tools of
observation and reason in order to secure and justify dominance. Out of this period came particular racial categories: exotic, Oriental, the East, Negro, native, savage, etc.11 Attached
to these general categories were particular descriptions of how
one might understand the Other in terms of temperament, language, civilisation, culture, and religion, among others.12
Melville’s Typee similarly represents the Other as offering
the European an image antithetical to the West, possessed of “a
free and natural sexuality, a marriage system based on female desire, a society living in ease and abundance, and in complete harmony with its natural surroundings.”13 This image of the savage or
primitive served to symbolise for Europeans the nature and essence
10
Daniel Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of
Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993).
11
Ibid., 29.
12
Ibid., 30.
13
David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1993), 128.
19
of humanity in its pre-corrupted (pre-civilized) form, thus giving
expression to the restless and passionate energy of the romantic
in his or her quest to know the unseen within. The savage, native,
or primitive was possessed of the “natural language”14 of humanity as coming forth from nature, sexually free and unencumbered
by the restraints of Western society. The primitive represented for
the European a way to know the origins of the human species, to
know the former state of civilized “man,” and to reconnect with
the “natural,” carnal, and spiritual within. In this special issue, the
articles authored by Hudson, Smith, and Hendrix address historical contexts that speak to this romantic notion of a hyper-sexualized, and hyper-spiritualized essential native character in the
white Mormon and male encounter with the racial Other.
With that context in mind, it would be remiss of us to
avoid speaking of ways in which the native feminine Other was
historically constituted. Amanda Hendrix-Komoto’s paper addresses both the ubiquity and the transgressive nature of nineteenth-century miscegenation or what Robert Young terms “a
dialectic of attraction and repulsion.”15 The native female body
was historically a site in which white religious sexual politics
of the nineteenth century were played out so that, even today,
black and brown women’s bodies have had to bear the scars of
white colonial patriarchies who courted both desire and piety.
The corollary to this tension is that Mormon women of color
have been silenced in the Mormon archive. White Christian
femininity comfortably occupies a position in a religious context that celebrates sexual purity, while the brown and black
female body has long been positioned as a sexual spectacle for
white male consumption and is therefore a sign of sinfulness.
THE MORMON ARCHIVE OF RACE
Mormons are a people of the book, or more precisely a peo14
Ibid., 126.
Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and
Race (New York: Routledge, 1994), 166.
15
20
ple of books, newspapers, letters, diaries, ledgers, and membership records. Thus, the physical signs of these constructed, racialized subjects, in the Mormon context, are to be found the
millions of linear feet of published and unpublished texts produced by the Mormons’ unrivalled missionary work, then carefully deposited in Church archives. However, these transcripts
of religious colonization, while useful in constructing a certain
historical account, also need to be understood as arising out of a
broader social and political context that framed and structured
the Christian evangelizing work in non-White spaces generally.
Missionary work of whatever denomination has long been a cog
in the wheel of the Western colonizing project and relies upon
doctrines of racial and cultural supremacy for its confidence in
causing familial, and social upheaval wherever it goes. These theories of race, whiteness, and colonisation, I would argue, apply
with the same force to the evangelizing work of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
At the heart of my argument is thus a desire for Mormon
scholars to normalize the intellectual and social praxis of theorizing race and how racialized ideologies have been used to colonize native lands, bodies, and minds. We must foster and encourage conversations about race that include the motivation to undo
colonial regimes that are constructed in discourse.
This being said, it is imperative to understand that transformative and meaningful race scholarship can and perhaps should
have a social justice end. As a New Zealander, I am aware of the
acrimony that attends such shibboleths as “social justice,” particularly in the white conservative corners of the United States. Unfortunately, a failure to engage with research practices and contexts that challenge assumptions, and seek to work with and for
people of colour is merely a reproduction of a long academic tradition of native “research” that Linda Smith rightly describes as
“probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous vocabulary.
. . . It is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism.”16 Re16
Linda Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indige-
21
search that does not have a social justice intent is merely a reproduction of research approaches that continue to position people
of color as Other, subject to the white colonial gaze, while their
intellectual resources are appropriated as data for those institutions and individuals interested in self-aggrandizement at best,
and population control at worst.
To decolonize means to understand and accept that both
the colonizer and the colonized have inherited a colonial legacy that has become anchored in the way we see and behave
in the world. To decolonize means to identify those inherited ideas and to challenge them even when they threaten the
very power structures that have relied upon the privileges that
these violations to our shared humanity have earned them. To
decolonize means to perform our intellectual work in a way
that decentres those historically particularised racial interests
that privilege colonial whiteness and to see with clarity the way
in which religious studies research practices have historically adhered to the broader interests of colonization. To borrow
self-consciously from Linda Smith, the future of Mormon race
scholarship therefore requires “a radical compassion that reaches out, that seeks collaboration, and that is open to possibilities
that can only be imagined as other things fall into place. Decolonizing methodologies is not a method for revolution in a
political sense but provokes some revolutionary thinking about
the roles that knowledge, knowledge production, knowledge
hierarchies, and knowledge institutions play in decolonization
and social transformation.”17 We offer this special issue as a
powerful starting place for these conversations—ever more fully theorized, historicized, and politicized—to grow.
nous Peoples (London: Zedd Books, 1999), 1.
17
Ibid., xii.
CURSES AND MARKS:
RACIAL DISPENSATIONS AND
DISPENSATIONS OF RACE IN
JOSEPH SMITH’S BIBLE REVISION
AND THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM
Ryan Stuart Bingham
Between 1830 and 1842, Mormon prophet Joseph Smith Jr.
produced scripture for the Latter-day Saint movement—his revision of the King James Bible, and the Book of Abraham—that
reported a providential history in which the God of Genesis took
an active interest in dark skin color as a mark of divinely instituted curses. Accepted as Joseph Smith’s successor among Latter-day
Saints headquartered in the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young officially established a policy in the late 1840s of withholding from
those of black African ancestry participation in the lay Mormon
priesthood otherwise freely extended to all male Church memRYAN STUART BINGHAM {[email protected]} is currently pursuing the Master of Arts degree in religious studies at the
University of Chicago Divinity School. He received the Bachelor of
Science degree in teaching social science at Brigham Young University
in 2014, and he has previously published in Sunstone Magazine. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: This study benefited from the careful readings and suggestions of several friends, colleagues, and mentors. In
particular, I thank Truedson J. Sandberg, Brent Lee Metcalfe, Jeffrey
Stackert, John G. Turner, Lavina Fielding Anderson, Curtis J. Evans,
Max Perry Mueller, Margaret Merrill Toscano, Paul J. Toscano, and
Margaret M. Mitchell. In appreciation for their patience, I dedicate
this article to Deborah Alonzo and Pride Oryang.
22
Ryan Stuart Bingham/ Curses and Marks
23
bers. By the opening of the twentieth century, the racial narratives
in Smith’s Bible revision and the Book of Abraham became major
sources of justification for this policy, which the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints discontinued in 1978.1
Previous scholarship has largely embedded treatments of
1
Under this policy, the LDS Church also barred black women and
men from participation in LDS temple ordinances that are closely tied
to LDS priesthood. Armand L. Mauss has concluded: “These policies
. . . almost certainly did not originate with the founding prophet, Joseph Smith, and there is no contemporaneous documentation indicating that they did.” Mauss, All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2003), 213. See also Stephen G. Taggart, Mormonism’s Negro
Policy: Social and Historical Origins (Salt Lake City: University of Utah
Press, 1970), 55–60; Lester E. Bush Jr., “A Commentary on Stephen
G. Taggart’s Mormonism’s Negro Policy: Social and Historical Origins,”
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 4 (Winter 1969): 86–103; and
Lester E. Bush Jr., “Whence the Negro Doctrine? A Review of Ten
Years of Answers,” in Neither White nor Black: Mormon Scholars Confront the Race Issue in a Universal Church, edited by Lester E. Bush Jr.,
and Armand L. Mauss (Midvale, Utah: Signature Books, 1984), 196,
202–8. On the ordinations of two black men, Elijah Abel and Walker Lewis, to the LDS priesthood under Joseph Smith, see Newell G.
Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing Place of Black People
within Mormonism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 37–
38, 87–91.
Brigham Young, fond of claiming continuity with Smith, never
cited Smith or his scriptural texts to justify the policy, both of which
arose as explicit justifications for the policy after Young’s death. In fact,
the gradual development of this policy occasioned a variety of early explanations for it. See Lester E. Bush Jr., “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
8 (Spring 1973): 11–68; and Russell W. Stevenson, For the Cause of
Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830–2013
(Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2014), 13–35. Though these explanations sometimes revealed interest in the contents of the Book of
Abraham, they never fully reflected Joseph Smith’s racial narratives as
he configured them.
24
Joseph Smith’s racial narratives within discussions of the LDS
priesthood ban and has thus focused on the publication and reception of the narratives rather than their construction and dictation.2 In 1970, Stephen G. Taggart cited the 1842 publication
of Joseph Smith’s Book of Abraham as evidence that Smith intended to make public a policy of denying priesthood eligibility to black men, recognizing in the Book of Abraham echoes of
“Southern fundamentalism.”3 Lester E. Bush Jr. quickly challenged Taggart’s assertion that Smith had introduced the policy, but he too recognized “parallels between Mormon scripture
and the contemporary proslavery arguments.”4
Newell G. Bringhurst’s 1981 study of the racial ban focused
on the reception of Smith’s narratives but also gave a detailed
and fairly integrated description of the narratives themselves.
Though his treatment overlooked what importance Smith’s racial narratives might have had for him beyond merely expounding the racial myths that he had inherited, Bringhurst recognized that Smith’s racial narratives reflected his inheritance of
myths from his culture.5 Bringhurst’s candor contrasts sharply
with the strained pre-1978 treatments of Armand L. Mauss and
Lester E. Bush Jr. Interested in promoting the discontinuation of
the priesthood ban without challenging the historicity of LDS
scripture, Mauss and Bush argued for the intense incoherence of
Smith’s racial narratives. Mauss, for example, suggested that the
“blackness” that came upon descendants of Cain was not necessarily connected either to the mark set upon Cain or to “a literal
blackness of the skin.”6
2
See, for example, Bush, “Whence the Negro Doctrine?”, 193–220.
Taggart, Mormonism’s Negro Policy, 55–60.
4
Bush, “A Commentary on Stephen G. Taggart’s Mormonism’s Negro Policy,” 93.
5
See Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks, 34–35, 40–44.
6
Armand L. Mauss, “Mormonism and the Negro: Faith, Folklore,
and Civil Rights,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 2 (Winter
1967): 27–28. See also Bush, “A Commentary on Stephen G. Taggart’s
Mormonism’s Negro Policy,” 92–95, 97, 101, and Bush, “Mormonism’s
3
Ryan Stuart Bingham/ Curses and Marks
25
Official LDS discourse has not addressed the inadequacy
of these arguments for incoherence and has largely remained
silent on the question of these narratives since 1978. On December 10, 2013, the LDS Church published an essay entitled
“Race and the Priesthood,” which recognizes that the Mormon
past is racially problematic, attributes much of this difficulty to
inherited racial myths, and repudiates racism; however, mention
of the source texts for the LDS priesthood ban is completely
absent.7 While unqualified assertions of scriptural historicity
encourage Latter-day Saints to accept these racial narratives
as historical,8 silence on the question of these narratives leaves
those who accept their historicity but find their racial implications to be repugnant to independently misinterpret them as
incoherent.
Negro Doctrine,” 35–36.
7
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, (no author[s]
identified), “Race and the Priesthood,” n.d., date of posting December
10, 2013, according to Internet Archive Wayback Machine {archive.
org/web}, https://www.lds.org/topics/race-and-the-priesthood?lang=
eng (accessed December 12, 2014). Though no authors are identified
for the LDS Church’s recent Gospel Topics essays, each essay has received approval from the LDS First Presidency prior to publication.
See Tad Walch, “LDS Church Enhances Web Pages on Its History,
Doctrine,” December 9, 2013, Deseret News, http://www.deseretnews.
com/article/865592128/LDS-Church-enhances-web-pages-on-itshistory-doctrine.html?pg=all (accessed March 3, 2015). Implicit reliance on the argument for incoherence is also evident in the 2013 edition of the LDS scriptures, which preserves a footnote reference to
Smith’s addition of “a veil of darkness” to Genesis 9:26 (with no exegetical commentary). See Genesis 9:26 note a, in Holy Bible (Salt Lake
City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2013), 14.
8
See another official essay, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints (no author[s] identified), “Translation and Historicity of the
Book of Abraham,” n.d., date of posting July 11, 2014, according
to Internet Archive Wayback Machine {archive.org/web}, https://
www.lds.org/topics/translation-and-historicity-of-the-book-of-abraham?lang=eng (accessed December 12, 2014).
26
Thus, interest in reception history and assumptions of scriptural historicity have kept scholars, LDS officials, and Latter-day
Saints from discussing the construction of the racial narratives in
Smith’s Bible revision and the Book of Abraham. Recent publications of original manuscripts for Smith’s scriptural projects
facilitate such careful examination.9 I propose that Smith’s construction of these narratives constitutes a fundamental concern in
the study of race within Mormonism, shedding light on Smith’s
religious imagination, and bearing implications for future LDS
scriptural hermeneutics.10 This article discusses Joseph Smith’s re9
For transcriptions in print of manuscripts from Smith’s Bible revision dictation, see Scott H. Faulring, Kent P. Jackson, and Robert
J. Matthews, eds., Joseph Smith’s New Translation of the Bible: Original Manuscripts (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2004).
For transcriptions and photographic images of these dictation manuscripts and early copies, including “OT3” (see note 27 below), see
Scott H. Faulring and Kent P. Jackson, eds., Joseph Smith’s Translation
of the Bible: Electronic Library, CD-ROM (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2011). Excepting one deviation discussed below, I follow the transcriptions of Faulring, Jackson, and Matthews in
all text quoted from Old Testament revision manuscripts below, preserving original spelling and punctuation. As of this writing (February 2015), the LDS Church Historian’s Office has published only one
Old Testament manuscript: Joseph Smith, Old Testament Revision
1, Joseph Smith Papers Online, Revelations and Translations, 7201–
(accessed December 22, 2014). For transcriptions and images of Book
of Abraham manuscripts, see Brian M. Hauglid, A Textual History of
the Book of Abraham: Manuscripts and Editions (Provo, Utah: Brigham
Young University, Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2010); and Joseph Smith, Book of Abraham and Other Egyptian
Material, the Joseph Smith Papers Online, Revelations and Translations, 7641–46 http://josephsmithpapers.org/the=papers#/R2L/JSP
PR6(accessed December 28, 2014). As the LDS Church Historian’s
Office has made all Book of Abraham manuscripts available online, I
provide the Joseph Smith Papers transcriptions below.
10
While these implications are especially significant for the LDS
community, they also speak to scriptural hermeneutics in other reli-
Ryan Stuart Bingham/Curses and Marks
27
ception of racial myths from his religious milieu, then provides a
detailed examination of the racial narratives that Smith dictated,
suggesting a framework for understanding these texts and the primary functions that they perform.
Smith constructed the racial narratives of his Bible revision
and the Book of Abraham in line with inherited myths of racial
origins, specifically the curse of Ham myth and its Cain-theory variant. In configuring his narratives, he supplied solutions to
broadly recognized problems facing the coherence of these myths
as he attached providential curses and marks to primordial offenders. Smith constructed these racial narratives on the foundation of
human free will resulting from prevenient grace, producing a racial
history of human guilt for limitations of providence.11
JOSEPH SMITH’S INHERITANCE OF CURSE MYTHS
Like many others of his time and place, Joseph Smith believed that dark skin marked people of African ancestry as
cursed by God. He traced this accursed state back to the biblical curses set upon Cain and Canaan, thus supplying a providential explanation for racial slavery. While Jews, Christians,
and Muslims had long discussed the Noachian curse of slavery upon Canaan and had identified African peoples as descendants of Ham, the rise of racial slavery in the New World
yielded special interest in a linkage of race and the Noachian
curse.12 Stephen R. Haynes maintains that this linkage was
gious communities that come from the Latter-day Saint movement,
most prominently Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints).
11
A similar (yet distinct) pattern is visible in the Book of Mormon—originally published just months before Smith began his Bible
revision—in relation to the origins and history of Native Americans
that it reports.
12
The following is only a selection of recent book-length considerations of the historical reception of the Genesis narrative of the Noachian curse, a subject that has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years. See Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical
28
present in America “by the early colonial period” and that the
decline of white servitude in America strengthened usage of
the Noachian curse to justify racial slavery. Haynes writes,
“By the 1830s . . . Noah’s curse had become a stock weapon in
the arsenal of slavery’s apologists, and references to Genesis
9 appeared prominently in their publications.”13 Sylvester A.
Johnson observes that, in the nineteenth century, “virtually all
Americans, across racial groups and regions, regarded the Negro as a descendant of Ham; American Negroes themselves,
especially, referred to this ‘fact.’”14
The curse of Ham myth faced several difficulties. The central
problem was the unexpected placement of a curse upon Canaan
in response to Ham’s offense in Genesis 9. Moreover, acceptance
of Hamitic ancestry for black Africans was distinct from the assertion of Canaanite ancestry for black slaves, and Genesis 9 did
not assign race to either Ham or Canaan. David M. Goldenberg
notes that the belief that Cain was an earlier ancestor of African
peoples had gained considerable currency in America by the eighteenth century.15 Goldenberg writes, “The Cain theory had an advantage over the Curse of Ham, since the Bible mentions a ‘mark’
Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press,
2002); David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in
Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); Sylvester A. Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of
God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Guillaume Hervieux,
L’ivresse de Noé: Histoire d’une malédiction (Paris: Perrin, 2011).
13
Haynes, Noah’s Curse, 8.
14
Johnson, The Myth of Ham, 5, also usefully argues, “Hamitic identity, as sensus communis, was primarily about originary concerns, not
slavery apologia.” We shall see that Smith’s racial narratives are concerned not primarily with racial slavery in nineteenth-century America but with questions of grace, free will, and providence.
15
Haynes joins Goldenberg in observing that the Cain theory had
gained credence in Europe during the previous century. See Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham, 178–79; and Haynes, Noah’s Curse, 15.
29
put on Cain, even if it doesn’t specify what it was.”16 By preserving
Cain’s line through Canaan, proponents of the Cain-theory version of the curse of Ham myth were able to unite the mark of Cain
with the curse of slavery. In his 1733 pamphlet critiquing slavery,
Quaker minister Elihu Coleman argued:
But some may object, as I my self have heard them, that there
was a Mark set upon Cain, and they do believe that these Negroes
are the Posterity of Cain, because of their Hair, and their being
so black, differing from all others, and that Canaan was to be a
Servant of Servants to his Brethren, whom they take to be of the
same Linage: But if we do but observe, and read in the Genealogy
of Cain, we may find that they were all drowned in the old World,
and that Canaan was of the Line of Seth. . . . [I]t was the Will or
Permission of God, that there should be a Ham, as well as a Shem
and a Japhet: By which we may see that God suffers wicked Men
to live as well as Righteous. . . .
And altho’ Canaan was to be a Servant of Servants to his
Brethren, yet the Lord afterwards spake by the Prophets, that the
Son should not bear the Iniquity of the Father, nor the Father
should not bear the iniquity of the Son, but the Soul that sinneth
should die. Then the Posterity of Canaan, or of Ham, do not bear
their Sins.17
Coleman’s 1733 argument against the Cain theory highlights its central problem: how to maintain that Canaan, Noah’s
grandson, was in fact a descendant of Cain. We shall see that in
his scriptural works Joseph Smith, like others, employed matrilineal ancestry to position Cain as an ancestor of the Canaanites,
a point that Haynes and Goldenberg also observe.18
16
Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham, 178.
Elihu Coleman, “A Testimony against the Antichristian Practice of Making Slaves of Men,” in Racial Thought in America, edited by
Louis Ruchames (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1969),
1:94–95. Ruchames’s reproduction is cited in Goldenberg, The Curse of
Ham, 357 note 2.
18
See Haynes, Noah’s Curse, 15; and Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham,
178, 358 notes 6 and 7. For similar (Mormon and otherwise) nine17
30
Lastly, Smith’s explicit identification of African peoples
with the cursed descendants of Cain, Ham, or Canaan outside
of his scriptural texts is highly significant. Seeking to assuage
fears among Missourian slaveholders that Mormons were in favor of abolition, Smith opened the April 1836 issue of the Messenger and Advocate with a letter to Oliver Cowdery in which he
presents several standard proslavery arguments, including familiar biblical proof texts: “The first mention we have of slavery is
found in the holy bible, pronounced by a man who was perfect
in his generation and walked with God. And so far from that
prediction’s being averse from the mind of God it remains as a
lasting monument of the decree of Jehovah, to the shame and
confusion of all who have cried out against the South, in consequence of their holding the sons of Ham in servitude!” After
quoting Genesis 9:25–2719 word for word as it appears in his
1828 Bible, Smith continues his commentary: “Trace the history
of the world from this notable event down to this day, and you
will find the fulfilment of this singular prophecy. What could
have been the design of the Almighty in this wonderful occurrence is not for me to say; but I can say, that the curse is not yet
taken off the sons of Canaan, neither will be until it is affected by
as great power as caused it to come.”20 Smith did not merely reteenth-century characterizations of Canaanites as descendants of
Cain through a matriarchal line, see William W. Phelps, “Letter No.
V” (Liberty, Mo.), February 6, 1835, Messenger and Advocate 1 (March
1835): 82; and Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham, 357 note 2. Among the
book-length studies of the curse of Ham cited in this article, Hervieux,
L’ivresse de Noé, 281–84, gives the lengthiest account of Joseph Smith’s
scripture and LDS racial history, though he is dismissive of Joseph
Smith generally and in fact completely overlooks Smith’s Bible revision and the Book of Abraham.
19
Smith incorrectly cites the selection as “Gen. 8:25, 26, 27.”
20
Joseph Smith (Kirtland, Ohio), Letter to Oliver Cowdery, Messenger and Advocate 2 (April 1836): 289. Bush details some of the arguments that Smith and others gave in this issue of the Messenger and
Advocate in “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine,” 14–15.
31
fer to blacks here as “the sons of Ham” or “the sons of Canaan” to
calm Missourian fears. Later opposition to slavery and personal
interaction with free blacks did not keep Smith from referring to
blacks as “the Negroes or Sons of Cain” in his personal journal
entry for January 25, 1842.21 Beyond the question of racial slavery, Smith consistently relied on the Cain-theory version of the
curse of Ham myth as an account of racial origins.22
CURSES AND MARKS: SMITH’S BIBLE REVISION
Joseph Smith began his revision of the Bible only months after publishing the Book of Mormon and establishing the Mormon Church. Though Smith referred to this endeavor as a translation,23 he did not report the use of a source text in any language
21
Joseph Smith, January 25, 1842, “Journal, December 1841–December 1842,” in Journals, Volume 2: December 1841–April 1842, edited
by Andrew H. Hedges, Alex D. Smith, and Richard Lloyd Anderson,
Vol. 2 of The Joseph Smith Papers, general editors Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, and Richard Lyman Bushman (Salt Lake City:
Church Historian’s Office, 2011), 30. On Smith’s opposition to slavery,
see Joseph Smith, General Smith’s Views of the Powers and Policy of the
Government of the United States (Nauvoo, Ill.: John Taylor, 1844). On
Smith’s personal interaction with free blacks, see Stevenson, For the
Cause of Righteousness, 3–11; and note 1 above.
22
See also Joseph Smith, June 19, 1831, “History, 1838–1856,
Vol. A–1 (December 23, 1805–August 30, 1834),” 129, Joseph Smith
Papers Online Histories, 7268 http://josephsmithpapers.org/paper
Summary/history-1838-1856-volume-a-1-23-december-1805-30august-1834#!/paperSummary/history-1838-1856-volume-a-1-23december-1805-30-august-1834&p=135 (accessed December 18,
2014). I am indebted to Russell W. Stevenson for directing me to
Smith’s record for June 19, 1831.
23
See, for example, Robin Scott Jensen, Robert J. Woodford, and
Steven C. Harper, eds., Joseph Smith, “Revelation, 30 December 1830
[D&C 37],” Book 1, in Manuscript Revelation Books, Facsimile Edition, Vol. 1 in the Revelations and Translation series of the Joseph
Smith Papers, general editors Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, and
Richard Lyman Bushman (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press,
32
other than English (as he did for the Book of Mormon and the
Book of Abraham). Some of the changes introduced in Smith’s
dictation were minor and evidently intended to clarify the language of his source text, an 1828 King James Bible printed in
Cooperstown, New York.24 Where Smith made his most significant additions to the text, a Book of Mormon passage on the
Bible suggests that Smith’s changes were restorations of original, lost text.25 A revelation that Smith dictated on December
7, 1830, giving God’s instruction to Sidney Rigdon to serve as
Smith’s scribe, provides a useful framework for understanding
the intended significance of the changes in his Bible revision: “&
a commandment I [the Lord] give unto you [Sidney Rigdon]
that thou shalt write for him [ Joseph Smith] & the scriptures
shall be given even as they are in mine own bosom to the salvation of mine own elect.”26 Thus, the Bible revision was intended
to have a high degree of validity.
Smith began dictating his revision of Genesis to Oliver
Cowdery in June 1830 and continued his revision through Genesis 24:41 by March 1831.27 During this time, Smith dictated a
2009), 68–69.
24
Henry Phinney and Elihu Phinney Jr., eds., The Holy Bible,
Containing the Old and New Testaments: Together with the Apocrypha
(Cooperstown, N.Y.: H. & E. Phinney, 1828). Smith’s copy is located in the Community of Christ Library-Archives, Independence. For
classifications of the types of changes that Smith made, see Philip
L. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints
in American Religion, Updated Edition (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 49–67; Robert J. Matthews, “A Plainer Translation”: Joseph Smith’s Translation of the Bible: A History and Commentary (Provo,
Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), 233–53; and Faulring,
Jackson, and Matthews, Original Manuscripts, 3, 8–11.
25
See Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon (Palmyra, N.Y.: E. B.
Grandin, 1830), 28–33.
26
Joseph Smith, “Revelation, 7 December 1830 [D&C 35],” Revelation Book 1, in Manuscript Revelation Books, Facsimile Edition, 64–
65.
27
During this time, Smith dictated to several scribes: Oliver
33
text that might best be understood as referring to dark skin as
a mark placed upon three cursed groups: (1) Cain and his seed,
(2) an antediluvian group identified as “the people of Canaan,”
and (3) Canaan and his descendants. Smith’s accounts of these
Cowdery, John Whitmer, Emma Hale Smith, and Sidney Rigdon. The
record of this original dictation is found in a single manuscript kept by
these scribes. Faulring, Jackson, and Matthews, Original Manuscripts,
77–79, designate this manuscript as “OT1.”
Two other extant manuscripts are of importance to this study. In
order to travel from New York to join Latter-day Saints gathered in
Ohio, Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon paused in their work on the
Old Testament around December 30, 1830, after having completed
the Enoch material, and after having reined in the dictation back toward the Genesis text, dictating through the end of Genesis 5. In January 1831, John Whitmer prepared a copy of the original manuscript
(“OT3”), probably for personal use. Smith and Rigdon returned to
the Genesis account of Noah and the flood around February 4, 1831,
working through Genesis 24:41 by March 7, 1831. That day, Smith reported a revelation that instructed him and Rigdon to turn their attention to the New Testament; the next day, he reported another revelation that instructed Whitmer to prepare a (second) copy of the Old
Testament manuscript, which Whitmer completed on April 5, 1831.
When Smith returned to his work on the Old Testament in July 1832,
he adopted Whitmer’s second (complete and commissioned) copy as
the beginning of a new dictation manuscript (“OT2”). See Faulring,
Jackson, and Matthews, Original Manuscripts, 44, 58, 78–80, 586–
87; and Joseph Smith, February 9, 1831, “History, 1838–1856, Vol.
A-1 (December 23, 1805–August 30, 1834),” 87–88, 92–93, 95, 98,
the Joseph Smith Papers Online, http://josephsmithpapers.org/paper
Summary/history-1838-1856-volume-a-1-23-december-1805-30august-1834#!/paperSummary/history-1838-1856-volume-a-1-23december-1805-30-august-1834&p=93 (accessed December 17, 2014).
I provide the text of OT1 below (as transcribed by Faulring, Jackson, and Matthews, unless otherwise indicated) because it served as
Smith’s working manuscript for his dictation of the material of primary interest here. I note differences between manuscripts and changes
made to them where significant to this study, and add terminal punctuation to quotations.
34
groups demonstrate a preoccupation with human offenses as occasions for divine curses and marks, a dependence on the Cain
theory, and an attempt to resolve the many difficulties surrounding Noah’s curse upon Canaan.
Cain, or Master Mahon
In his revision of Genesis 4, Smith did not immediately attach race to Cain. Before turning to Cain’s curse or the mark
of that curse, Smith began by discussing the occasion of Cain’s
curse: his guilt. Upon having “gotten a man from the Lord,”
Smith’s Eve supposes, “wherefore he [Cain] may not reject his
[the Lord’s] words.” Smith immediately negates Eve’s supposition: “but behold also cain hearkened not saying Who is the
Lord that I should know him.” Whereas Eve disobeys God in
the Edenic innocence of Genesis 3, Cain becomes the first example of willful disobedience. Cain’s brother Abel “hearkened
unto the voice of the Lord.” Thus, before the brothers make their
offerings, Smith distinguishes them in terms of hearkening and
hearkening not.
Smith infuses Cain’s story with temptation away from God.
Thus, Cain “loved Satan more than God & Satan commanded
him saying make an offering unto the Lord.” Given such dubious inspiration, it is not surprising that the Lord rejects Cain’s
offering: “Satan knew this & it pleased him.” Smith notices an
enigmatic line in Genesis 4:7 and expands it to suggest that Cain
might be specially bound to Satan. The Lord tells Cain:
& if thou doest not well sin lieth at the door & Satan desireth to
have thee & except thou shalt hearken unto my commandments I
will deliver thee up & it shall be unto thee according to his desire
& thou shalt rule over him for from this time forth thou shalt be
the father of his lies thou shalt be called perdition for thou wast
also before the world & it shall be said in times to come that these
abominations was had from cain for he rejected the greater counsel which was had from God & this is a cursing which I will put
upon thee except thou repent.
Cain, however, “loved Satan more than God.” Smith then clari-
35
fies what he means by “these abominations”:
& satan saith unto Cain swear unto me by thy throat & if thou
tell it thou shalt die & swear thy brethren by their heads & by the
living God that they tell it not for if they tell it they shall surely
die & this that thy father may not know it & this day I will deliver
thy brother Abel into thine hands & Satan swa <swore> unto Cain
that he would do according to his commands & all these things
were done in secret & Cain saith truly I am Mahon the master of
this great secret that I may murder & get gain Wherefore Cain
was called master Mahon & he gloried in his wickedness.
After slaying Abel, “cain gloried in that which he had done
saying I am free surely the flocks of my brother falleth into my
hands.” “These abominations,” then, become a matter of secretly covenanting to “murder & get gain.” The Book of Mormon
deals heavily with this motif as “secret combinations” between
the books of Alma and Ether. As early as his 1829 dictation of
the Book of Mormon, Smith portrayed Cain in similar terms:
The Book of Mormon identifies Satan as “that same being who
did plot with Cain, that if he would murder his brother Abel, it
should not be known unto the world. And he did plot with Cain
and his followers, from that time forth.”28 The Book of Mormon
describes the nature of this plot in some detail: “And Akish did
administer unto them the oaths which was [sic] given by them
of old, who also sought power, which had been handed down
even from Cain, who was a murderer from the beginning. And
they were kept up by the power of the devil to administer these
oaths unto the people, to keep them in darkness, to help such as
sought power, to gain power, and to murder, and to plunder, and
to lie, and to commit all manner of wickedness and whordoms
[sic].”29 Thus, the Book of Mormon, like Smith’s subsequent Bible revision details Cain’s offense as a secret oath to “murder &
get gain.”30
28
Smith, The Book of Mormon (1830), 424.
Ibid., 553–54.
30
On the anti-Masonic valence of the “secret combinations” that
29
36
Smith dictates Genesis 4:9–12 almost word-for-word from
his 1828 Cooperstown Bible, leaving intact the account of Cain’s
curse: that Cain will be “a fugitive” and “a vagabond,” and the
ground will not yield its fruit to him. Smith’s Cain begins his complaint, “Satan tempted me because of my brothers flock & I was
wroth also for his offering thou didst except [sic] & not mine.” After complaining of the curse placed upon him, Smith’s Cain fears
that whoever finds him will slay him “because of mine oath31 for
these things are not hid from the Lord.” Smith does not tamper
with the mark: “Whosoever slayeth Cain vengeance shall be taken
on him seven fold & the Lord set a mark upon Cain lest any finding him should kill him.” Smith’s work with Cain in his revision
of the Bible evidences a particular preoccupation: Smith leaves the
curse and the mark as they stand, but he vigorously changes the
nature of Cain’s offense. While the Book of Mormon primarily
describes the secretiveness of Cain’s offense, Smith’s Bible revision
elaborates repeatedly on the willfulness of Cain’s offense.
In Smith’s revision, Cain’s “wife & many of his brethren”
(presumably those identified as also having “loved Satan more
than God”) join him in exile. Dictating the genealogy of Cain
across more than one day, Smith emphasizes that each new generation is filled with “Sons & daughters,” such that Cain and his
followers become a large group of Cainites within a few generations.32
Smith elaborates, see Dan Vogel, “Mormonism’s ‘Anti-Masonick Bible,’” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 9 (1989): 17–30; and
Vogel, “Echoes of Anti-Masonry: A Rejoinder to Critics of the Anti-Masonic Thesis,” in American Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon, edited by Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe (Salt Lake City:
Signature Books, 2002), 275–320.
31
Though John Whitmer originally wrote “oath” in both of his
copies, he later replaced “oath” with “iniquities” in his second copy,
probably after it had become the working manuscript for Smith’s dictation in July 1832.
32
Having paused in his dictation to Cowdery in the middle of
Genesis 4:18, Smith began dictating his revision to John Whitmer on
37
Five generations down from Cain in the Genesis account,
Lamech confides to his wives that he has “slain a man to my
wounding, and a young man to my hurt. If Cain shall be avenged
seven-fold, truly Lamech seventy and seven-fold.” Smith notices
the parallel to Cain and Lamech’s magnified sense of his transgression. Smith explains the gravity of Lamech’s sin, recalling
Cain’s title of “Master Mahan.”33 Rather than being driven by
jealousy over his brother’s flocks, Lamech murders his grandOctober 21, 1830, continuing to fill Cain’s generations with “sons &
daughters.”
33
Faulring, Jackson, and Matthews, Original Manuscripts, 45, take
Whitmer to have written “Mahon” here in OT1, as Cowdery had done
twice earlier, but they also indicate that he spelled Cain’s new title
“Mahan” consistently throughout OT3 and OT2. I concur on the second point but dissent on the first: Cowdery spelled the name “Mahon,” while Whitmer most likely spelled the name “Mahan” in every
instance. Faulring, Jackson and Matthews observe, “His [ John Whitmer’s] lowercase o’s and a’s appear virtually identical.” Where Whitmer supplies the name in OT1, the eye of the fourth grapheme is indeed closed, but a vertical stroke extending to the baseline follows it.
Thus, though the manuscript is difficult to decipher, “Mahan” is the
more natural reading. Furthermore, it is unlikely that Whitmer would
have shifted completely in both his personal and commissioned copies
away from the spelling that both he and Cowdery used in the dictation
manuscript without explicit instruction from Smith, and it is unlikely
that Smith would have directed Whitmer to initiate this change in his
personal copy (OT3). It is much more likely that, in preparing his copies, Whitmer simply preferred his own spelling to Cowdery’s. Far from
requiring us to suppose that Whitmer later judged Cowdery’s spelling
to be inaccurate, the difference in spellings probably reflects Smith’s
own pronunciation. The alternate graphemes “a” and “o” indicate that
Smith most likely pronounced Cain’s new title /meɪ̯hən/ (International Phonetic Alphabet); /meɪ̯hɑn/ is possible, and /mɑhən/ is less likely.
Cowdery probably used the distinct graphemes “a” and “o” to indicate
a difference between two phonemes, thus rendering /mɑhɑn/ even less
likely. On the similarity of “Master Mahon” to “Master Mason,” see
Vogel, “Echoes of Anti-Masonry,” 288-89. See also note 30 above.
38
father Irad,34 who, having discovered that Lamech, like Cain,
had entered into a covenant with Satan, had begun to reveal
Lamech’s secret. Thus, Lamech murdered him “not like unto
Cain his brother abel for the sake of getting gain but . . . for the
oaths sake for from the days of Cain there was a Secret combination & their works were in the dark & they knew evry man his
brother.” Lamech’s sin was not merely seeking to “murder & get
gain,” but murdering in order to “murder & get gain.”
When Smith’s dictation turned on November 30, 1830, from
Lamech’s personal wickedness toward a spread of his abominations, “Lameck & his house & all they that had covenante[t]<d>
with Satan” received a new curse: that “he [the Lord] ministered
not unto them.” The abominations of this secret combination
“began to spread among all the Sons of men”:
& among the daughters of men these things were not spoken because that Lameck had spoken the Secret unto his wives & they
Rebelled against him & declared these things abroad & had not
compasion wherefore Lamech was dispised & cast out & came
not among the Sons of men lest he should die & thus the works
of darkness began to prevail among all the sons of men & God
cursed the Earth with a sore curse & was angery with the wicked
with all the sons of men whom he had made for they would not
hearken unto his voice nor believe on his o[l]<n>ly begotten Son
even him which he declared should come in the maridian of time
which was prepared from before the foundation of the world.
Here, Lamech, like Cain, is exiled, and he fears for his life because
his oath has been made known; and here, again, “God cursed the
Earth with a sore curse.” Smith, then, presents Lamech’s curse,
as well as his sin, in terms very similar to those he uses in relation to Cain, though Lamech, unlike Cain, is not identified by a
new “mark.” (As we shall see below, Smith later identifies Cain’s
34
Smith seems more interested in introducing Lamech’s oath than
in supplying a coherent profile for Lamech’s victim, whom Smith
identifies as a “young man” in accordance with Genesis, but also as
Lamech’s grandfather Irad, placing strain on the image of the youthful victim.
39
mark as one that his descendants inherit.) Also of great significance here is Smith’s continued portrayal of divine disfavor as a
response to human wickedness: the sins of Lamech and his family
occasion divine withdrawal.
The People of Canaan
The responsiveness of divine providence to the offenses of
Cain and Lamech anticipates the discussion of prevenient grace
with which Smith introduces the people of Canaan. In his revision of Genesis 5, Smith presents Seth’s line as righteous, keeping a record of God’s dealings with humanity from the foundation of the earth. As he details Seth’s genealogy, however,
Smith suggests that Satan’s influence begins to overpower some
of Seth’s descendants: “from thence forth came wars & blood
sheds & a mans hand was against his own brother in administering death because of secret works seeking for Power.” Seth’s
son Enos leads “the residue of the People of God” to “a Land of
Promise”—which he names after his son Cainan—where they
are able to dwell in righteousness.
Continuing Seth’s genealogy on December 1, 1830, Smith
expands the Genesis text to provide a lengthy account of the
visions, prophecies, and exhortations of Enoch, a descendant of
Seth and Enos whom Genesis 5:24 identifies as having “walked
with God: and he was not; for God took him.”35 The Lord speaks
to Smith’s Enoch, calling him to be a prophet and a seer though
he is “but a lad” and “slow of speech.” The Lord tells Enoch that
“this people . . . have saught their own councils in the dark and
in their own abominations have they devised murder and have
not kept the commandment that <which> I gave unto their father Adam.” Thus, the Lord commands Enoch to preach because
Sethites (whom Enoch will soon identify) have begun to adopt
“their own abominations,” falling away from an Adamic tradition of righteousness. Enoch says that he “came out from the
land of Cainan the land of my fathers a land of righteousness
35
Emma Smith served as scribe at this point, with John Whitmer
returning as scribe probably the same day.
40
unto this day” in order to promote righteousness, presumably
among those who have not yet adopted said abominations.
After expounding the doctrine of the fall, Enoch begins to
preach repentance through Jesus Christ to his audience: “Christ
hath atoned for original guilt wherein the sins of the Parents
cannot be answered upon the heads of the Children for they are
whole from the foundation of the world. . . . [T]hey are agents
unto themselves.”36 Prevenient grace has freed Enoch’s listeners
from original sin, and he encourages them to freely accept baptism, explaining that the Lord taught this gospel to Adam, who,
after being baptized, heard a voice from heaven: “Thou art baptized with fire & with the Holy Ghost this is the record of the
father & the Son from henceforth & forever & thou art after the
order of him who was without begining of days or end of years
from all eternity to all eternity behold thou art one in me a son
of God & thus may all become my sons amen.” According to
Enoch, then, Christians participate in the “order” of the Son of
God, but they must choose the Christian gospel and this order
as “agents unto themselves.”37
Smith’s Enoch then juxtaposes this exhortation with a
prophecy of the wickedness of an antediluvian “people of Canaan,”—the Sethites introduced above in the divine command
to Enoch—with whom he and his audience are familiar:38
behold the people of Canaan which are num<e>rous shall go
fourth <forth> in battle aray against the people of Shum and shall
slay them that they shall utterly be destroyed and the people of
Canaan shall divide themselves in the land and the land shall be
barren and unfruitfull and none other people shall dwell there but
the people of Canaan for behold the Lord shall curse the land
36
John Whitmer returns as scribe here. Note here an echo of Coleman’s belief that children are free from the sins of parents as cited
above.
37
Smith added an explicit reference to the Christianity of Adam
as “priesthood” to OT2 after it became his subsequent working manuscript.
38
At this point, Sidney Rigdon takes over as scribe.
41
with much heat and the barrenness thereof shall go fourth <forth>
forever and there was a blackness come upon all the Children of
Canaan that they were dispised among all people.
The placement of this prophecy immediately following
Enoch’s exhortation on prevenient grace makes clear that the
people of Canaan, like Cain and Lamech, will murder willingly
in order to get gain. Having declared that the people of Canaan
would be cursed with barren land, Smith’s Enoch “continued
to call upon all the people save save it were the people of Canaan to repent,” signaling that, like the Cainites under Lamech,
the people of Canaan were to be cut off from both spiritual and
bodily sustenance because of their wickedness. Accompanying
these curses, “there was a blackness come upon all the Children
of Canaan that they were dispised among all people.” This first
explicit reference to “blackness” clarifies the racial nature of the
marks described in this text: Because of their wickedness, the
Lord ceases to sustain the people of Canaan and marks them
with blackness so that others despise them.
Enoch’s admonitions to the other Sethites inspire a great increase in faith, and Enoch founds the city of Zion, which is “taken up into heaven.” On this occasion, the Lord shows Enoch in
a vision “the residue of the people which were the sons of Adam
and they were a mixture of all the seed of Adam save it were the
seed of Cain for the seed of Cain were black and had not place
among them.” Here, then, we learn that, as with the people of
Canaan, the Lord had set a general mark of blackness upon “the
seed of Cain” before the flood. Thus it is that Lamech received no
new mark to accompany the curse for his sin.
Smith places Enoch’s account of the people of Canaan between his exhortation and a vision of the Noachian flood, the
crucifixion, ascension, second coming of Christ, and the wickedness of the world in the last days, setting in relief the freedom of
the people of Canaan through the grace of God to choose righteousness or wickedness as “agents unto themselves.” Not only
are the people of Canaan the most immediate example of wicked antediluvians, but also it is clearly because of their wickedness
42
that the Lord destroys them in the flood.
Ham, the Father Canaan
Having finished his Enochic account, Smith suspended dictation across January 1831 before returning to the tale of the
flood and the curse upon Canaan. Smith’s dictation follows the
list of flood-survivors in Genesis 9:18 closely, except that, for
Smith, “Ham was the father Canaan,” rather than “the father of
Canaan.” After introducing the drunkenness of Noah, Smith explains in verse 22 that “Ham the father Canaan” told his brothers of having seen his father’s drunken nakedness. Sidney Rigdon, Smith’s scribe for this portion of the manuscript, omits the
word “of ” in both instances in which Genesis 9 identifies Ham
as “the father of Canaan.” Rigdon makes no comparable omissions throughout the dictation manuscript, almost certainly reflecting with accuracy Smith’s intentional dictation here.
This peculiarity in Smith’s dictation, however, was quickly
overlooked. When Smith and Rigdon shifted their attention to
the New Testament in March 1831, Smith directed John Whitmer to copy the Old Testament manuscript as it stood (i.e.,
through Genesis 24:41). Whitmer made his copy of this material over the next month while Smith continued his dictation to
Rigdon. As Whitmer copied the portion of the original manuscript prepared by Rigdon, he reversed Rigdon’s omissions of the
word “of,” probably believing them to be accidental. Whitmer
made these changes inline, not as interlinear insertions after the
fact. His choice to reinsert the word “of ” in each instance was almost certainly independent.
Smith’s dictation seems calculated to turn “the father Canaan” into a title for Ham, parallel to the title “master Mahon”
that he attached to Cain. In fact, Smith seems to have introduced the antediluvian people of Canaan primarily to supply
meaning to Ham’s title.39 Smith’s construction of Ham’s title it39
I am indebted to Truedson J. Sandberg for first suggesting to me
the significance of the people of Canaan in relation to Ham’s title. Joseph Fielding Smith (1876–1972), a proponent of the LDS priesthood
43
self, however, was meant to bring coherence to the curse of Ham
myth where it was lacking. The Genesis account has Noah curse
Canaan for Ham’s offense. This broadly recognized difficulty did
not fit Smith’s pattern of portraying curses as originally placed
upon willful offenders. Smith’s revision resolved this difficulty as
well as that of maintaining that “Hamite” slaves in America were
indeed the Canaanites whom Noah had cursed with slavery. For
Smith, Hamites are Canaanites because Ham is Canaan.
This point has long been obscured. Smith never published
his revision of Genesis 9, and there is no record of his ever having taught his versions of the curse of Ham myth or the Cain
theory in any detail, much less that Ham was “the Father Canaan.” When he referred to the sons of Ham, Canaan, or Cain,
he did so with the assumption that his audience understood who
these sons were. None of Smith’s recorded references to Ham or
Canaan outside of his scriptural texts ever establishes Ham and
Canaan as separate characters, e.g., by listing them together, by
identifying Ham as “the father of Canaan,” or by identifying Canaan as “the son of Ham.” If anything, Smith seems to have referred to Ham and Canaan interchangeably. Beginning with the
1867 publication of Smith’s Bible revision by the Reorganized
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, all publications of
Smith’s revision of Genesis 9 have identified Ham as the father
of Canaan. The key to understanding Ham’s identity—which is
the heart of the racial narratives in Smith’s Bible revision and the
ban, saw a similar connection, though he understood Ham to have assigned this name to his son Canaan. (He also mistook the people of Canaan to be Cainites.) Joseph Fielding Smith, The Way to Perfection (Salt
Lake City: Deseret Book, 1972), 107. In the absence of a progenitor
named “Canaan,” Smith’s reference to the people of Canaan as “the
Children of Canaan” probably reveals that he understood the name
“Canaan” to have similar significance for the people of Canaan and
for the Canaanites. Some writers have even conflated the antediluvian people of Canaan and the postdiluvian Canaanites in Smith’s racial
narratives. See, for example, Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith:
Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 288.
44
Book of Abraham—has lain hidden in the original manuscript.
Smith may not have noticed that his solution to the difficulties facing the curse of Ham myth would render later genealogies difficult until he dictated them. (See Gen. 10:6; 1 Chron.
1:8.) Even if Smith had foreseen this difficulty, revising this genealogy to equate Canaan with Ham would have been difficult.
It is possible that recognition of the problem that Genesis 10
posed to his revision of Genesis 9 partially motivated Smith to
supply a distinct Canaanite genealogy in the Book of Abraham.
In any case, we shall see that the Book of Abraham genealogy
gains considerable coherence from Smith’s revision of Genesis 9.
Smith abbreviates the Genesis 9:23 account of Shem and
Japheth’s reaction to Ham’s offense, omitting the words “and
covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward.” Smith maintains the rest of Genesis 9:23, thus still indicating that Shem and Japheth “went backward” and that “they
saw not their fathers nakedness.” Though it is possible that
Smith intended to eliminate a redundancy here, he later restored
the omitted clauses, indicating that his omission was most likely
accidental, skipping from the first instance of the word “backward” to the words following the second instance.40
Smith does little else to change the account of Noah’s curse,
40
Whitmer restored the omitted clauses as an interlinear insertion in OT2. This insertion is one of a set of corrections that Whitmer seems to have made with distinct ink to OT2 after it had become
Smith’s working manuscript in mid-1832. Though it is possible that
Smith lost his place by looking back and forth between his source text
and the dictation manuscript, his dictation generally evinces close attention to his source text, and he did not act here as his own scribe.
It is also possible that Smith paused after having read the first “backward” aloud to Rigdon in order to scan vv. 25–27 further down the
column of his Bible to plan how to make his next—and highly significant—change to the text. A comma follows each of these instances of
the word “backward” in Smith’s 1828 Bible, inviting just such a pause
and omission. I am indebted to Jeffrey Stackert for suggesting that I
consider the importance of the two instances of the word “backward.”
45
but what he does is highly significant. As Smith dictates it, Noah’s curse runs as follows: “And he said cursed be Canaan a Servent of servents shall he be unto his breatheren and he said blessed be the Lord God of Shem and Canaan shall be his servent
and a vail of darkness shall cover him that he shall be known
among all men God shall enlarge Japheth and he shall dwell
in the tents of Shem and Canaan shall be his serven[t.41 Thus,
Smith attaches a mark of “darkness” to the Father Canaan to accompany a curse for his offense. Unlike Lamech, Smith’s Canaan
does not inherit a mark from his ancestors. The Father Canaan,
like Cain, receives a new mark that will render him (and his descendants) recognizable. Smith does nothing here to clarify the
nature of Ham’s offense or curse, focusing instead on the alignment of offense, curse, and mark in one character: Ham, the Father Canaan.
Thus it is that, between June 1830 and March 1831, Smith
constructed a clear pattern of “blackness” or “darkness” marking divine curses for human offenses. Smith’s curses are placed
upon original offenders, revealing his preoccupation with willful
human wickedness as the occasion for divine disfavor. Smith’s
characterization of the seed of Cain as “black” signals that he
built the Cain theory into his Bible revision. However, he focused on resolving the central difficulties of the curse of Ham
myth rather than working out a Cainite ancestry for the Canaanites, a problem that he would take up in 1835 as he dictated
the Book of Abraham.
CURSES AND MARKS: THE BOOK OF ABRAHAM
In July 1835, Smith took an interest in Egyptian papyrus
41
Faulring, Jackson, and Matthews, Original Manuscript, 52, use
this notation to indicate that a tear in the manuscript page renders this
“t” difficult to read. This tear may have extended through the letter before Whitmer prepared OT2: Whitmer renders this word “Servents,”
which does not match the text of Smith’s 1828 Bible or OT1 (though
it likely reflects Whitmer’s understanding of Noah’s curse as extending
to Canaan’s descendants).
46
documents and mummies that a traveling exhibitor brought to
Kirtland, Ohio. Smith pooled money from the Mormon community in Kirtland to purchase the mummies and papyri, the
latter of which, Smith reported, contained records kept by the
ancient patriarchs Abraham and Joseph.42 The mummies and
papyri became curiosities for both members of the Mormon
community and those who visited the Mormon prophet in
Kirtland.43
There is no record that Smith attempted to produce the writings of Joseph. Over the next several months, however, Smith
did produce an Abrahamic account that told of his descent into
Egypt, Pharaoh’s genealogy, astronomy, a premortal existence,
and the creation.44 By October 1, 1835, Smith had recorded
42
Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 286.
See, for example, Joseph Smith, October 24, 1835, October 29,
1835, and December 12–14, 1835, in Journal, 1835–1836, in Journals,
Volume 1: 1832–1839, 73, 76, 120–22, edited by Dean C. Jessee, Mark
Ashurst-McGee, and Richard L. Jensen, Vol. 1 of the Journal Series
of The Joseph Smith Diaries, general editors Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, and Richard Lyman Bushman (Salt Lake City: Church
Historian’s Press, 2008), 73, 76, 120–22;.
44
Despite its lack of reference to race, Mormon apostle Orson
Hyde seems to have assigned racial significance to the preexistence
account in the Book of Abraham as early as 1845. Speech of Elder Orson Hyde, delivered before the High Priest’s [sic] Quorum in Nauvoo, April
27th, 1845, upon the Course and Conduct of Mr. Sydney Rigdon, and upon
the Merits of His Claims to the Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints (City of Joseph, Ill.: John Taylor, 1845), 30. Though
Smith’s revision of Genesis describes Cain as being “also before the
world,” Smith’s Bible revision and the Book of Abraham consistently
refer to race as a mark of curses occasioned by mortal wickedness. By
assigning wicked desires to inheritors of the Canaanite curse before
mortality, Hyde’s account responds to the tension between inherited
curses and the freedom of human beings as “agents unto themselves” in
Smith’s narratives. However, Hyde uses his elaboration of preexistence
as an instrument to pit Brigham Young’s claims to authority against
those of Sidney Rigdon following Smith’s death, and there is no re43
47
some impressions of what would become Pharaoh’s genealogy,
mentioning a “pharaoah,” a “princess or queen,” “a royal family in
female line,” and “the land of Egypt first seen under water.”45 In
the most expansive record of his impressions, Smith mentioned
“descent from her by whom Egypt was discovered,” and identified both a Pharaoh and a queen as descendants of Ham, indicating that, as such, this Pharaoh did not inherit “the priestly
blessing, because of the transgrissions of Ham, which blessing
fell upon Shem from under the hand of Noah.”46 This expanded
cord of Smith assigning racial significance to his preexistence doctrine. Most significantly, the tension between inheritance and freedom
in these narratives results from Smith’s attribution of inherited curses
to willful wickedness. If Smith came to assign racial significance to his
preexistence doctrine, it is unlikely that he did so before dictating the
Book of Abraham. See also note 1 above.
45
These phrases come from the earliest portion of Joseph Smith’s
“Egyptian Alphabet,” which appears in his own hand and primarily
outlines Pharaoh’s genealogy, though it first expresses interest in “the
first being who exercises Supreme power” and the authority held by
“the first man,” anticipating the juxtaposition in the Book of Abraham between Abraham’s desire to obtain the priesthood that God
gave Adam and the origins of Egypt. Smith’s journal reports that, on
the afternoon of October 1, 1835, he “labored on the Egyptian alphabet, in company with brsr O[liver] Cowdery and W[illiam] W.
Phelps: The system of astronomy was unfolded.” Smith had recorded material relating to Abraham’s descent into Egypt before adding
material from this “unfolding” to the document. See Joseph Smith,
“Egyptian Alphabet, JS and Oliver Cowdery Scribe, circa July-circa
December 1835,” “Egyptian Alphabet, Oliver Cowdery Scribe, circa
July-circa December 1835,” “Egyptian Alphabet, William W. Phelps
Scribe, circa July-circa December 1835,” the Joseph Smith Papers Online, Revelations and Translations, 8101–03, http://josephsmithpapers.org/the-papers#/R2L/JSPPR6 (accessed January 1, 2015); and
Joseph Smith, October 1, 1835, “Journal, 1835-1836,” in Journals, Volume 1:1832–1839, 67.
46
The “Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language” presents several expanded versions of the outline contained in the “Egyp-
48
outline reveals elements of Smith’s version of the curse of Ham
myth and signals the importance of the “queen” and the “female
line.” When Smith finally dictated Abraham’s account of Pharaoh’s genealogy, he produced a narrative in which Abraham explicitly identifies Pharaoh and the Egyptians as inheritors of the
Canaanite curse through matrilineal ancestry. We shall see that
this genealogy demonstrates a dependence on Smith’s revision
of Genesis 9:18-27, which in turn elucidates Smith’s solution to
the problem of establishing Cainite ancestry for the Canaanites.
Smith probably first began dictation of Abraham’s narrative
on November 19, 1835, with Frederick G. Williams and Warren Parrish simultaneously acting as scribes.47 Smith’s Abraham
tian Alphabet.” See Joseph Smith, “Grammar and Alphabet of the
Egyptian Language, circa July-circa December 1835,” 3–5, 9–10, 14.
The words “Sign of the fifth degree of the first <Seceond> part” at
the beginning of the earliest Book of Abraham manuscripts likely
indicate that Smith developed the narrative most directly from the
first expanded outline of the “Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language.” See Joseph Smith, “Frederick G. Williams Copy of
Abraham Manuscript, circa October 1835 [Abraham 1:4–2:6],” and
“Warren Parish Copy of Abraham Manuscript, Fall 1835 [Abraham
1:4–2:2],” Joseph Smith Papers Online, Revelations and Translations,
7898, http://josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/grammar-andalphabet-of-the-egyptian-language-circa-july-circa-december-1835
(accessed December 21, 2014).
47
Several identical deletions and a nearly simultaneous shift in
spelling from “Pharoah” to “Pharaoh” between these scribes’ manuscripts suggest that these two earliest manuscripts from Williams and
Parrish are direct products of the same dictation, as does the earliest reference to the “translation” of the Book of Abraham (i.e., dictation of a narrative, as opposed to work on the “Egyptian Alphabet” or
the “Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language”) in Smith’s
journal. On November 19, 1835, Smith reports that he kept company with both Williams and Parrish early in the day and that he “spent
the day in translating the Egyptian records.” Smith’s journal reports
“rapid progress” on the translation the following day, and the translation of “some” material on November 24. Thus, November 19, 20, and
49
begins his account by indicating that his descent into Egypt is
closely tied to his desire for priesthood, which he describes as
a patriarchal order. Abraham begins in Chaldea, where he observes a corruption of priestly authority (to which his father has
become subject) largely inspired by Egyptian influence. Abraham almost becomes a victim of human sacrifice before the
Lord delivers him and leads him out of the land. He tells us that
the priest who sought to sacrifice him had previously sacrificed
“three virgins at one time who were the daughters of Onitah—
one of the regular royal discent directly from the loins of Ham
these virgins were offered up because of their virtue they would
not bow down to worship Gods of wood, or of stone therefore
they were Killed upon this alter And it was done after the manner of the Egyptians.”48
24, 1835, are probably the best dates to assign to Williams’s and Parrish’s manuscripts. An identically placed “X” on page 2 of Williams’s
manuscript and page 3 on Parrish’s manuscript may mark the break
in dictation between November 19 and 20, and Smith’s November 24
report of having “translated some of the Egyptian, records” may account for the portion of the dictation that is recorded on the last page
of Williams’s manuscript but which is absent from Parrish’s manuscript. Thus, the best date for Smith’s dictation of Pharaoh’s genealogy is probably November 20, 1835. See Edward H. Ashment, “Reducing Dissonance: The Book of Abraham as a Case Study,” in The Word
of God: Essays on Mormon Scripture, edited by Dan Vogel (Salt Lake
City: Signature Books, 1990), 225; Ashment, “Abraham in the Breathing Permit of Hôr (pJS 1),” Mormon Scripture Studies: An E-Journal
of Critical Thought, http://mormonscripturestudies.com/boabr/eha/
abrhor.asp#hn7, (accessed December 30, 2014); Joseph Smith, “Frederick G. Williams Copy of Abraham Manuscript, circa October 1835
[Abraham 1:4–2:6]”; Joseph Smith, “Warren Parish Copy of Abraham
Manuscript, Fall 1835 [Abraham 1:4–2:2],”; and Joseph Smith, November 19, 1835, November 20, 1835, and November 24, 1835, “Journal, 1835–1836,” Journals, Volume 1: 1832–1839, 107, 109. I am indebted to Brent Metcalfe for directing me to consider Williams’s and
Parrish’s manuscripts as products of a single dictation.
48
I provide the text of Williams’s manuscript despite the more fre-
50
After Abraham’s deliverance, the Lord promises him the
same priesthood that Noah enjoyed and smites the Chaldeans
for their wickedness. Abraham indicates that this “smiting”
caused “great morning [sic] in Chaldean and also in the court
of Pharaoh.” At this point, before going on with the account of
his descent into Egypt and later material, Abraham discourses at
length on Pharaoh and priesthood:
which Pharaoh signifies King by royal blood. Now this King of
Egypt was a discendent from the loins of Ham and was a partaker
of the blood of the Cananitess by birth: From this decent sprang
all the Egyptians and thus the blood of the Cannites was preserved in the land. The land of Egypt being first discovered by a
woman, who was the daughter of Ham; and the daughter of Zeptah. which in the Chaldea signifies Egypt, which sign[i]fies that
which is forbidden. Whin this woman discovered the land it was
under water, who after settled her sons in it: and thus from Ham
sprang that race which preserved the curse in the land.
Now the <first> government of Egypt, was established by
Pharaoh, the eldest sun son of Egyptes the daughter of Ham; and
it was after the manner of the government of Ham, which was
Patriarchal. Pharaoh being a righteous man established his kingdom, and Judged his people wisely and Justly all his days, seeking
earnestly to imitate that order established by the fathers in the
first generation in the days of the first Patriarchal reign, even in
the reign of Adam. And also Noah his father. For in his days who
blessed him with the blessing<s> of the earth, and of with the
blessings of wisdom, but cursed him as pertaining to the priesthood.
Now Pharaoh being of that leniage by which he could not
have the right of priesthood; notwithstanding the Pharaohs would
fain claim it from Noah through Ham: Therefore, my father was
led away by their—idolitry.
Though Abraham’s descriptions of idolatry and human sacquent irregularity of his spelling, noting below one instance in which
Williams’s spellings may reflect a distinction in Smith’s dictation that
Parrish failed to note.
51
rifice certainly index Egyptians as wicked, Abraham’s Egyptian genealogy is concerned very little with Egyptian offenses.
Rather, it is concerned with the lineage through which a race
preserves the curse of non-participation in “priesthood.” Where
Smith’s Bible revision bars Cainites and the people of Canaan
from divine ministration and Christian evangelization, Abraham’s Egyptian genealogy attaches priesthood ineligibility to
“the Cananitess,” ignoring the curse of slavery in Genesis 9, and
producing a general pattern of banishment from the Christian
community among the Cainites, the people of Canaan, and the
Canaanites.
Smith’s decision to characterize the privilege denied to Canaanites as “priesthood” is probably related to his understanding
of the nature of Ham’s offense. In 1841, Smith argued against
strict temperance by speaking “of the curse of ham for laughing
at Noah while in his wine but doing no harm.”49 The context
of this reference suggests that Smith intended to excuse Noah’s
drunkenness by appealing to the efficacy of the curse that he
uttered. Smith likely understood Ham’s disregard for his father
(i.e., “laughing . . . but doing no harm”) as the offense that occasioned his having been cursed “as pertaining to the priesthood,”
which Smith’s Abraham describes as patriarchal.50
49
Wilford Woodruff, November 7, 1841, in Waiting for World’s
End: The Diaries of Wilford Woodruff, edited by Susan Staker (Salt
Lake City: Signature Books, 1993), 48–49. Rather than reflecting the
common reference to the curse upon Canaan as “the curse of Ham,”
Woodruff ’s tight juxtaposition of “the curse of ham” and “for laughing
at Noah” unites offense and curse in the person of Ham, accurately reflecting Smith’s understanding of the story.
50
LDS Church historians expanded Woodruff ’s account in the
mid-1850s to include explicit references to priesthood that seem to accurately reflect the intent of Smith’s 1841 statement, though the additional affirmation that “the curse remains upon the posterity of Cainaan until the present day” is likely a product of the LDS racial priesthood policy under Brigham Young. Joseph Smith, November 7, 1841,
“History, 1838–1856, Volume C–1 Addenda,” 19–20, Joseph Smith
52
In 1842, Smith changed both Zep-tah’s and Egyptes’s names
to “Egyptus,” rendering this genealogy difficult to decipher.51
The original, however, is clear: Abraham identifies “all the Egyptians” as “Cananitess” or “discendent[s] from the loins of Ham.”
Pharaoh is “the eldest sun son of Egyptes the daughter of Ham”
and “the daughter of Zep-tah.” “Thus,” i.e., because Egyptes discovered and settled her sons in the land of Egypt, “from Ham
sprang that race which preserved the curse in the land” whereby
Pharaoh (and Egyptes’s other children) were cursed “as pertaining to the priesthood.”52
While Smith’s Abraham includes two female characters in
this genealogy, the name “Canaan” is notably absent from Abraham’s accounts of Noah’s curse and the ancestry through which
Pharaoh becomes “a partaker of the blood of the Cananitess.”
Abraham portrays Egyptes, “the daughter of Ham; and the
daughter of Zep-tah” as the mother of all Egyptians, the instrumental character through whom the Canaanite curse is preserved. Canaan the son of Ham is clearly missing from this Canaanite genealogy, but neither does he belong here. Any attempt
to introduce Canaan the son of Ham into this genealogy would
Papers Online, Histories, 8119, http://josephsmithpapers.org/papers
Summary/history-1835-1836-volumeC-1-addenda (accessed December 31, 2014).) I am indebted to Dan Vogel for directing me to the
original source.
51
Brent Lee Metcalfe has recently provided a thorough study of
this textual development in “The Curious Textual History of ‘Egyptus’
the Wife of Ham,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 34, no. 2
(Fall/Winter 2014): 1–11.
52
As noted above, the genealogy of Pharaoh that Smith’s Abraham provides here diverts Canaanite genealogy from the accounts of
Genesis 10 and 1 Chronicles 1, accounts that Smith’s revision of Genesis 9 renders problematic. On Hamitic ancestry for Pharaoh, see also
William Clayton, May 1, 1843, “Journal Two: Nauvoo, Illinois 1842–
1846,” in An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton, edited
by George D. Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books in association
with Smith Research Associates, 1995), 100.
53
require Egyptes to be a “daughter” of Ham in the sense of being a female descendant, but not in the sense of having Ham
and his wife as parents. Any such interpretation is spread thin
across Egyptes’s parallel identities as “the daughter of Ham” and
“the daughter of Zep-tah,” which are almost certainly meant to
indicate that Ham and Zep-tah begat Egyptes. (Similarly, we
should understand the “three virgins” or “the daughters of Onitah” in Abraham’s account as Onitah’s three young daughters,
not female descendants of otherwise unspecified relation.) Rather, Smith’s “Ham, the father Canaan” is the progenitor of the Canaanites, and his genealogy provided here is both complete and
coherent: Egyptes preserves “the blood of the Cananitess” as “the
daughter of Ham.”
Recognition of Ham as the Father Canaan, however, does
not immediately reveal the importance of Egyptes’s instrumental role as the mother of all Egyptians, through whom a curse is
preserved.53 Smith’s Abraham could have traced the same ancestry and curse of the Egyptians by merely specifying that they
were “discendent[s] from the loins of Ham.” Zep-tah, moreover,
serves no readily apparent function in this narrative. Abraham’s
introduction of two female characters here is unexpected yet
crucial.
The emphasis on matrilineal characters in this genealogy almost certainly indexes Smith’s intent to combine here the curses and marks of Cain and Canaan.54 Smith’s Bible revision as53
The parallel here to Eve is presaged in Smith, “Grammar and
Alphabet of the Egyptian Language,” 10: “Zip Zi: all women: … And
from the first woman who bore children; and men were multiplied
upon the earth.”
54
Phelps had proposed such a solution in his February 6, 1835,
letter. (See note 18 above.) However, he identified Canaan’s Cainite
mother as the link between Canaanites and Cain, understanding Canaan to be the son of Ham. It is possible that Phelps’s letter or his
involvement in the preparation of the “Egyptian Alphabet” and the
“Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language” influenced the
development of Smith’s solution for the Cain theory. Notably, how-
54
signs curses and marks to Cain, the people of Canaan, and the
Father Canaan for their own offenses, eliminating any need for
their ancestry to be cursed or marked. Nevertheless, the Bible
revision extends Cain’s cursed descendants to the days preceding the flood, demonstrating Smith’s interest in the Cain theory independent of the possibility of using it to attach dark skin
to Canaan himself. In his Bible revision, Smith attaches a new
mark of dark skin to Canaan but fails to attach such a mark to
Lamech because Lamech is a Cainite but the Father Canaan
is not. Rather, his daughter and her sons are: through his wife
Zep-tah. Where Smith prefers Egyptes as the sole founder of
Egypt—allowing him to clearly demonstrate a unification of
Canaanite and Cainite ancestry—he requires Zep-tah to trace
the preservation of Cainite ancestry. As Egyptes is the daughter
ever, Smith’s solution, which encompasses the “Egyptian Alphabet,”
the “Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language,” and the
Book of Abraham manuscripts, never reflects Phelps’s understanding
of Canaan as the son of Ham, referring only to Ham and Canaanites.
Phelps’s February 6, 1835, letter also mentions Egyptians, but clearly
not as descendants of Ham, as in Smith’s “Egyptian Alphabet.” For recent dialogue on the nature of Phelps’s involvement in the production
of the Book of Abraham, see Christopher C. Smith, “The Dependence
of Abraham 1:1–3 on the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar,” John
Whitmer Historical Association Journal 29 (2009): 38–54; and Samuel
M. Brown, “The Translator and the Ghostwriter: Joseph Smith and
William W. Phelps,” in Dimensions of Faith: A Mormon Studies Reader,
edited by Stephen C. Taysom (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2011),
259–96. Brent Lee Metcalfe suggests that the curse of non-participation in this patriarchal priesthood arises from the matriarchal link between Ham and the Canaanites. See Metcalfe, “The Curious Textual
History of ‘Egyptus’ the Wife of Ham,” 3 note 5. As noted above, I
take Smith’s interest in patriarchal priesthood in this text to have arisen from a prior understanding of Ham’s offense in Genesis 9 as a disregard for patriarchal authority. It was through matriarchal ancestry
that the curse was “preserved,” not begun. Smith’s account of Pharaoh’s
ancestry, along with his revision of Genesis 9, deals with a curse that
originates in the offender himself.
55
of Canaan and his wife, so also are all of her children descendants of both Canaan and Cain. Where Smith’s revision of the
Bible implements the Cain theory, the Book of Abraham provides a solution to its central problem: how to affirm that Cain
was an ancestor of the Canaanites.
Some remaining textual evidence may reflect Smith’s interest in Zep-tah as Egyptes’s Cainite mother. As indicated above,
Smith originally dictated this narrative to two scribes: Frederick
G. Williams and Warren Parrish. While Parrish’s manuscript refers twice to “the blood of the canaanites,” Williams’s text (provided above) refers to “the blood of the Cananitess” and “the
blood of the Cannites.”55 If Smith dictated “Cainites” in the second instance, then he not only pairs Canaanite and Cainite ancestries here, but he also signals the parallel preservation of their
seed in Egyptes: “The land of Egypt being first discovered by
a woman, who was the daughter of Ham; and the daughter of
Zep-tah.” Through Egyptes, Egyptians are of Ham and Zeptah, of Canaan and Cain. Parrish may have recorded “the blood
of the canaanites” twice under the assumption that Smith had
elided the second syllable of “Canaanites” when he had in fact
dictated “Cainites.” In any case, Egyptes’s identity as “the daughter of Ham; and the daughter of Zep-tah” clearly marks a dual
interest in patrilineal and matrilineal ancestry. Smith almost certainly included Zep-tah in Pharaoh’s genealogy in order to con55
Both Parrish’s and Williams’s manuscripts reflect hesitance here
that is difficult to interpret with confidence. Each may have originally
written something different. Notably, however, their manuscripts ultimately disagree. Parrish referred to his own original manuscript to
produce the copy that became the basis for later work on the Book of
Abraham, obscuring the distinction in Williams’s manuscript. See Joseph Smith, “William W. Phelps and Warren Parrish Copy of Abraham Manuscript, Summer–Fall 1835 [Abraham 1:1–2:18],” the Joseph Smith Papers Online, Revelations and Translations, 7643, http://
josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/william-w-phelps-and-warren-parrish-copy-of-abraham-manuscript-summer-fall-1835-abraham-11-218 (accessed January 1, 2015).
56
nect Cainite and Canaanite ancestry.
Without an understanding of Smith’s Ham as “the father
Canaan,” Smith’s implementation of the Cain theory—across
the Book of Mormon, his revision of the Bible, and the Book of
Abraham—may seem redundant, as the Cain theory originally
developed to attach race to Canaan, a function that the “vail of
darkness” in Smith’s revision of Genesis 9:26 performs. However,
as early as 1829, Smith demonstrates a preoccupation with understanding the original recipients of these curses and marks as
guilty of the offenses that occasion them, an understanding that
precludes Canaan as the son of Ham. Recognition of the Father
Canaan as Smith’s solution to problems facing the curse of Ham
myth elucidates the Egyptian genealogy that Smith produces
in the Book of Abraham and reveals Zep-tah to be the solution
that he provides for his version of the Cain theory.
RACIAL DISPENSATIONS AND DISPENSATIONS OF RACE
In his Bible revision, Smith’s Enoch refers to spiritual
“chaines of darkness” and a physical “veil of darkness” covering
the earth in his eschatological vision. These phrases are very
similar to Smith’s description of the mark set upon Canaan.
Furthermore, Smith’s Bible revision and the Book of Abraham
never explicitly refer to dark “skin.” If Smith intended “blackness” or “darkness” to symbolically or spiritually mark the wickedness of the accursed, it is quite evident that the mark was
not merely symbolic or spiritual: Smith consistently describes
the mark as a means for humans—not God—to identify the
accursed: the “fugitive,” the “vagabond,” the “dispised,” the
shunned, the “Servent of servents . . . known among all men,”
or “that race.” In the 1842 publication of the Book of Abraham, Smith introduced in the book’s third facsimile (adapted
from his papyri) a dark figure, designated “Olimlah; a slave belonging to the prince.”56 This 1842 depiction in the Book of
56
See Joseph Smith, “A Fac-simile from the Book of Abraham.
No. 3,” Times and Seasons 3 (May 16, 1842): 783–84. Smith based
57
Abraham of a slave as black is based on Smith’s particular understandings of blacks as slaves: Smith incorporated the Cain
theory and the curse of Ham myth into his scriptural texts and
supplied solutions to the problems that these myths faced.
Smith’s narratives, however, disrupt the significance of the
curse of Ham myth and the Cain theory as justifications of
racial slavery insofar as Smith actively configured these myths
as providential-historical explanations of spiritual rather than
physical bondage. Furthermore, while Smith clearly inherited
these racial myths and the problems facing them, the dependence of his solutions to these problems on the freedom of
primordial actors is distinctive. Thus, Smith inherited myths
about divine assignments of race, but he elaborated them as
accounts of historically racial limitations on the dispensation
of Christianity, emphasizing racial dispensations of providence
over providential dispensations of race. Enoch’s exhortations
suggest that the free will emphasized in these narratives mediates the tension embodied in them between the universality of
prevenient grace and the historical limitations of providence.
the character Olimlah upon the arms just visible at the edge of the
Book of the Dead Chapter 125 vignette in his papyri. Smith did not
change any of the visible colorings of the figures in his papyri, though
the presence of a dark figure in his copy of the Breathing Permit of
Hôr may have contributed to his original intention of incorporating
the curse of Ham myth and the Cain theory into the Book of Abraham narrative. See Joseph Smith, “Egyptian Papyri,” 1, 3, The Joseph
Smith Papers Online, Revelations and Translations, 7879, http://josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/egyptian-papyri, (accessed January 1, 2015); Smith, “A Fac-simile from the Book of Abraham, No.
1,” Times and Seasons 3 (March 1, 1842): 703; and Robert K. Ritner,
The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition (Salt Lake City:
Signature Books, 2013), 101–86, 253–56.
“PLAYING THE WHORE:”
THE DOMESTIC AND SEXUAL
POLITICS OF MORMON MISSIONARY
WORK ON TAHITI NUI AND
IN THE TUAMOTUS
Amanda Hendrix-Komoto
In 1845, Benjamin F. Grouard traveled to the Tuamotus, a
small island chain in the South Pacific. Born in New Hampshire in
1819, he had run away from his family as a teenager to work in the
New England shipyards. His family, not hearing from him for over
two years, had mourned him “as one among the dead.”1 His conversion to Mormonism in the 1830s compelled him to travel to his
family to let them know that he was alive and had learned of a new
gospel. It also, however, induced him to travel to the Pacific Islands
to spread the gospel to “the islands of the sea” and “the nations of the
earth.”2 Three other men accompanied him to the Pacific—Noah
Rogers, a New York doctor who already had several children; Addison Pratt, a seasoned whaler who had lived in the Sandwich Islands
AMANDA HENDRIX-KOMOTO {[email protected]} is a
PhD candidate in history at the University of Michigan where she defended her dissertation in April 2015.
1
Benjamin F. Grouard, Journal, August 7, 1843, 11, LDS Church
History Library, Salt Lake City.
2
These phrases occur frequently in the blessings that Mormon
missionaries received before they left Missouri, Ohio, and Illinois to
serve as missionaries. They also appear in Mormon scriptures (2 Ne.
29; D&C 25:17).
58
Amanda Hendrix-Komoto/Missionary Politics
59
as a beachcomber for several months; and Knowlton F. Hanks, a
man whose body was wracked with tuberculosis, who would die
on the voyage out. Pratt would also leave before they reached the
island of Tahiti Nui. When they stopped on the island of Tubuai for
supplies, Pratt decided that the people there had shown sufficient
interest in the Mormon gospel to warrant the presence of a white
missionary.
All of the men who arrived in the Pacific would find their
missions difficult. When Grouard and Hanks landed on the island of Tahiti Nui, they discovered that the French had established a protectorate over many of the islands in the area. War
between Pomare loyalists and the French colonial government
made missionary work almost impossible. Rumors circulated
that native Tahitians planned to slaughter every white man and
woman they found.3 Grouard wrote in his journal that his sermons were “often drowned out amidst the roll of the drum &
[the] shrill notes of the fife.”4
Grouard eventually decided to abandon Tahiti Nui. The
Mormon mission had already become fragmented. One of his
companions had decided to labor on the island of Tubuai, and
another one had returned to the United States after learning of
Joseph Smith’s death. He hoped that the Tuamotus would be
more receptive to the Mormon gospel than Tahiti Nui had been.
Far removed from Tahiti Nui, their small population had caused
Protestant missionaries to deem them too inconsequential to
warrant the presence of a full-time, white missionary. Grouard’s
arrival on the islands excited the local population, who saw in
3
These rumors are recorded in the letters that members of the
London Missionary Society (LMS) sent to their directors in London
during the war. See, for example, Alexander Simpson and William
Howe, Letter to the Directors of the LMS, February 8, 1843, Council
for World Missions/London Missionary Society (hereafter, CWM/
LMS), South Seas, Incoming Correspondence, Box 23, fd. 4, Jacket
C, School for Oriental and African Studies (hereafter, SOAS), London, England.
4
Grouard, Journal, May 24, 1844, 37.
60
his arrival an opportunity to increase their prestige and access to
European goods. Within a few months of his arrival, Grouard
had healed dozens of people, casting out demons and invoking
the power of God as he did so.5 He also married an indigenous
woman after learning that his white wife, whom he had left behind in Philadelphia, had probably left the Mormon community.
For the people of Tuamotus, his marriage offered the community enormous prestige and solidified the alliance between the two
communities. His marriage, combined with his prophecies and
dramatic invocations of God, led most of the inhabitants of the
principal island of Anaa to convert to Mormonism.
The Mormon missionaries were not the first people to evangelize the Pacific Islands. Christian missionary work had already
been underway for decades when Grouard arrived in the islands.
The London Missionary Society, a Congregationalist organization devoted to proselytizing indigenous people throughout the
world, had first sent missionaries to the area nearly fifty years
earlier.6 The Congregationalist missionaries were initially met
with indifference but eventually succeeded in converting the Tahitian royal family. The recent extension of the family’s authority
over many of the surrounding islands increased the influence of
the LMS immensely. The enormous power they had garnered by
5
Laurie Maffly-Kipp has argued that the success of Mormon missionary work in Tahiti and the South Pacific was partially the result
of the consonance between the missionaries’ belief in spiritual healing and native religious practices. Maffly-Kipp, “Assembling Bodies
and Souls: Missionary Practices on the Pacific Frontier,” in Practicing
Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965, edited by
Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Mark Valeri (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 68–69.
6
Historians have traditionally referred to the London Missionary
Society as the LMS in their studies of nineteenth-century missionary
work. The Journal of Mormon History, however, prefers not to use acronyms. To conform with the expectations of this journal, I have usually
used the full name of the London Missionary Society or abbreviated
it as “the society.”
61
the 1840s meant that their ideas about the role the family should
play in missionary work would define Grouard’s experiences on
Tahiti Nui and ultimately in the Tuamotus. As a result, his missionary work is best understood in contrast to their ideas and
experiences.
Grouard’s success on Anaa worried the London Missionary
Society in spite of the remoteness of the Tuamotus. Although
it was enormously influential in the Pacific Islands, the society
feared that the Christian civilization they had created was fragile. In a letter to the society’s directors in London, one of the
missionaries in the field wrote that he feared that the Mormon
missionaries had set “a machinery to work that [would] soon
take away all the Paumotus.”7 The seriousness of his response belied the poverty and small number of the Mormon missionaries
who had only three total men in the islands and whose destitution forced them to rely on their converts for support.
The London Missionary Society’s fears were partially a reaction to Mormon understandings of the relationship between
domesticity and missionary work. In the nineteenth century, domesticity was understood to encompass more than housework.
It included the way that individuals cared for their children,
dressed their bodies, and acted within their homes. Although religious faith was seen affecting public life, it was seen as a private,
domestic act.8 Unlike LMS members, early Mormon missionar7
George Platt, Letter to the Directors of the London Corresponding Society, January 16, 1849, CWM/LMS, South Seas, Incoming
Correspondence, Box 22, fd. 1, Jacket A, SOAS.
8
There is a large literature on the nature of domesticity in the
nineteenth century. For an introduction to the idea, see Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977); Linda Kerber, Women of
the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel
Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); and Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–
62
ies rejected the idea that indigenous people should be expected
to adopt the standards of white domesticity immediately upon
conversion. Instead, Mormon missionaries believed that the social, spiritual, and physical transformation of indigenous people
would occur once they had traveled to the banks of the Mississippi to build a physical Zion. Grouard and his companions
spoke to their Polynesian converts about the possibility that they
would travel to the Americas and participate in the events that
would initiate Christ’s return and eventually, create the kingdom
of God. This emphasis was in sharp contrast to later expectations, which encouraged Polynesian members to remain within
their native countries.
Although Mormon theology deified the family, the practicalities of Mormon missionary work required that they enact a
different understanding of the family than they practiced in the
United States. Traveling alone and without significant funds,
Mormon missionaries did not establish the white, middle-class
families that defined the missions of many Protestant organizations. The decision of Mormon missionaries to travel as impoverished itinerants fueled the concerns of the London Missionary Society about the seductiveness of Polynesian women and culture. Mormon understandings of missionary work
emphasized its temporariness. They saw the space in which
they lived as one in which God was beginning to remake the
world; temporal ties would come undone only to be remade.
This emphasis upon the undoing and remaking of the world
led them to temporarily leave their wives and children behind
in imitation of the apostles of the New Testament. Instead of
recreating their families in the Pacific, early Mormon missionaries lived in the homes of indigenous men and women. The
daily intimacy that resulted worried members of the London
Missionary Society who saw the Mormon willingness to live
among indigenous communities as reminiscent of their own
earlier decisions.
1800 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).
63
They believed that proximity to indigenous people had led
some individual members of their society to commit sexual immorality and apostasy. Although the society’s missionaries initially embraced marriages between white men and indigenous
women as a means of spreading the Christian gospel, early sexual indiscretions among a few of the white men they initially
sent to the Pacific convinced them that the only way to contain
male sexual desire was through the presence of white women.
Grouard’s decision to marry an indigenous woman only solidified the society’s concerns.
However, it is important to remember that polygamy
was not the issue that worried the London Missionary Society, or at least not yet. Rather, it was the intimacy between
white Mormon men and their indigenous converts. Although
Joseph Smith had already started practicing polygamy by the
early 1840s, it was a secret that remained hidden from much
of the Mormon community and from the outside world as a
whole. As such, Grouard and his companions saw their faith as
a monogamous one. They saw the rumors that circulated in the
Pacific, Great Britain, and the United States about sexual irregularities in the Mormon community as unfounded lies that
were meant to discredit their faith and their position among
indigenous communities.
“VOLUPTUOUS ATTRACTIONS:”
THE LONDON MISSIONARY SOCIETY’S
EARLY EXPERIENCES IN THE PACIFIC
The London Missionary Society had first sent missionaries—or, as they famously became known “godly mechanicks”—
to Tahiti Nui in 1797. Although the society was theoretically
ecumenical in nature, its members were primarily white Congregationalists. During the decades that its members labored before the arrival of Mormon missionaries, the London Missionary Society had succeeded in converting influential Ma‘ohi men
and women. As a result, they enjoyed positions of ecclesiastical
power. Initially, many of the society’s directors had imagined that
64
some of the single, white missionaries would marry indigenous
women, creating a mixed-race society that would serve as the
beginnings of Christianity in the Pacific.9 This decision to favor
marriages to non-white women had been a deliberate choice.
The London Missionary Society received applications from several white, unmarried women who wanted to serve as female
missionaries and who would have presumably married the white
men that the society sent to the Pacific Islands. In the end, only
six out of the thirty men it sent to the Pacific were married.10
In this vision of missionary work, Christian conversion and
marriage to white missionaries would create new domesticated
roles within which Ma‘ohi women would learn proper skills of
the home and motherhood which would eventually constitute
their becoming “civilized” in European eyes. The marriages that
the London Missionary Society imagined were both gendered
and racialized. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European Christians believed that men should serve as the public face and heads of their families, with the result that women
would accept their husbands’ leadership and, as a result, their
faith.11 As a result, the society rejected the possibility that white
9
Emily Manktelow, “Missionary Families and the Formation of
the Missionary Enterprise: The London Missionary Society and the
Family, 1795–1875” (Ph.D. diss., King’s College, 2010), 34–76; and
Nicolas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 37–40.
10
Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (New
York: Routledge, 2008), 107.
11
See Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots,
1825–1880 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990);
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the
Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, No. 25/26
(1990): 56–80; Amanda Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?
A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s
History,” Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993): 383–414; Catherine Hall
and Leonore Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English
Middle Class, 1780–1850 (1994; rpt., London: Routledge, 2002); Mary
65
women serving as missionaries could marry Ma‘ohi men, since
the women would be in jeopardy of following and adopting their
husbands’ culture. It was impossible for members of the London
Missionary Society to imagine a world in which white women
would marry Ma‘ohi men. The society’s directors, however, encouraged male members to find non-white women who would
convert to Christianity and then become their brides. The idealized world the directors imagined was one in which mixed-race
marriages between white men and Ma‘ohi women would transform society first on Tahiti Nui and eventually the rest of the
Pacific. This view, however, did not last beyond the first decade
of the nineteenth century.
One reason was that a few of the society’s earliest missionaries became infamous for their sexual indiscretions. Francis
Oakes, a young shoemaker, and John Cock, a carpenter, slept
with prostitutes in Sydney after they arrived from Tahiti Nui.
The former admitted he had also done so on the island.12 The
most infamous indiscretion, however, occurred not in Tahiti
but in Tonga. George Vason had been one of the initial missionaries whom the London Missionary Society had sent to
the Pacific Islands in 1797. Before his conversion to evangelicalism, he had worked as a bricklayer. When the missionaries
arrived in the Pacific, he agreed to serve on Tonga rather than
Tahiti Nui. While living in Tonga, he renounced Christianity
and his calling as a missionary just months after his arrival
there to live under the patronage of the influential chief Mulikiha’amea.13 His public apostasy made him a symbol of the
Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life
in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2008).
12
Niel Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the
South Seas (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), 152–53; Progress
of the Gospel in Polynesia (Edinburgh: Waugh & Innes, 1832), 81.
13
See Ian Christopher Campbell, “Gone Native” in Polynesia: Captivity Narratives and Experiences from the South Pacific (Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Publishing, 1998), 47–51; George Vason, An Au-
66
Pacific’s imagined seductiveness. In his memoir, he describes
stripping his body of European clothes and wrapping a tapa
cloth around his loins before he succumbed to the “voluptuous
attractions” of the islands.14 According to Vason, it was not any
particular incident but the constant presence of “pleasure, luxury, and amusement,” that caused him to abandon his previous faith.15 Because he was unable to attend houses of worship,
“modesty, by degree, lost . . . its moralizing charm.”16 He began
to attend “every pleasure and entertainment of the natives.”17
His marriage to a Tongan woman, however, marked the climax of his apostasy, not his decision to accept the daily habits of
indigenous Tongans. He wrote that the idea of marrying such a
woman—a “heathen” who would be “destitute of every mental,
as well as religious endowment”—had initially disgusted him. It
is important when reading his language here to remember Vason’s audience. Written a decade after his mission in Tonga, Vason’s writing provides important insight into his experiences. It
also, however, serves as an apology for his decision to abandon
white society and live among the indigenous people of Tonga.
His description of himself as being disgusted by his future wife
distanced him from her and from any accusations that he might
have been irredeemably degraded by his experience. Vason eventually embraced his wife and the culture she represented.18
It is difficult to reconstruct his reason for doing so. He does
thentic Narrative of Four-Years Residence at Tongataboo, edited by S.
Piggot (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1810).
14
Vason, An Authentic Narrative of Four-Years Residence at Tongataboo, 110. Michelle Elleray, “Crossing the Beach: A Victorian Tale
Adrift in the Pacific,” Victorian Studies 47, no. 2 (2005): 164–73, has
explored the importance of clothing in Vason’s narrative, which comes
to represent civilization and respectability.
15
Vason, An Authentic Narrative of Four-Years Residence at Tongataboo, 107.
16
Ibid., 108.
17
Ibid., 112.
18
Elleray, “Crossing the Beach,” 111.
67
not provide information about why he chose to marry the Tongan woman or even name her in his text. She is simply the eighteen-year-old relative of Mulikiha’amea, presented to him by
the chief for his own pleasure. In the nineteenth century, Vason
came to represent the worst outrages of the early missionaries of
the London Missionary Society. His decision to marry a Tongan
woman suggested that white men who traveled to the Pacific
would lose their connections to white society and would be debased to the level of Polynesian men and women. Although his
skin was not racially transformed through his adoption of indigenous customs, Vason seemed to represent the fragility of white
identity. His adoption of Tongan culture suggested that whiteness could ultimately be undone by individuals’ decisions to shed
their clothing or to marry indigenous women. The habits of “civilization” were not so robust that they could not be discarded.
Although Vason does not explicitly refer to Mormon missionaries (doing so would have been impossible since his actions
preceded the organization of the Mormon Church), his experiences would ultimately provide one of the lenses through which
the London Missionary Society viewed Grouard’s marriage. Ultimately, the society worried that white missionaries were degrading themselves rather than elevating indigenous women.
The society’s leadership in London feared that Christian belief
alone could not govern male sexuality. By 1809, the society had
abandoned its earlier vision of a mixed-race mission community.
Instead, they embraced the figure of the white missionary wife,
which they had once dismissed as an unnecessary expense.19 Her
body seemed to provide an appropriate outlet for white, male
sexual desire, and they believed that the children she bore would
bind men to the domestic sphere. In this process, white women’s
bodies became a way of disciplining the sexuality of white men.
As a result, the body became a site of cultural work.
19
Manktelow, “Missionary Families and the Formation of the
Missionary Enterprise”; Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Religion and Society in
Frontier California (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994),
148–80.
68
The ways that individuals dressed, the people with whom
they had sex, and their willingness to tattoo their bodies (or not)
became markers of their adherence to cultural norms about sexuality. The society believed that the presence of white women
and children would protect white men from the Pacific’s seductiveness and prevent the sexual sins that had challenged its first
wave of missionaries. As a result, questions of sexuality, domesticity, and the family became intertwined, as marriage became a
way of maintaining the racial identity of white men. Historian
Emily Manktelow has pointed out that the society’s changing
understanding of the family created tensions within the Pacific’s white missionary community. The first group of missionaries
the society sent were more “attuned to the ideals of marital and
cultural integration,” while the second rode “the tide of the civilizing mission.”20
This second tension within the white missionary community coalesced around the sexual indiscretions of white missionary
children. The men that the London Missionary Society sent to
the Pacific after 1809 tended to blame the “misbehavior” of the
white missionary children on the inability of their parents to
separate them from indigenous society.21 Their concerns about
the proximity of their children to indigenous people were similar to those that the society would later have about the Mormon
willingness to live in indigenous communities. Stories about the
lurid escapades of the society’s children circulated throughout
the nineteenth-century Pacific. Native men were found under
the beds of more than one missionary daughter, and at least two
young white boys were accused of sleeping with Ma‘ohi women
and running away to be circumcised in the native fashion.22 In
1843, Alexander Simpson, the schoolmaster assigned to teach
the white missionary children, was accused of “improper” con20
Emily Manktelow, “Rev. Simpson’s ‘Improper Liberties’: Moral
Scrutiny and Missionary Children in the South Seas Mission,” Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 2 (August 2012): 163.
21
Ibid.
22
Gunson, Messengers of Grace, 159–60.
69
duct with his female students five or six years earlier. One girl
accused him of “tickling us” and putting “his hand round our
cheeks & into our bosoms.” Another claimed that he had pulled
a female student out of bed and “attempted to violate her person.”23 The debate that ensued focused as much on the girls’ reputations as on the schoolmaster’s. In a letter that Simpson’s wife,
Sarah, wrote to a male missionary, she accused the girls of being
“degraded” and of having acted with an “evil intention.” Not only
did she find their testimonies inconsistent, but she also felt that
“such unaccountable proceedings, could not have been carried
on, under our roof, for so long a time, while I was there, without
my knowledge.”24 It is easy to dismiss Sarah’s defenses of her
husband as a wife being unwilling to admit that her husband
could have been so base as to molest young women; and on one
level, they are just that. On another level, however, her concerns
about the reliability of the girls’ testimony and the effects that
their closeness to indigenous people had had on their character
would reappear in the society’s concerns about the presence of
Mormon missionaries.
Members of the London Missionary Society saw the accusations as an example of their inability to control male sexual
desire. Sexual indiscretion was so prevalent within the mission
that a missionary named David Darling threatened to resign if
something was not done. He would be unable to “exercise . . .
discipline in my church against immoral persons which I ever
wish to do, without being opposed.”25 He was also concerned
23
For the correspondence concerning Simpson’s case, see Boxes 16–18A, CWM/LMS, South Seas, Incoming Correspondence,
SOAS. For these particular quotations, see C. Wilson, Testimony,
March 21, 1843, and Elizabeth Darling, Testimony, June 20, 1843. See
also Manktelow, “Rev. Simpson’s Improper Liberties,” 159–81.
24
Sarah Simpson, Letter to William Howe, June 12, 1843, CWM/
LMS/South Seas–Incoming Correspondence, Box 16, fd. 2, Jacket C.
25
David Darling, Letter to the Directors of the London Missionary Society, July 25, 1843, CWM/LMS/South Seas–Incoming Correspondence, Box 16, fd. 3, Jacket A.
70
that one of his daughters had been enrolled at the school when
the incident had occurred and was upset “to think that one of
our number [Simpson] should have been acting such an impure
part [to] all the young girls who were committed to his care.”26 It
was not the first time that he had worried for his children’s welfare. In 1818, he had urged the London Missionary Society to
force its members to establish greater control over their families. He feared that his children would become “ignorant, debauched, [and] ruined”—his sons would be forced to become
“sailors” and his daughters “a disgrace to their sex” if the missionaries did not find a way to control their children. Although
Darling felt that his own family was orderly, he worried about
the influence of the other white children on the islands on his
own.27 Many of the attempts of Darling and other white members of the London Missionary Society to ensure that their families were orderly focused on the minutiae of the children’s behavior. Manktelow portrays the lives of the missionary’s children
as one of surveillance, in which the small details of everyday life
were invested with enormous importance. In the defense of his
conduct to the society’s directors, Simpson claimed that he often had “to reprove a want of cleanliness” in the girls. The white
dresses they wore often bore “large stains” from their menstrual cycles.28 Simpson portrayed it as his duty to instruct the girls
on how to properly act and care for their bodies. His testimony
linked their inability to care for their bodies properly with the
moral transgressions that had marked their youth.
The stories that had circulated about the girls’ earlier conduct
26
Ibid.
David Darling, Letter to the Directors of the London Missionary Society, September 29, 1818, quoted in William H. Tagupa, “Missionary Lamentations: Early Educational Strategies in Tahiti, 1800–
1840,” Journal de la Société des océanistes 36, no. 68 (1980): 168.
28
Alexander Simpson, Letter to the Directors of the London Missionary Society, November 26, 1844, CWM/LMS/South Seas–Incoming Correspondence, Box 17, fd. 4, Jacket B; also quoted in Manktelow, “Rev. Simpson’s ‘Improper Liberties,’” 167.
27
71
were used to implicitly cast doubt on their claims. In spite of the
fact that only white individuals were involved in this scandal,
the sexual transgression was seen as the result of the proximity
of white missionaries to indigenous people. Descriptions of the
children in missionary correspondence emphasized their affinity
with indigenous people. One advised the directors of the London Missionary Society not to be too harsh with a missionary’s
daughter who had been intimately involved with white and indigenous men because “she had been brought up from her Infancy with the natives—They were the same to her as her own
people.”29 The letter uses her position within Tahitian society to
explain her sexual liaison. It portrays her as having white skin
but being culturally indigenous.
The difficulties that the London Missionary Society had
with the children of its members influenced the advice that
they gave to American and British societies that wanted to establish missions. When asked for advice on how to establish a
successful Christian mission during a trip to the Sandwich Islands, William Ellis, a member of the London Missionary Society, suggested that they send their children to the mainland
of the United States to be educated. To do otherwise would
be to invite, in the words of one of the wives of the American
missionaries, “moral death.”30 The society’s members tried to
separate their own children from indigenous society by creating a separate school in 1824 where the children of white missionaries could be closely monitored. The society saw its children as being in need of grace. Its members worried that too
much contact with indigenous people would play upon their
children’s sinful natures, leading them away from salvation and
29
Quoted in Niel Gunson, “The Deviations of a Missionary Family: The Henrys of Tahiti,” in Pacific Island Portraits, edited by J. W. Davidson and Deryck Scarr (Canberra: Australian National University
Press, 1970), 36.
30
Mercy Whitney, Letter to Mrs. Ely, November 24, 1832, cited
in Mary Zwiep, “Sending the Children Home: A Dilemma for Early
Missionaries,” Hawaiian Journal of History 24 (1990): 46–47.
72
toward a life of sin. Concerns about the influence of indigenous
people on white men would come up again when Mormons
arrived in the Pacific Islands in the 1840s.
In spite of their influence in the Pacific, the London Missionary Society was afraid that the Christianity it created could
be undone at any moment.31 In the 1840s, it seemed as though
their fears might be realized. The French desire to establish a
trading network that spanned the Pacific caused them to extend a protectorate over Tahiti Nui, Moorea, and the Tuamotus,
just two years before the arrival of Mormon missionaries. French
colonial officials rejected the society’s vision of morality, introducing alcohol into the islands and allowing Ma‘ohi men and
women to revive indigenous forms of dancing. Grouard arrived
in the Pacific on April 30, 1844, with his companions, when the
captain of their ship, the Timeleon, decided to stop at Tubuai to
replenish his dwindling supplies. Pratt stayed on Tubuai, while
the other two men continued on to Tahiti Nui.
The arrival of Mormon missionaries only increased the society’s fears that the world they had sought to create in the Pacific
was coming undone. Although the French colonial government
had established physical control over much of Tahiti Nui and
Iti by 1846, negotiations between France and Britain over the
terms by which France would control the islands were ongoing.
To recognize the London Missionary Society would, they felt,
give undue advantage to British claims, while installing French
Catholic missionaries would risk accusations of theocracy. Initially, the French government saw Mormon missionaries as a potential alternative. Neither French nor British, they offered the
French government the opportunity to appear to be supporting
religious tolerance while theoretically undermining the control
of the London Missionary Society by presenting an alternative
vision of Christianity.
31
Patricia Grimshaw has traced how this decision on the part of
the LMS affected Protestant missionary work in Hawai‘i in Paths of
Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989).
73
Although the London Missionary Society remained enormously powerful, it now had to compete with the French government and Mormon missionaries for influence. Differing
ideas about the relationship between domesticity and missionary work compounded the concerns that the society had about
the presence of Mormon missionaries. Instead of living in indigenous communities, the London Missionary Society built
expansive missionary houses that included verandas, sitting
rooms, and separate bedrooms for children of different genders. These houses would not have been considered immodest
in Great Britain. In the Pacific Islands, however, they were a
departure from Ma‘ohi houses. In a letter to the society’s directors in London, James Orsmond claimed that the indigenous
men and women who came to their houses “usually expressed
astonishment & approbation” upon seeing the way that white
missionaries organized their homes. He claimed that they
frequently looked to their compatriots and said, “See these
foreigners keep their sons & daughters separate in different
rooms, locked in & at different ends of the house. True indeed it is. We are like hogs. There are parents sons & daughters all in one bed under one cloth.”32 Mormon missionaries,
however, criticized the homes of British missionaries, seeing
them as a sign of opulence. Grouard, for example, criticized the
“splend[id] mansion[s]” that the Society built. He claimed that
“everything [had been] made as comfortable” for members of
the London Missionary Society “as curcomstances will possibly admit of.”33 As a Mormon missionary, he saw his poverty as
a badge of his authenticity.
This relative poverty became a point of contention between
the Mormon missionaries and the London Missionary Society.
When the German-born Ernst Krause visited Pratt in Tubuai,
“he lookt down at my feet and saw my toes sticking out of my
32
James Orsmond, Letter to the Directors of the LMS, November
24, 1827, CWM/LMS/South Seas/Incoming Correspondence, Box 6,
fd. 3, Jacket C, SOAS.
33
Grouard, Journal, April 23, 1845, 71.
74
shoes, and the ground in my house covered with hay instead of
a floor, and askt again, ‘And does your society render you no assistance?’”34 Although the people of Tubuai and Anaa eventually
built the Mormon missionaries separate houses, they were not
as large or as impressive as those in which the society’s members lived. Even after Pratt had his own house, he continued to
critique the society for its extravagance. Although Pratt’s journal contains no sketches that would allow us to say for sure how
large the homes of Mormon missionaries were, it is unlikely that
he would have accepted a large home with a veranda and several separate rooms. It is possible that the homes in which Pratt
and Grouard lived were in the same style as indigenous homes
or blended indigenous and European elements. In the Sandwich
Islands, in this same time period, white Protestant missionaries constructed structures that blurred Hawaiian and American elements as well as buildings that were purely in a New
England style. It is impossible to say without further evidence
whether the homes that Pratt described indigenous Mormon
converts building for him were in an American or indigenous
style or some mixture of the two.35 In Anaa, Grouard sometimes
lived in houses that had formerly been the residences of indigenous members of the London Missionary Society. These homes
would have certainly been built in an indigenous style. Although
the Tahitian men who traveled to the Tuamotus saw the people
they encountered there as “savages,” they would not have adopted European or American building styles for their housing.
Instead, local congregations built houses for them in either the
34
S. George Ellsworth, ed., The Journals of Addison Pratt: Being a
Narrative of Yankee Whaling in the Eighteen Twenties, A Mormon Mission to the Society Islands, and Early California (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), 243.
35
Laurel Spencer Forsythe, “Anglo-Hawaiian Building in Early-Nineteenth-Century Hawaii,” in Shaping Communities: Perspectives
in Vernacular Architecture, edited by Carter L. Hudgins and Elizabeth
Collins Cromley (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997),
161–73.
75
style of their adoptive or home communities.36
The acceptance of spiritual gifts among Mormon missionaries would have solidified their association with both indigenous
people and the English poor. While they were in Tahiti, Mormons frequently cast out demons and healed the sick. In his journal, Pratt describes an exorcism that he performed on a woman
with an eira, or a spot, on her skin. As he laid his “hands upon
her head” to rebuke the “evil spirits that troubled her,” he felt “a
heavy pressure on the top of my head.” The “powers of darkness”
began to “overshadow my mind, and brought with it a foretaste
of hell.”37 Although members of the London Missionary Society accepted the workings of God within their world, the actions
of the Mormon missionaries may have reminded them of earlier
ecstatic movements in the South Pacific. The society’s missionaries used the same term—“visionary”—to describe Grouard and
Pratt that they had used to describe members of the Mamaia
sect a few decades earlier in the 1820s. The movement did not
completely dissipate until the 1840s.38 Members of Mamaia accepted spirit possession, issued dramatic prophecies, and claimed
to be living in the Millennium.39 Although the white mission36
Doug Monroe and Andrew Thornley’s collection on indigenous
missionaries in the Pacific Islands contains several references to the
types of houses that communities built native pastors. These references
are spread throughout the volume and are not contained in any particular author’s essay. The Covenant Makers: Islander Missionaries in the
Pacific (Suva, Fiji: Pacific Theological College, 1996), 29, 34, 67, 131.
37
Pratt, The Journals of Addison Pratt, 284.
38
James Orsmond, Letter to the Directors of the LMS, March 8,
1829, CWM/LMS/South Seas/Incoming Correspondence, Box 7, fd.
1, Jacket C, SOAS; Letter, John Barff to the Directors of the LMS,
July 2, 1846, CWM/LMS/South Seas/Incoming Correspondence,
CWM/LMS/South Seas/Incoming Correspondence, Box 19A, fd. 2,
Jacket E.
39
Niel Gunson, “An Account of Mamaia or Visionary Heresy of
Tahiti, 1826–1841,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 71, no. 2 (1962):
208–43.
76
aries that the society employed would have recognized the differences between the Mormon missionaries who traveled to the
Pacific and Mamaia members, they also saw striking similarities
between the two groups.
The poverty of Mormon missionaries combined with their
acceptance of spiritual gifts to make them morally suspicious
in the eyes of London Missionary Society. Like many nineteenth-century Christians, the society’s missionaries believed
that the “brutal licentiousness and moral degradation” of native
Tahitians was a result of their being enthralled by the devil.40
This belief was culturally presumptuous. It relied on assumptions
about the nature of indigenous people and their relationship to
“civilization.” It is important to note, however, that the assumptions that the society made about the nature of Tahitian society
were not exclusive to the South Pacific. The society’s approach
assumed that humanity was inherently sinful and that, without
proper theology and guidance, individuals would turn away from
God and toward Satan. For the society’s members, the presence
of Mormon missionaries who rejected the ideas about domesticity and proper Christian behavior that the society had so carefully cultivated threatened to undo the work they had done in the
Pacific Islands. They feared that the people of Tahiti Nui, Anaa,
and Tubuai would descend into sexual immorality.
Grouard’s marriage to an indigenous woman a few years after
his arrival in the islands only cemented their fears. Their union
revitalized many of the concerns that the society had developed
about interracial marriages after the sexual indiscretions of a few
of their own members. Although the white beachcombers who
had been some of the earliest converts to Mormonism had indigenous wives, Grouard’s position made his marriage particularly salient. He had also been previously married and had failed
to divorce his first wife. For the London Missionary Society, his
40
Quoted in Christopher Herber, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991), 168.
77
marriage came to represent the problems with Mormon missionary work. For Grouard, however, his marriage was perfectly
consonant with the Mormon understanding of the role that indigenous people would play in the Millennium.
As a result, understanding Grouard’s marriage and the reactions of London Missionary Society to the presence of Mormon
missionaries means understanding Mormon interactions with
indigenous people in the Americas. In the following section, I
explore the role of American Indians and Polynesians in Mormon theology in an attempt to provide a context for Grouard’s
missionary work in the Pacific. I also ask what role sexuality and
intermarriage played in Mormon understandings of the physical
and social transformation of indigenous people.
TEACHING THE “DAUGHTERS OF THE LAMANITES:”
MORMON IDEAS ABOUT AMERICAN INDIANS
Like many Americans in the nineteenth century, early Mormons saw the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Pacific as being intimately connected. They believed that the indigenous men and women they encountered in the Tuamotus, on
Tahiti Nui, in the Austral Islands, and throughout the Americas
were descendants of the house of Israel. The Book of Mormon
presented an image of Native Americans as the descendants of
Israelites whom God had led to the Americas and who had then
spread throughout North and South America and the Pacific Islands. Mormons saw their missionary work as part of the process
through which these people would be redeemed.
According to early Mormon theology, Native Americans
would reclaim their divine heritage and work with white converts to build a physical Zion in preparation for the second
coming of Christ. In 1833, Joseph Smith Jr. appointed his sixty-two-year-old father as the Church’s patriarch. The blessings
that the latter gave as patriarch often included descriptions
of the role that individuals would play in redeeming Native
Americans. John Lytle’s patriarchal blessing, for example, told
him that he would have “the gift of tongues” so that he could
78
speak “to the aboriginal inhabitants of this continent, the wonderful works of God in their own tongue by the power of the
Holy Ghost.”41 Louisa Rappleye would “be called to instruct
many of the women amongst the Lamanites in the principles of
this world.” Her name, she was told, was “written in the lambs
book of life.”42 Although neither of these individuals served a
mission to the Native Americans, the centrality of these images
to their patriarchal blessings suggests how important such missionary work was to early Mormonism.
As Christopher Smith’s essay in this volume highlights, the
ecstatic practices of a small group of Mormon converts in Kirtland, Ohio, in the 1830s documents the importance of American Indians to early Mormon theology. The small community
converted to Mormonism during a brief visit in the winter of
1830–31 from four Mormon missionaries who were en route to
proselytize American Indians in Missouri. Their fervor included Indian themes—for example, preaching to imaginary crowds
of American Indians from tree stumps, mimicking what they
saw as “Indian modes of warfare”—“knocking down, scalping,
ripping and tearing out the bowels”—and speaking in pretended Indian tongues.43 Although Smith had rejected these spiri41
John Lytle, Patriarchal Blessing bestowed by Joseph Smith Sr.,
ca. May 1836, in H. Michael Marquardt, comp., Early Patriarchal
Blessings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake
City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2007), 128.
42
Louisa Rappleye, Patriarchal Blessing bestowed by Joseph Smith
Sr., ca. May 1836, in ibid., 137.
43
For primary sources dealing with these spiritual practices, see
Parley P. Pratt [ Jr.], ed., Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt, (1938;
rpt., 9th ed., Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1972), 61; John Whitmer, From Historian to Dissident: The Book of John Whitmer, edited by
Bruce Westergren (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1995), 57; “The
Mormon Delusion,” Christian Mirror No. 16 (November 24, 1831);
and C.M.S., “Mormonism.” Painesville Telegraph 2, no. 35 (February
15, 1831): 1–2. For the particular quotation, see Mark Lyman Staker,
Hearken, O Ye People: The Historical Setting of Joseph Smith’s Ohio Reve-
79
tual practices by the following summer, the early Ohio converts’
enthusiastic embrace of an “Indian” identity combined with the
foundational scripture of the Book of Mormon, establishes early Mormonism’s interest in American Indians. At the center of
Mormonism’s redemptive narrative was a story of racial transformation—Native American men and women would be physically
transformed in the last days, becoming “white” as they remembered their godly heritage. As white Mormons in Kirtland spoke
in “Indian” tongues and preached from tree stumps, they appropriated this status and used the story as the basis for their ritual
practices. (See Christopher C. Smith’s following article.)
The Mormon missionaries who traveled to the Pacific likely
connected the people they encountered on Tahiti Nui, the Tuamotus, and the rest of the Pacific Islands to the stories contained
in the Book of Mormon. Throughout the nineteenth century,
Europeans and white Americans frequently referred to Polynesians as “Indians.” Noted geographer Jedidah Morse, for example,
in a letter to the U.S. Secretary of War, urged a policy of not encouraging the preservation of any Indian languages. He told the
secretary that he had already shared his reasons with American
missionaries who had been “sent to the Sandwich Islands, and to
others destined to our Indians.”44 His statement elided the significant differences between Native Americans and Polynesians,
creating a single category of “Indian.” Likewise, the 1858 report
of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
collapsed the distance between their mission in the Sandwich
Islands and that in the American West, considering them in a
single paragraph. The board’s report quickly switched back and
forth between discussing the Sandwich Islands and “the wild
men of our woods.”45
For non-Mormons, the relationship between Polynesians
lations (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2009), 82.
44
Jedidiah Morse, A Report to the Secretary of War on Indian Affairs
(New Haven, Conn.: S. Converse, 1822), 357.
45
Forty-Ninth Report of American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1858 (Boston: Press of T. R. Marvin & Son, 1858), 34.
80
and Native Americans was not one of biological kinship. Instead,
they created a general category populated by brown-skinned
people living in tribal communities. For Mormons, however, the
story of Hagoth in the Book of Mormon provided a genealogical
link. In this narrative, an explorer set out into the west sea, with
a large ship carrying families, a successful venture from which
he returned to organize another expedition. This time, he never returned (Alma 63:5–8). In Mormon mythology, Polynesians
became Hagoth’s descendants, and Polynesian migration myths
were seen as evidence of Mormonism’s authenticity. It is difficult
to pinpoint the moment when Mormons first began to identify
Polynesians as the descendants of Hagoth. Although Pratt never
explicitly identifies them as such in his journal, his wife, Louisa,
told people in Tubuai that the people of the Book of Mormon
were “their ancient fathers.”46 Stories told within the family suggest that Addison Pratt may have requested to be sent to the Pacific Islands because of the affinities he saw between American
Indians and Polynesians. Such stories, however, are impossible to
verify and may be reflective of later storytelling.47
Whatever the ultimate origins of Mormon ideas about the
history of Pacific Islanders, Pratt and Grouard emphasized the
importance of Polynesians gathering to the United States. Although none of the sermons or teachings of the two men are extant, historians can get some sense of their message based from
the records of the London Missionary Society. In 1849, the society’s members decided to tour the outer islands of the mission
field. The letters that they sent back to the directors in London
document the beliefs of early Ma‘ohi converts to Mormonism.
In 1849, George Platt was sent to many of the outer islands
to determine the extent of the Mormon influence there. Ernest
Krause embarked on a similar journey with another member of
the London Missionary Society named George Charter. To46
Louisa Barnes Pratt, The History of Louisa Barnes Pratt (Logan:
Utah State University Press, 1998), 149.
47
“Mission to Polynesia: The Story of Addison Pratt and the Society Islands Mission,” Improvement Era, March 1949, 13.
81
gether, their letters document many of the concerns that the society had about the presence of Mormon missionaries.48 In his
letter to the aociety’s directors, Platt described a conversation
that he had with a Paumotuan man about the location of Zion.
After asking Platt where Zion was, the man told him that “they
[the Paumotuans] were going to Zion.” Platt responded by telling him that it “would be well if they were found in the Heavenly Zion.” The man then clarified his previous statement, telling
him that “they were going to America.”49
Later evidence from the mission supports the idea that Pratt
and Grouard taught their converts about the principle of gathering. In 1847, Pratt left the mission to travel to Utah to ask the
main body of the Church for more missionaries to serve in the
South Pacific. He returned to his mission field in 1850, accompanied or followed soon afterward by several other missionaries, including his wife, Louisa, and his brother-in-law Jonathan
Crosby. Although the presence of women changed the complexion of the mission, it is the attempts by some of the missionaries
to locate a place where the Ma‘ohi Saints could gather that concerns us here. Just months after Thomas Thompkins arrived in
Tubuai, he returned to the United States in an attempt to find a
place in California that mirrored Tahiti’s climate.50 The attempt
of Mormon missionaries to establish a Ma‘ohi Zion suggests
that Grouard and Pratt saw themselves as participating in the
same redemptive project as Mormon missionaries to American
Indians.
In many ways, the Mormons were not unique in their emphasis upon missionary work. The early nineteenth century was
48
George Platt, Letter to the Directors of the London Missionary
Society, January 16, 1849; and George Charter and Ernst Krause, Letter to the Directors, July 10, 1849, both in CWM/LMS/South Seas/
Incoming Correspondence, Box 22, fd. 1, Jacket C.
49
Platt, Letter to the Directors of the London Missionary Society,
January 16, 1849.
50
R. Lanier Britsch, Unto the Islands of the Sea: A History of the Latter-day Saints in the Pacific (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1986), 17.
82
a time of keen interest in Christianizing American Indians and
other indigenous people.51 A key question among Christian missionaries of this period was whether indigenous people had to
learn the habits of industry and cleanliness before or after they
converted to Christianity. Scottish theologian James Montgomery argued for concentrating on conversion, which he felt would
inevitably transform their domestic and social lives.52 However,
Samuel Marsden, a British missionary to New Zealand, believed
that indigenous people in Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas
could be converted only through a slow process of acculturation
and education. What these two positions shared was an assumption that the process of “civilizing” indigenous people would be
accomplished in this historical epoch, not during or after the return of Christ.53
51
John Garrett, To Live among the Stars: Christian Origins in Oceania (Geneva, Switzerland: World Council of Churches Publications/
Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1982), 11. In addition to the
London Missionary Society’s missionaries to the Pacific, in 1806 five
students from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts,
created the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions,
which sent men to British India, the Sandwich Islands, northern Ceylon, Singapore, and China. David W. Kling, “New Divinity and the
Origins of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,” North American Foreign Missions, 1810–1914: Theology, Theory,
and Policy, edited by Wilbert R. Shenk (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004), 12. In 1817, religious leaders in
Connecticut created a school to educate male American Indians, Native Hawaiians, and men from other “heathen” nations in Christianity
and the habits of Euro-American Christian civilization, with the goal
of turning the school’s graduates into missionaries.
52
J. Edwards, Life of the Revd. David Brainerd Revised and Abridged
with an Introductory Essay by James Montgomery (Glasgow, Scotland:
n.pub., 1829), xvii, quoted in Ian Douglas Maxwell, “Civilization or
Christianity? The Scottish Debate on Mission Methods, 1750–1835,”
Christian Missions and the Enlightenment, edited by Brian Stanley
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2001), 123.
53
Brian Stanley, “Christianity and Civilization in English Evan-
83
Mormon understandings of the role that the Millennium
would play in transforming indigenous people were more ambiguous. Although Mormons did not completely discard the
idea that it was their duty to instruct indigenous people in the
habits of Euro-American conceptions of industry, some of the
patriarchal blessings that early Mormons received suggest that
they may have believed that these dramatic events would occur
after the second coming of Christ. One Mormon woman’s blessing told her that she would “teach the daughters of the Lamanites” in their own language, “be instrumental in peopling the
new earth,” and would “stand when Jesus Christ shall come in
clouds of heaven.”54 Another woman was told that the Spirit had
testified that she would “instruct the Lamanites in needle work.”
If she were faithful, she would “not die” but would be “caught up
in the Air” and “changed in the twinkling of an eye.”55 The emphasis within Mormonism on the nearness of the Millennium
meant that early Mormons initially expected these events to occur within their lifetimes.
While the roles that the Saints were to play in the redemption of the Lamanites were prophesied in personal patriarchal
blessings and in more public prophetic revelations, the timing of
these events was not enunciated. Mormon missionaries proselytized indigenous people throughout the Pacific and the United
States. The nearness of the Millennium, however, significantly
influenced their missionary work. Instead of encouraging their
followers to adopt farming, Pratt and Grouard taught their followers about the gathering. They believed, like other Mormon
missionaries, that indigenous people had to submit to baptism
and move to the Mormon Zion before they would be transformed socially and even physically. Their understanding of race
gelical Mission Thought, 1792–1857,” in Christian Missions and the
Enlightenment, edited by Brian Stanley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William
B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2001), 185–91.
54
Lucia Louisa Leavitt, Patriarchal Blessing, bestowed by Joseph
Smith Sr., June 20, 1836, in Marquardt, Early Patriarchal Blessings, 79.
55
Ibid.
84
was in many ways quite similar to that which Protestants offered
in the nineteenth century. Like Protestants, Pratt and Grouard
believed that indigenous people would need to be transformed
before they could participate fully in the kingdom of God.
Unlike the London Missionary Society members, Mormons
did not see their mission as one of long-term transformation and
decades of sacrifice. They believed that God had initiated a dramatic series of events that would radically transform the world,
culminating in the creation of God’s kingdom on earth. Their
missionary work would not involve the establishment of longterm missions that would cultivate Christian families and lead
to the Christianization of entire peoples. Instead, they would
call forth the people of God from the nations, encouraging them
to be baptized and to immigrate to Nauvoo. It would only be
there, on the banks of the Mississippi and within the boundaries of Zion, that indigenous people would be instructed in their
own language about needlework, domesticity, and thrift. Historian Grant Underwood has argued that early Mormons believed
that the United States had been identified as a gathering place of
American Indians and Gentiles, while Jerusalem would serve a
similar role for the Jewish people.56 As a result, he argues, Mormons read the actions of the U.S. government through their understanding of the Millennium. They celebrated Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policies as the beginnings of God’s plans to
relocate American Indians into a single spot where they could
be instructed in the gospel. According to Underwood, some early Mormons even referred to U.S. federal officials as “nursing
fathers” who, through their actions, helped to bring about the
transformation of American Indians.57
In the meantime, Mormon missionaries enacted an itinerant
ministry modeled on the New Testament. Usually poor—occasionally poverty-stricken—they left behind whatever clothing,
56
Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 30–31.
57
Ibid., 31.
85
food, and money they had and relied on the generosity of others for shelter and food. In their letters and memoirs, Mormon
missionaries in the Pacific Islands frequently described themselves as embracing the impoverished existence of their hosts.
Although Pratt and Grouard proselytized for much of their mission on their own, several other men and a few women joined
them in 1851. One of the men was James Stephens Brown. In a
colorful memoir published almost fifty years later, he described
eating “bugs about the size of a man’s thumb,” “young snakes,”
and “seasnails” in a tone that was meant to entertain his audience
at the same moment that it disgusted them.58 He recalled taking
“hold of the body [of a fish] with his teeth” and stripping off “the
flesh in [my] mouth,” repeating “the operation” with multiple
fish until he had “completed his repast.”59 Addison Pratt, for his
part, spent long nights and days in the company of native men,
hunting wild boars, eels, and ducks. When he returned from the
Austral Islands and the Tuamotus, it was rumored that he “could
catch fish in a cow track.”60
In many ways, their itinerant ministry was similar to that of
other Christian missionaries. The ministries of George Whitefield and other itinerants in the United States in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries had established this form of evangelization as an important part of the American religious landscape. It is important to remember, however, that the practice
remained controversial even in the United States because it
challenged the authority of settled ministers.61 In the Pacific
Islands, the willingness of Mormon missionaries to live in indigenous communities threatened the philosophy, and hence
58
James Stephens Brown, Life of a Pioneer: Being the Autobiography of James S. Brown (Salt Lake City: G. Q. Cannon and Sons, 1900),
157–61.
59
Ibid., 158.
60
Ibid., 115.
61
Timothy Hall, Contested Boundaries: Itinerancy and the Reshaping
of the Colonial American Religious World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), passim.
86
the authority, of the London Missionary Society. The society
did not have enough men to provide every island with a white
missionary. Instead, they ordained men from local, indigenous
populations to travel to other islands and serve as missionaries. The inhabitants of the island of Anaa, who had once been
famed for their military prowess, saw the decision of the London Missionary Society to not send them a white missionary
as a slight.62 In the nineteenth century, the presence of white
missionaries offered communities immense prestige and access
to material resources. The society’s decision to locate their mission on Tahiti Nui rather than the Tuamotus implicitly favored
the former. The Tuamotus, which had recently come under the
authority of the Tahitian monarchy, resented the Tahitian men
that the society sent as missionaries.63
The excitement generated by Grouard’s arrival in Anaa may
have partially resulted from the community’s perception that
his presence increased their social status. The letters of the society’s members from this time period contain frequent references
to claims by the indigenous peoples of Tuamotus that they had
converted to Mormonism because the Mormons were willing
to send a white missionary to live among them and the London Missionary Society was not. In a letter to the society’s directors in London, George Platt wrote that his interviews suggested that Paumotuan people had “received [Grouard] because
he was a white man, who came to their poor Island, taught the
same things we did, and was content to live on such food as they
did.”64
In a similar letter, Ernest Krause, a German who had begged
to join the London Missionary Society, wrote that the people he
encountered on the beaches of the Tuamotus initially appeared
62
Per Hage and Frank Harary, Island Networks: Communication,
Kinship, and Classification Structures in Oceania (Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 208.
63
Niel Gunson, “Pomare II of Tahiti and Polynesian Imperialism,”
Journal of Pacific History 4, no. 1 (1969): 65–82.
64
Platt, Letter to the Directors, January 16, 1849.
87
“suspicious” of him. When he spoke with them, they told him,
“We have another Teacher.”65 In spite the animosity that Krause
encountered, the statements that the society’s emissaries recorded sometimes explicitly contained a promise that the residents
would revert to Protestant Christianity if it could provide them
with a white missionary of their own.66 On Rurutu, Rimatara,
and Raivavae, a group of islands belonging to the same island
chain as Tubuai, the people told Krause that they did not “desire
any more Tahitian teachers.” “We are fin roa, thoroughly tired of
them,” they told the white missionary. Instead of receiving more
indigenous missionaries, they wished for a white missionary to
remain on the island. They promised Krause that they would
“build dwelling houses, give land to cultivate, & supply them
with food.”67 Even on the islands of Tubuai and Anaa, where the
Mormon missionaries had made their greatest inroads, Krause
claimed that the majority told him, “We desire the word of
God.” They assured him that if they “had European Teachers
connected with [the London Missionary] Society,” they would
“adhere to them.”68
Contemporary newspapers hint that the intimacy between
Mormon missionaries and their indigenous converts extended
beyond their willingness to eat in native homes to include sexual
intimacy. Early Mormons had also discussed the idea of marrying indigenous people in the United States. In 1831, an Ohio
newspaper claimed that Joseph Smith allegedly instructed Mormon missionaries to make a “matrimonial alliance” with American Indians if possible.69 Their source was Ezra Booth, a former Mormon who had come to believe that his previous faith
65
Charter and Krause, Letter to the Directors, July 10, 1849.
67
Charter and Krause, Letter to the Directors, July 10, 1849.
68
Ibid.
69
“Mormonism: Nos. VIII–IX,” Ohio Star 11, no. 49 (December
8, 1831), rpt. in Eber D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed, or, A Faithful
Account of that Singular Imposition (Painesville, Ohio: Self-published,
1834), 200.
66
88
was an imposture and who published several exposés of Joseph
Smith and the Mormon Church. It would be easy to dismiss his
claims. There are no contemporary Mormon sources that document Smith giving such instructions to Mormon missionaries.
The claims, however, cannot be entirely discounted In 1861, W.
W. Phelps, an influential Mormon editor, wrote that Smith had
told him that Mormon missionaries would take native women as
their wives “in the same manner that Abraham took Hagar and
Keturah” and “Jacob . . . Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah.”70 Although
Phelps’s remembrances were likely heavily embellished and influenced by later Mormon theology, the convergence of these
two sources suggests some acceptance that missionaries would
marry indigenous women. Doing so would provide them with
access to American Indian communities, allowing them to reach
indigenous people more effectively.71
In fact, Brigham Young adopted a similar tactic in the
1850s. In 1853, just one year after he had departed from the
Pacific, James S. Brown served a missionary among the Shoshone Indians in what is now Wyoming. According to Brown,
the missionaries were to “identify our interests with theirs, even
to marry among them.”72 Some of the Mormon missionaries
who received the instruction to marry Indian women appear to
70
W. W. Phelps, Letter to Brigham Young, August 12, 1861,
Brigham Young Papers, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City,
cited in Todd Compton, “Fanny Alger Smith Custer: Mormonism’s
First Plural Wife,” Journal of Mormon History 22, no. 1 (Spring 1996):
80. Armand Mauss has written about later ideas of intermarriage with
American Indians among both General Authorities and ordinary
members in his All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions
of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 52–65,
116–27.
71
David J. Whittaker, “Mormons and Native Americans: A Historical and Biographical Introduction,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon
Thought 18, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 33–64.
72
W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon
Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 81.
89
have found the idea somewhat unsettling. When Moses Martin Sanders married an Indian woman near Green River, Utah,
his fellow Mormon missionaries described her as “an old haggard mummy looking” woman, and made fun of Sanders for his
choice of wife.73
The London Missionary Society would have found rumors
about Mormon men marrying Native American women troubling if they had known about them. The society’s missionaries
in Tahiti had access to anti-Mormon literature such as E. D.
Howe’s 1834 Mormonism Unvailed, which had reprinted Booth’s
letters. They also read accounts of Mormonism in the newspapers that arrived on whaling ships. It is impossible to know,
however, if they had access to specific rumors. If they had, it
would have reminded them of the sexual indiscretions of some
of the society’s earliest missionaries in the Pacific. Even without
this knowledge, however, the presence of Mormon missionaries
would have provoked fears about sexual immorality and apostasy. In choosing to sleep in indigenous beds, hunt with indigenous men, and share indigenous meals, the Mormon missionaries evoked images of George Vason abandoning white civilization by abandoning his jacket and pants for tapa cloth. Members
of the London Missionary Society worried that the presence of
Mormon missionaries would lead indigenous men and women
to revive licentious dancing, public copulation, and incest. After
speaking with some of the Ma‘ohi men and women who had
converted to Mormonism, George Platt lamented the presence
of Grouard and Pratt, writing in a letter to the society’s directors, “What a doorway is opened to licentiousness.”74 Although
members of the London Missionary Society exaggerated the
centrality of sexuality to Ma‘ohi society, their anxiety was based
in their own understanding of the relationship between domesticity and sexuality. They feared that male sexual desire was uncontrollable and that it would dominate any society that failed to
73
74
Ibid., 82.
90
adopt white, middle-class domesticity. The willingness of Mormon missionaries to live in the homes of the indigenous people
blurred the boundaries between white and indigenous people.
Grouard’s decision to marry Tearo, an indigenous woman,
elevated their concern. In marrying a Paumotuan woman, he
placed himself on the margins of white society. Members of the
London Missionary Society frequently mentioned his marriages75 in their letters. After George Platt detailed Mormon heresies and the sexual immorality he believed would result from
the Mormon presence in the Pacific in his letter, he described
Grouard’s marriage to a Paumotuan woman, telling the society’s directors that he understood that Grouard “had left a wife
in America.” Platt’s statement explicitly linked the Mormon
missionary to white men “who had run away from vessels, and
have married or are living with native women.” Although his
tone was neutral, the beachcombers to whom he referred had
long had difficulties with the London Missionary Society.76 It
was Addison Pratt’s experiences as a beachcomber in the Sandwich Islands that had initially led him to distrust Protestant
missionaries. Although the society viewed Grouard’s marriage
with suspicion, there was no uniform reaction among Mormon
missionaries. When Pratt initially heard about Grouard’s plan
to marry Tearo, he told him to do as Judas had done, “What
thou doest, do quickly.”77 His quotation of scripture implicitly
called Grouard a traitor to his own religion. In his diary, Pratt
worried about the reaction of white Mormon women in the
United States to Grouard’s marriage. He thought they would
think that he had made a “rude choice.”78 It is likely that Mor75
When Tearo died, presumably from childbirth complications
and leaving a baby daughter, Grouard married a second indigenous
woman, Nahina, and fathered three more children during his lengthy
six-year mission to these islands. Ellsworth, The Journals of Addison
Pratt, 560.
76
77
Pratt, The Journals of Addison Pratt, 276–77.
78
Ibid., 277.
91
mon women shared the general American aversion to marriages between white and indigenous people.
Historian F. Edward Butterworth’s work on the Pacific, on
the other hand, suggests that the white local Mormon converts, many of whom had lived for decades as beachcombers,
celebrated Grouard’s marriage as a confirmation of their own
decisions to marry indigenous women.79 The people of Anaa
likely also celebrated the marriage. Pratt describes them as “delight[ing] in excitement” and making a “great noise” about the
marriage.80 The diversity of these responses suggests a division
within Mormon society. Although Mormonism placed indigenous people at the center of its redemptive narrative, individual
Mormons often felt uncomfortable with the presence of Native
Americans. Grouard’s marriage was fully recognizable within a
Mormon theology that imagined a future in which American
Indians would participate in building a literal Zion. The rumors
that Mormon missionaries were marrying American Indian
women, the brief adoption of an American Indian identity by
some Mormon converts, and the explicit attempts of Mormon
missionaries to focus their efforts on American Indians would
have lent credence to the idea that Mormon missionaries could
marry indigenous women without sacrificing their place within
the Mormon community. It would have, however, been impossible for Mormon women to do the same. Although nothing in
Mormon theology prevented these matches, Mormons shared a
general aversion to white women marrying non-white men. As
a result, white Mormon women who married American Indian
or black men were marginalized. (See Angela Pulley Hudson’s
article, “William McCary, Lucy Stanton, and the Performance
of Race at Winter Quarters and Beyond,” in this issue.) While
there are no records of marriages in the Pacific between white
Mormon women and Polynesian men, it stands to reason that
79
F. Edward Butterworth, The Adventures of John Hawkins: Restoration Pioneer (Independence: Herald House, 1963), passim.
80
Pratt, The Journals of Addison Pratt, 276–77.
92
such marriages would have received similar disapproval.
“PLAYING THE WHORE:”
GOSSIP, SEXUAL IMMORALITY, AND MISSIONARY WORK
Accusations of sexual immorality had long been used to undermine the position of individuals within the white community.
The rumors about Simpson are one such example. The accusations distanced him from the rest of the white community. Simpson was not the only man to find his reputation undermined by
sexual innuendo and rumor. In 1837, stories circulating in New
Zealand about an Anglican missionary having improper relationships with several of his Maori students led to his dismissal
from service.81 In another instance, rumors that a missionary’s
daughter had been seduced by a Tahitian chief and was “playing
the whore” in her father’s house led other white missionaries to
doubt his ability to discipline his children and congregation.82
Stories began to circulate about the sexual behavior of Mormon missionaries even before they arrived in Tahiti. The popularity of Mormonism in Great Britain and the eastern United
States meant that they were a frequent topic of conversation in
newspapers, books, and pamphlets in the Atlantic world. American and British sailing ships brought anti-Mormon pamphlets
such as John C. Bennett’s The History of the Saints: Or an Exposé
of Joe Smith and Mormonism (Boston: Leland & Whiting, 1842),
and carried news about the popularity of the sect. Bennett’s book
was almost certainly passed around the Congregationalist missionary community. Salacious in tone, it accused Joseph Smith of
trying to seduce married women, of commanding men to commit murder, and of promoting prostitution.83
81
Judith Binney, “Whatever Happened to Poor Mr. Yate? An Exercise in Voyeurism,” New Zealand Journal of History 38, no. 2 (2004):
154–68.
82
Gunson, “The Deviations of a Missionary Family,” 36.
83
Grouard, Journal, June 30, 1844, 44, describes arriving in Tahiti and bearing his testimony, only to discover that Bennett’s works on
Mormonism had preceded him.
93
Although early Mormon missionaries rejected such rumors,
they were equally willing to gossip about Protestant sexual immorality. Writing to Willard Richards in September 1844, Pratt
sneered that the daughter of a British Congregationalist missionary kept a brothel for sailors and had been tattooed “from
her shoulders to her heels, missing no intermediate portions.” He
called the son of another Congregationalist missionary a “brutish libertine” and wrote that he had been expelled from the British mission’s academy for his sexual dalliances with indigenous
women. Furthermore, two white wives of missionaries allegedly
had donned native costumes, leaving their breasts bare, adorned
their hair with “low & wild flowers,” and presented themselves
at the door of the local chief where a young man took them inside. Pratt could only assume what had happened once the door
had closed.
Rumors did not circulate only among the European community; they were part of discussions about sexuality and morality
among native Tahitians as well. In the early 1840s, the society’s
missionaries confronted Simpson about the rumors that he had
molested their daughters. The inquiry that followed was difficult.
The members of the London Missionary Society felt that the
evidence undeniably pointed to Simpson’s guilt, yet the society’s
directors repeatedly told them that they could not legally convict him on hearsay. As a result, they were forced to allow him to
maintain his position. Rumors continued to circulate, however,
for years afterward that he was trading native women alcohol for
sex.84 When he was finally dismissed for accepting a position
with the French government in the 1850s, native converts were
supposed to have asked why a missionary who was faaturi, or an
adulterer, had retained his position for so long.85 They had also
served as some of the primary witnesses in the case. It was the
unwillingness of the society’s directors to accept the testimony
84
For the correspondence on Simpson, see Boxes 16–18A, CWM/
LMS, South Seas, Incoming Correspondence, SOAS; and Manktelow, “Rev. Simpson’s ‘Improper Liberties,’” 159–81.
85
Manktelow, Missionary Families, 210.
94
of indigenous men and women that forced the local committee
to acquit Simpson. In his descriptions of the illicit sexual behavior of the members of the London Missionary Society, Pratt also
explicitly relied on the narratives of native Tahitians. His stories
quoted their testimony and used them to discredit the English
missionaries. It is important to remember that these stories were
more than mere gossip. In the nineteenth century, individuals
throughout the Pacific laid claim to moral authority by demonstrating their ability to cultivate proper domestic relationships.
In portraying the British missionaries as immoral, Pratt questioned the propriety of granting them authority.
Grouard’s marriage aligned Mormon missionaries, not with
white respectability but with beachcombers and whalers who
lived on the margins of white society. In many cases, these men
had married indigenous women and had chosen to live among
native Tahitians rather than in the white domestic spaces members of the London Missionary Society had created. Pratt had
actually performed some of these marriages. According to the
Church records he compiled on Tubuai, he married William J.
Bowen and Potí on July 14, 1844—within six weeks of his arrival. That same year, he married Oman Clifford to Vaiho, George
McLain to Paahaaho, and George Prescott to Metua. Although
it is possible that he did so reluctantly, his records contain no
special comments that indicate any of the anxiety that marked
his response to Grouard’s marriage to Tearo.86 It is possible that
his concerns about Grouard’s marriage arose from the latter’s
status as a missionary. As a white American Mormon missionary, Grouard was to be an exemplar of the community in ways
that the beachcombers and whalers who converted to Mormonism were not. In marrying an indigenous woman, Grouard raised
the possibility that he would be assimilated into Ma‘ohi society
rather than teaching his congregation about their destiny as Israelites.
86
“Mehahe—Marriages,” The Records of the Church at Toobooai
[sic], 1844–1882,” LDS Church History Library.
95
His marriage also attracted the interest of the LMS missionaries. Although Grouard’s marriage grew out of a specifically Mormon understanding of the role that indigenous people
would play in the Millennium, it was not incomprehensible for
members of the London Missionary Society. They saw Grouard’s
marriage as being part of a much larger history in which white
men frequently succumbed to the seductions of the Pacific. Although Pratt did not marry an indigenous woman, his willingness live in indigenous communities would have raised questions
about his morality and chastity.
The questions that the presence of Mormon missionaries like
Grouard and Pratt raised in the Pacific were similar to the questions that had arisen in the wake of the sexual indiscretions of a
few earlier members of the London Missionary Society. Focusing on Mormon missionaries reminds us of the ways that questions of sexual desire, domesticity, and religious piety became entwined in the Pacific. In choosing to live in indigenous communities without white women to restrain their sexuality, Mormon
missionaries classed themselves in the eyes of their Congregational fellow missionaries with indigenous revival movements,
beachcombers, and white men who married indigenous women.
Their decisions seemed to highlight the fluidity of racial identity. In adopting indigenous customs, eating indigenous food, and
living in indigenous homes, Mormon missionaries seemed ready
to abandon their whiteness. Even though they saw themselves
as bringing gospel to the islands of the sea, their willingness to
live in indigenous communities placed them in a marginal position. In the Pacific, they were viewed as being akin—not to
white, middle-class Christian missionaries—but to beachcombers, whalers, and other miscreants. For the society’s members and
for early Mormons, racial identity was not fixed. The society’s
missionaries feared that too much contact with indigenous people would lead their children to adopt indigenous customs and
to become part of Ma’ohi society. Although these children remained physically white, they occupied a liminal space within
Tahitian society. Born in the Pacific, they first began to babble
96
in Tahitian and were frequently favored by the Pomare family.
The society’s members worried that their children were becoming Tahitian and tried to separate them from indigenous society,
forbidding them to play with indigenous children and placing
them in a white boarding school on Tahiti Nui.
For Mormon missionaries, the fluidity of race involved
physical as well as social transformations. Early Mormon theology imagined an eschaton in which indigenous people would
be physically whitened. Although this emphasis on the literal
transformation of indigenous people into white men and women might have led Mormons to be more emphatic about the
importance of indigenous people adopting white standards of
domesticity, Mormons did not have a firm timeline upon which
they believed such transformations would occur. It is possible
that some believed that indigenous peoples would not ultimately adopt white habits of civilization until after the second coming of Christ. The world that I have described in this article was
short-lived. By the 1850s, Mormon missionaries brought their
wives to live on the islands of Tahiti Nui and Tubuai. When Addison Pratt returned to the United States in 1847, his wife, Louisa, half-joked that she would divorce him if he were called on
another mission to the Pacific Islands. When Young ultimately
asked Addison to return to the Pacific, she asked to serve with
him. She and her daughters lived in Tubuai from 1851 to 1852.
It is important, however, to understand the earliest experiences
of Mormon missionaries. They provide us with a window into
the ways in which white domesticity served as a disciplinary
force in the Pacific, determining who would be accepted into the
white community and offered as a model of religious piety for
the indigenous communities who served as the object of their
proselytization.
WILLIAM MCCARY, LUCY STANTON,
AND THE PERFORMANCE OF RACE AT
WINTER QUARTERS AND BEYOND
Angela Pulley Hudson
In February 1847, Brigham Young and his colleagues among
the Quorum of the Twelve were treated to an unusual concert in
Winter Quarters by “a Mr. McCarey,” who demonstrated his talents
on a flute, fife, whistle, and saucepan. Alternately regarded as “the
Indian musician,” “a professed Spaniard,” “a half-blooded Indian,”
“the Choctaw Indian,” and “the nigger Indian,” McCary and his
white wife, Lucy Stanton, had recently arrived at Winter Quarters.
This vast encampment on the Missouri River was a gathering place
for Mormons heading west.1 Although McCary, a well-known
ANGELA PULLEY HUDSON {[email protected]} is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: I thank Paul Reeve, Quincy Newell, and the Journal
of Mormon History’s anonymous readers who offered helpful advice for
improving this article. I also express appreciation to Spencer Fluhman,
participants in the Texas A&M Department of History’s colloquium,
Connell O’Donovan, and my writing group for their assistance with
my book from which this article emerges: Real Native Genius: How an
Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
1
Juanita Brooks, ed., On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea
Stout, 1844–1861 (1964; rpt., Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press,
1982), 1:244; Willard Richards, Journal, February 26, 1847, Willard
Richards Papers, 1821–54, MS 1490, Box 2, fd. 6, LDS Church History Library; Charles Kelly, ed., Journals of John D. Lee, 1846–47 and
1859 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1984), 100–103; Robert Campbell, Journal, March 1, 1847, 56, Mormon Missionary Di-
97
98
musician across the Midwest, provided welcome entertainment to
the Saints settled in the area, within just a few months, he and his
wife would be cast out of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, shamed into exile, and accused of racial, religious, and sexual
transgressions.
Most scholars of Mormonism and race are familiar with the
“negro prophet” William McCary and his presence at Winter
Quarters in 1847. The most common and persuasive interpretation of this episode is that McCary’s “bizarre activities,” including alleged dalliance with white women aged sixteen to sixty,
were among the factors that led to a pronouncement banning
priesthood ordination for black men.2 But when McCary entered the Mormon orbit, he was not alone, nor was his “blackness” the Mormons’ only concern. However, the focus on McCary’s perceived African ancestry and the subsequent priesthood
ban has largely obscured consideration of both performative “Indianness,” by which I mean a wide-ranging set of ideas about
how American Indians looked, talked, lived, and loved, and the
role of his white Mormon wife, Lucy Stanton McCary.3
aries, Harold B. Lee Library Digital Collections, http://contentdm.
lib.byu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/MMD/id/51765 (accessed June 14,
2014), L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library,
Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (hereafter Perry Special Collections).
2
Newell G. Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks: The Changing
Place of Black People within Mormonism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 1981) and Bringhurst, “The ‘Missouri Thesis’ Revisited: Early
Mormonism, Slavery, and the Status of Black People,” in Black and
Mormon, edited by Bringhurst and Darron T. Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 13–33; Connell O’Donovan, “The Mormon Priesthood Ban and Elder Q. Walker Lewis: ‘An Example for
His More Whiter Brethren to Follow,’” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 26 (2006): 48–100; and Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different
Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2015), especially chap. 5.
3
Patrick Polk first identified William McCary as “Okah Tubbee.”
Polk, “Early Black Mormons and Dilemmas of Identification,” paper
Angela Hudson/William McCary and Lucy Stanton
99
Under a variety of pseudonyms, the pair went on to become
famous Indian performers in the eastern United States and Canada in the late 1840s and early 1850s.4 Their career as professional Indians was shaped in part by Mormon views on blackness
and Indianness that intersected with broader American concerns
about interracial sex and marriage. These views were rooted in
and resonated with antebellum racial ideologies but were also
tied to theological debates within the LDS church.
Moreover, while extant interpretations of the Winter Quarters episode have illuminated certain questions of race, gender,
and Church doctrine, they have obscured others. By widening
our view from the narrow question of blacks in the priesthood to
include popular ideas about Indians, crises of authority and identity within and beyond the Church, and concerns about interracial sex and marriage, we can better situate the Winter Quarters episode not only within Mormon history, but also within
the broader social and cultural history of the antebellum United
States.
William McCary and Lucy Stanton had each experimented
with playing Indian before, but their sojourn at Winter Quarters convinced them of the benefits they could derive from fully inhabiting Indian personae. Their experiences among Church
delivered at the Mormon History Association annual meeting, Sacramento, May 23, 2008; and Polk, “William McCarey (Alias Wm.
Chubbee); Or The Magic Mulatto in Mormon Country,” paper delivered at the Sunstone Symposium, Salt Lake City, August 9, 2008,
copies in my possession.
4
William McCary used a number of aliases including Warner McCary, William Carey, James Carey, William Chubbee, Okah Tubbee,
Dr. O.K., and Chief Wah Bah Goosh. For the purposes of this essay,
I will refer to him by the name he used at the moment under discussion, alternating primarily between William McCary and Okah Tubbee. Lucy Stanton also devised a variety of pseudonyms during her life,
including Luceil Bsuba, Laah Ceil Manatoi Elaah Tubbee, and later,
Madame Laahceil and Celeste La Salle. I will primarily refer to her
here as Lucy Stanton, Lucy McCary, or Laah Ceil.
100
leaders vividly demonstrated the contingent nature of race,
which historian Ariela Gross has observed is “not something imposed from above” but rather “created and re-created every day
through the workings of community institutions and individuals
in daily life.”5 The couple’s subsequent performances of Indianness, shaped by their time in Winter Quarters, both reflected
and constituted popular conceptions of American Indians and
illuminate the interplay between race, faith, gender, and sexuality
during the antebellum era.
COMING INTO THE FOLD
William McCary entered the Mormon circle in 1846
when he was baptized by Orson Hyde and married twenty-nineyear-old divorcée Lucy Stanton in Nauvoo.6 But his journey to
the Mormons’ “Kingdom on the Mississippi” began far downriver in Natchez, where he was born into slavery in about 1810.
Though he would later assume over a dozen aliases, as a child
he was known as Warner McCary. When his owner died, threeyear-old Warner became a ward of the estate. His “labor and
Services, and the proceeds of the same” were designated for the
benefit of half-siblings Bob and Kitty McCary, who were granted their freedom in the owner’s will.7 In later recollections, the
man born Warner McCary would claim that he had been kidnapped from the Choctaws and placed in bondage. Given docu5
Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in
America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008), 10.
6
Untitled notice, Voree [Wisc.] Herald 1 (October 1846): 10. Hyde
is also identified as the officiator in “A Protest of Orson Hyde, against
the New Organization, at the Conference in G. S. L. City, Oct. 7th,
1860, with Editorial Notes,” True Latter Day Saints’ Herald, 2, no. 1
(March 1861): 5. However, both publications were critical of Hyde
and may have overstated his role in bringing McCary into the Church.
7
James McCary, Will, 1813, Adams County, Probate Cases, Box
27, Microfilm 5646, Estate of James McCary, Mississippi Department of Archives and History (hereafter Mississippi Archives), Jackson, Mississippi.
Angela Hudson/William McCary and Lucy Stanton 101
mented relationships between African-descended, Euro-American, and indigenous peoples in the early national South, a possible link to Choctaw ancestors cannot be dismissed.8 Nevertheless, he was raised and regarded as a mulatto slave, hired out
in a variety of trades. As a youth, he learned he could provide
for himself by performing—first imitating animal sounds, then
whistling tunes, and later taking up the fife and flute. He had exceptional natural talent as a performer; and after his manumission around 1840, he relied on this talent to make his way in the
world as a traveling entertainer.9
McCary probably first met Lucy Stanton in Quincy, Illinois,
where she and her three young children lived near her parents,
Daniel and Clarinda Stanton, following her divorce from former Mormon Oliver Harmon Bassett.10 The Stantons had been
among the earliest converts to Mormonism in Kirtland, Ohio,
8
See, for example, Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005); Daniel F. Littlefield, Africans and Creeks:
From the Colonial Period to the Civil War (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1979); Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters:
Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
9
Many secondary sources contend that McCary adopted an Indian persona because he was a fugitive slave. However archival records
indicate that his half-brother/owner initiated steps to free him in 1839
and he was recognized as a “free man of color” in Mississippi by 1843.
Robert McCary, P. Atty. Almon Baldwin, 1839, Deed Book BB, Microfilm 5351, and Excerpt from Board of Police Minutes, Microfilm
5322, Mississippi Archives.
10
Oliver Harmon Bassett initiated the divorce proceedings. Lucy’s
perspective on the split remains unknown, but her daughter Semira
later suggested that religious differences underlay the break-up. Adams County (Illinois), Clerk of the Circuit Court, Chancery case files,
1827–54, Microfilm 1839548, LDS Family History Library, Salt Lake
City; Semira L. Wood, “An Abridged Sketch of the Life of Semira
L. Wood Written March 24th 1881 Springville, Utah,” 1, in Charles
William Mitchell, Biographies (1835), Perry Special Collections.
102
in the early 1830s, and had migrated to Missouri in mid-1838,
but were expelled along with the rest of the Latter-day Saints
during the racially charged Mormon War.11 The family then settled in Quincy, where Daniel Stanton later became stake president.12 As they were pushed from place to place by growing and
sometimes violent anti-Mormon sentiment, the Stantons and
other early Mormons may have recognized a similarity between
themselves and Native Americans forced to vacate their eastern
homelands during the same era, as diasporic peoples whose fates
were intertwined.
While a variety of antebellum denominations were interested in American Indians, largely as potential converts, the
centrality of Indians to Mormon theology is distinctive.13 One
11
While the Mormon war, like all such conflicts, had many causes,
I am particularly interested in how accusations of abolitionist sentiments and “Indian tampering” influenced local anti-Mormonism. See
J. Spencer Fluhman, “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 53; Ronald K. Walker, “Seeking the
‘Remnant’: The Native American during the Joseph Smith Period,”
Journal of Mormon History 19, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 15. On race and the
Mormon War, see also T. Ward Frampton, “‘Some Savage Tribe’: Race,
Legal Violence, and the Mormon War of 1838,” Journal of Mormon
History 40, no. 1 (2014): 175–207.
12
Lyndon Cook, The Revelations of the Prophet Joseph Smith: A Historical and Biographical Commentary of the Doctrine and Covenants (Salt
Lake City: Deseret Book, 1985), 156–57. Kettley, Garr, and Manscill
note that the Quincy stake was short-lived since many Mormons left
to follow Joseph Smith to Commerce, where he established Nauvoo.
Within one year, the stake had been reduced to an “ordinary branch”
numbering only seventy members. Marlene C. Kettley, Arnold K.
Garr, and Craig K. Manscill, Mormon Thoroughfare: A History of the
Church in Illinois, 1830–1839 (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies
Center, 2006), 108.
13
Mark Lyman Staker, “Hearken, O Ye People”: The Historical Setting for Joseph Smith’s Ohio Revelations (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford
Books, 2009), 81–82.
modern scholar has gone so far as to describe the Book of Mormon as not merely a “record of the ‘Lamanite’ or Native American people,” but also a “manifesto of their destiny.”14 In addition,
some early Mormons, who themselves experienced persecution
and repeated displacement, may have also considered recently
removed Native people as a sort of “spiritual kin.”15 Despite the
fact that Mormon migrants were among the beneficiaries of Indian removal—frequently living on land recently emptied of its
indigenous inhabitants—the often coerced or forced migration
of Mormon converts interestingly mirrored the region’s contemporaneous expulsion of American Indians.16
When the first Mormon missionaries arrived in Ohio, the
state had recently expelled most Native peoples living there. Between 1817 and 1825, twenty-five treaties separated tribes from
their lands, including those belonging to the Shawnee, Seneca,
and Delaware nations. From the 1820s through 1850s, a period
that included the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830,
the United States signed another eighty-six removal treaties
with tribes between New York and Mississippi.17 Some of these
14
Walker, “Seeking the ‘Remnant,’” 3.
Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010),
16. Joy Porter echoes these characterizations, asserting that Indians, as
well as Masons, held a special place in Joseph Smith’s “spiritual imagination” and referencing the widespread antebellum discussions about
Indian origins (in relationship to the biblical account of Genesis) as an
important influence on him. Porter, Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 96–97.
16
See, for example, Elias Hutchings, “Autobiography, ca. 1842,” 30,
Perry Special Collections.
17
On these removals, see John P. Bowes, Pioneers and Exiles: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); James J. Buss, Winning the West with Words: Language and Conquest in the Lower Great Lakes (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2011); R. Douglas Hurt, The Ohio Frontier: Crucible
of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830 (Bloomington: University of Indi15
104
groups were already refugees from earlier episodes of dispossession. The Delawares, among whom the earliest Mormon missionaries made their first inroads and from whom Lucy Stanton
would later claim descent, were relocated no fewer than seven
times.18 Following in the footsteps of these recently removed Indians, American migrants, including some who would convert to
Mormonism, poured into the Ohio country along newly opened
roads and canals.
The uniquely American phenomenon of “playing Indian” accelerated alongside these episodes of Indian removal during the
1830s. As Christopher Smith details in his “Playing Lamanite:
Ecstatic Performance of American Indian Roles in Early Mormon Ohio” in this issue, young Lucy Stanton participated in the
practice along with her sisters in Kirtland.19 While some Amerana Press, 1996); David W. Miller, Forced Removal of American Indians from the Northeast: A History of Territorial Cessions and Relocations,
1620–1854 ( Jefferson, N.C.: Macfarland, 2011). The broader literature
on Indian removal is considerable. See, for example: Ronald N. Satz,
American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1974), 2002; Tim Alan Garrison, The Legal Ideology
of Removal: The Southern Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009); Francis Paul
Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics
of Indian Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
18
On Delaware dispossession specifically, see Bowes, Pioneers and
Exiles. On the abbreviated Mormon mission to the Delawares, see
Parley P. Pratt Jr., ed., The Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt, One
of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
Embracing His Life, Ministry and Travels, with Extracts, in Prose and
Verse, from his Miscellaneous Writings (Chicago: printed for Pratt Bros.
by Law, King & Law, 1888), chap. 8.
19
Rayna Green asserts that playing Indian is “one of the oldest
and most pervasive forms of American cultural expression.” Green,
“The Tribe Called Wannabe: Playing Indian in America and Europe,”
Folklore 99 (1988): 30. Other important work on the phenomenon in-
ican men donned Indian attire in fraternal society meetings with
faux native names and inventive ceremonies, the Stanton girls
distinguished themselves with ecstatic glossolalia that including
“speaking Injun” in the early 1830s.20
They were not the only ones who got “the power” and played
Indian. Convert John Corrill witnessed examples of tongue-singing that he was later informed were in “Indian dialects” previously unknown to the singers.21 Another observer recalled that
some Kirtland faithful “claimed to have a special mission to the
Indians, and they went through all sorts of Indian performances,” saying that he had seen them, “in pantomine [sic] tomahawk
and scalp each other, and rip open the bowels and tear out the
entrails.”22 Black and white men and women experimented with
bodily spiritual practices that included fervent prayer, states of unconsciousness, leaping and falling, and mimicking Indians or what
they thought to be Indian behavior.23 To express their “unique
empathy” for the Lamanites, they also sang Indian-inspired songs,
like “The Indian’s Lament” and “The Red Man.”24 Thus, long before meeting McCary, Lucy Stanton was already inclined to think
cludes Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998). See also Shari Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians
in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 2001); Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians,
Making Americans, 1880–1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004); S.
Elizabeth Bird, ed., Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian
in American Popular Culture (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996).
20
Reuben P. Harmon, “Statement,” in Arthur Deming, ed., Naked
Truths about Mormonism: Also a Journal for Important, Newly Apprehended Truths, and Miscellany 1, no. 2 (Oakland, Calif: Deming & Co.,
April 1888): 1, copy in LDS Church History Library.
21
Corrill quoted in Dan Vogel and Scott C. Dunn, “‘The Tongue
of Angels’: Glossolalia among Mormonism’s Founders,” Journal of
Mormon History 19, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 4.
22
Staker, Hearken, O Ye People, 83.
23
John Whitmer and Josiah Jones quoted in ibid., 85.
24
Michael Hicks, Mormonism and Music: A History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 210–11.
106
of herself in relation to Indians in ways that informed both her
faith and identity. In addition to these tendencies, she would later
claim that she felt personally called to “do good . . . to a fallen people,” a mission revealed to her in a childhood vision.25
While some early Mormons had actual, face-to-face encounters with indigenous people in their homelands or in exile,
Mormon imaginings of American Indians also borrowed freely
from popular representations found in novels, reform tracts, sensational newspaper accounts, and political rhetoric. As was apparent in the Kirtland practices, they were influenced by romantic and melodramatic depictions of Native peoples as violent but
redeemable savages who were worthy of pity and conversion. In
their migrations from western New York to central Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois between 1830 and 1846, the Mormons were
walking in the footsteps of the “vanishing race.” But, as noted
above, they and other Americans were also beneficiaries of Indian removal policies. Indeed, as Philip Deloria has noted, popular racial imaginings of Indians during and after the removal
years often appeared in “simultaneous languages of cultural fusion and of violent appropriation.”26 Perhaps to mitigate their
complicity in the crimes of settler colonialism, early Mormons
participated in an emergent tendency among non-Native people
in former Indian lands to associate themselves with Indians, as
real or “substitute ancestors . . . in a presumptuous reconstruction
of American kinship.”27 For antebellum Americans, including
25
Laah Ceil Manatoi Elaah Tubbee, A Sketch of the Life of Okah
Tubbee: Alias, William Chubbee, Son of the Head Chief, Mosholeh Tubbee,
of the Choctaw Nation of Indians, Okah Tubbee (Toronto: Henry Stephens, 1852), 75.
26
Deloria, Playing Indian, 5.
27
Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 124–25. Joseph Roach describes this practice as “surrogation,” which, in the context of Mardi Gras Indians, works to mitigate absences created by
colonization through cross-cultural performance. Roach, Cities of the
Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University
Mormon converts like the Stantons, ideas about Native Americans were thus important in multiple and overlapping registers
that were sometimes simultaneously made manifest in missionary ambitions and racial masquerade.28
When Lucy Stanton and William McCary met, he probably
also had experience performing Indianness, drawing on childhood experiences with Choctaws in the South, stories heard
during his time as a militia musician, and the same popular representations that influenced Mormon views. Stanton later recalled that, from the first moment she saw the “Indian brave,”
she knew he would be her husband and he quickly charmed her
family with his talents.29 Whether or not others in the Church
accepted him as such, Hyde’s willingness to baptize William
McCary and marry the pair apparently rested on his perception
of McCary as an Indian. Hyde allegedly regarded the newcomer
as a “Lamanite prophet” who would carry the Mormon message
to the western tribes.30
By their own description, the courtship between Lucy Stanton and William McCary was brief. Within one day after meeting, the “brave” asked Stanton to marry him. Thinking his hasty
proposal was a joke, she coyly replied, “O yes,” and her family, which had assembled to meet the stranger, shared a good
laugh. Drawing forth a flute, he then played a tune for them, followed by another played on the “sauce-panana,” an instrument
he had invented after having a dream about its construction. In
his dream, a mysterious voice commanded him to create an instrument from a saucepan and to use it to unite scattered flocks
of sheep, whom he interpreted as Indians, “driven by the palePress, 1996), 6, 14.
28
For a useful overview of Mormon ideas about Indians in this
period, see Walker, “Seeking the ‘Remnant,’” 1–33.
29
Tubbee, A Sketch of the Life of Okah Tubbee (1852), 76. The reaction of Lucy’s parents, Daniel and Clarinda Stanton, to the hasty
courtship was not detailed in the autobiography, nor have I discovered
other records conveying their perspective on these events.
30
Ibid., 73–78.
108
faces.” “If I could visit them with some simple instruments of
music,” he concluded, “the harmony might melt the savage heart,
and unite the broken and wasting tribes.”31
Being an Indian was thus McCary’s entrée into the Mormon
world. It was an identity that had already inspired the fascination of many early converts and was a tool for demonstrating his
usefulness to the Church.32 He may have also hoped that it deflected the accusations of African American ancestry—based on
physical characteristics—that would eventually plague him and
conceal his past as a slave. For Lucy Stanton, acting Indian had
also been foundational to her experience of Mormonism. In addition, being married to a converted Indian provided her with a
practical way to do good to the “fallen” Lamanites, a mission to
which she later claimed to have been divinely directed.33
By the spring of 1846, William McCary was performing as
“Mr. Carey, the Indian flutist” for a temperance event in Quincy. Shortly thereafter, he and his wife went to Cincinnati. They
reportedly established a small church in the center of the city
and attracted about sixty followers.34 During this brief sectarian
experiment, Lucy McCary adopted a Native persona, naming
herself “Luceil Bsuba,” and claiming to be a Delaware Indian.
According to local papers, their signature blessing, which they
bestowed on the congregants, professed their authenticity as Indians—but in distinctly Mormon language, promising followers
that they would have eternal life, since their names were “written
in the Lamb’s Book of Life.”35 Although Lucy McCary had ex31
Ibid., 73–78.
Reeve makes a similar observation in Religion of a Different Color, chap. 5.
33
Tubbee, A Sketch of the Life (1852), 75.
34
Untitled notice, Weekly Reveille (St. Louis, Mo.) May 4, 1846,
3; “Millerism Outdone,” Cincinnati [Ohio] Commercial, October 27,
1846, 2.
35
Cincinnati Commercial, November 17, 1846, 2. Stanton’s patriarchal blessing does not appear in the only compendium of such blessings from the Kirtland era but the collection is not comprehensive. See
32
hibited an interest in Indians since childhood, this was the first
time she fully performed a Native identity and it was deeply influenced by her faith.
In their public performances of Indianness, the McCarys were hardly alone. In addition to the growing practice of
playing Indian, Native figures were common on the antebellum stage, including theatrical characters, orators, dancers, and
musicians.36 For example, at the same time that McCary and
his “Delaware wife” were establishing their Indian act, popular Anishinaabe orator George Copway was on a lecture tour
through the Northeast. In fact, the three of them would later
share the stage.37 Professional Indians capitalized on antebellum audiences’ desire for trivia on the vanishing race. Spectators wanted to witness brief, entertaining snippets of ethnographic detail (“Indian traits and customs”) largely calculated
to highlight differences between Indians and white Americans
and mourn the decline of “the red man.” Topics included “Indian courtship” or “How Indians get their names,” and could also
be found in periodicals and popular literature, including the
composite autobiography the McCarys would later produce.38
As part of a growing “imperialist nostalgia,” removed Native peoples—like the Choctaws and Delawares—had emerged
as popular objects of both pity and charity.39 Performing as
H. Michael Marquardt, ed., Early Patriarchal Blessings of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, (Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2007).
36
Among others, see Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian; Rosemary
K. Bank, “Staging the ‘Native’: Making History in American Theatre
Culture, 1828–1838,” Theatre Journal 45 (1993): 461–86; Joshua David Bellin and Laura L. Mielke, eds., Native Acts: Indian Performance,
1603–1832 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011).
37
“Tabernacle,” New York Herald, March 9, 1848, col. F.
38
Bank, “Staging the ‘Native,’” 461–86.
39
Renato Rosaldo describes “imperialist nostalgia” as a paradox:
“In any of its versions, imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of ‘innocent
yearning’ both to capture people’s imagination and to conceal its com-
110
Indians could provide the McCarys with both an audience
and an income. Perhaps the temperance event in Quincy was
a test run. A civilized Christian Indian couple, presented in
“bold relief to the mind of the philanthropist,” could solicit
contributions to help relieve the “melancholy” plight of their
red brethren.40 The pair may have also felt that Lucy’s performance as an Indian could help them avoid unwanted attention
that a black-white or Indian-white union might attract. Such
a strategy, the necessity of which would be confirmed at Winter Quarters, could both protect their relationship and fill the
collection plate.
Whatever their ambitions, by the beginning of 1847, their
church in Cincinnati had fallen apart. As one observer put it,
“The Black Indian has blown out, and all his followers here
are ashamed.”41 Within a month, the pair turned up in Winter
Quarters. At the end of February, “William McCairey the Indian musician” gave his first concert for the assembled Saints.42 It
provided a welcome diversion for a community that had suffered
great hardship through the winter snows, seeing many of their
number perish from disease and malnutrition.43
“McGarry . . . a half blooded Indian,” as John D. Lee called
him, impressed Church president Brigham Young, who concluded that the musician could be of use to the emigrant companies, provided McCary would listen to counsel. Young declared,
“His skill on the flute cannot be surpassed by any musician that
I have ever heard,” and he instructed Church leaders to “use the
plicity with often brutal domination.” “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations 26 (1989): 108.
40
41
“Extract of a Letter to President Strang,” Zion’s Reveille (Voree,
Wisc.) February 25, 1847.
42
Brooks, On the Mormon Frontier, 1:244.
43
Stanley B. Kimball, Heber C. Kimball: Mormon Patriarch and Pioneer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 145; see also Richard E. Bennett, Mormons at the Missouri: Winter Quarters, 1846–1852
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004).
man with respect.”44 Lucy McCary couldn’t keep up her Delaware persona in Winter Quarters, since she was among her own
people. But she did not shrink from their attention, instead distinguishing herself as a person of influence, largely through her
enigmatic Native spouse.
Indeed, through all of these episodes, Lucy McCary was a
visible and vocal participant. She most likely introduced McCary to many of the Saints she had known in Ohio, Missouri,
and Illinois. She was apparently present at McCary’s public appearances throughout the late winter and spring; and based on
her later role as his pseudo-agent and manager, she may have
helped arrange the performances. She was at his side when he
first met Brigham Young and the apostles and appeared with
him again when they were summoned to address rising concerns about their actions. And she almost certainly provided him
instruction in Mormonism, since he was not literate and thus
could not read the scriptures. Yet her role in this pivotal moment
has been largely overlooked, despite evidence that she played a
prominent role in shaping her husband’s Indian persona (as well
as her own).
Meanwhile, William McCary practiced his Indianness. Once
while visiting Brigham Young’s home, he became annoyed by
noisy children and wondered aloud “how people could talk easy
when others were talking & playing in same room.” Adopting
a tone that was both indignant and ethnographic, he informed
Young that “amongst Indians . . . ‘children were not allowed to
talk or make any noise, you may be amongst 100 Indians from
1 year old to 10, or from 10 to 15, or from 15 to 20, & you will
not hear a word, neither any noise. But you may hear a Cambric Needle drop on the ground.’”45 The statement probably reflected McCary’s legitimate irritation, but it also resembled the
sort of “traits and customs” trivia that his listeners might have
both expected and desired. It also makes clear that McCary was
44
45
Kelly, Journals of John D. Lee, 100–103.
McCary quoted in Campbell, Journal, 56.
112
practicing his Indian identity both on and off stage, seizing even
informal opportunities to convince the Saints of his authentic
Indianness, quite apart from any claims to status as a religious
leader or prophet. And while it seems likely that the McCarys
could have had at least occasional contact with Omahas, Otoes,
and other native people in the area, the pair probably learned as
much about how to “act Indian” from other Mormons as from
the Indians themselves.
McCary’s musical talents and Indian traits were not the only
reason he generated a buzz in Winter Quarters. In the spring of
1847, Church secretary Willard Richards indicated: “Heard report that the Nigger Indian McCarry was holding private meetings over the River. first entering into a Covt. of Secresy.”46 Perhaps McCary was attempting to reconstitute the Cincinnati
church or experiment with another form of sectarian invention.
Indeed, a number of schismatic meetings and “kinds of religions”
sprang up in Winter Quarters that spring and summer. One diarist recalled that the Twelve were alarmed enough about the
fractious activities that they delivered a “warning [to] the people
against those who may rise up and try to lead off parties.”47 The
McCarys’ little movement may have been of particular concern,
however, because it transgressed not only emergent doctrinal,
but also racial and sexual, boundaries.
Although it is difficult to determine consensus on how William McCary was regarded by the Mormons he first met in Illinois, from his first appearance in Winter Quarters, there was
widespread disagreement about his race. And the marriage between racially indeterminate William McCary and Lucy Stanton, “a white woman,” did not pass without notice.48 A number
of scholars have pointed out that interracial sex between white
women and black or Indian men was not uniformly condemned
46
Willard Richards, Journal, March 8, 1847, LDS Church History Library.
47
Brooks, On the Mormon Frontier, 1:244.
48
Campbell, Journal, 56.
in the early national and antebellum United States.49 But popular antebellum attitudes toward such pairings suggest a “climate
of anxiety” that demanded greater attentiveness to the boundaries between the races.50 Interracial marriage in particular was increasingly met with disapproval or worse. At the time that McCary and Stanton were married in Nauvoo, Illinois, state laws
held that marriage between blacks and whites was punishable
by fines, whipping, and prison.51 Despite an apparently tolerant
attitude toward the participation of blacks in the Church’s earliest years, the Mormons at Winter Quarters likely shared some
of these broader antebellum antipathies toward interracial marriage, and McCary himself would claim that his union with a
white woman was the primary reason his Mormon neighbors
began to turn against him.
SCHISMS AND SENSUALITY AT WINTER QUARTERS
Fears about fractious sects and concerns about interracial
marriage were not the only issues raised by the McCarys’ schismatic movement, however. One observer recalled that William
McCary “had converted a good many to his kind of religion” and
49
On the frequency of and reaction to interracial unions from the
colonial period through the mid-nineteenth century, see, for example
Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); David Henry Fowler, Northern
Attitudes towards Interracial Marriage: Legislation and Public Opinion
in the Middle Atlantic and the States of the Old Northwest, 1780–1830
(New York: Garland, 1987); Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men:
Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1997); Charles F. Robinson II, Dangerous Liaisons:
Sex and Love in the Segregated South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003).
50
Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell, 30.
51
Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the
Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009),
22–27. She cites the 1845 Illinois law on 329 note 44.
114
noted that he was “in favor of holding his meetings of the men
and women separately.” It appeared that “his teaching to the men
and to the women was entirely different,” implying spiritual—
and perhaps sexual—transgression.52 When the McCarys were
called to appear before Brigham Young and Church apostles in
March 1847 to answer for their actions, they deflected any suggestion of apostasy and sexual indecency by accusing their Mormon neighbors of gross racism and disrespect.
William McCary addressed himself to the assembly as
“a brother” and told them bluntly that he was being abused in
Winter Quarters. He complained that Church leaders must
have counseled his neighbors not to allow him into their “wigwams” and said that when he walked by, he heard, “There go the
old nigger & his White Wife.” He wanted to know who had
sanctioned such contempt. If he had transgressed, he claimed, he
wanted to learn to “walk right.” But he was more interested in
pointing out the prejudice he faced in Winter Quarters than in
answering for his alleged sins. Referring to biblical stories of the
curse of Ham and mark of Cain that provided scriptural justification for white supremacy in American Protestantism broadly
and the Mormon faith specifically, he asked, “We were all white
once, why av [have] I the stain now?”53
With his wife at his side, McCary then waded further into
the murky question of his origins and focused the assembly’s attention on his possible identities. First, he said, “I came in as a
52
Nelson W. Whipple, “History of Nelson Wheeler Whipple, Pioneer of 1850, written by himself,” 30, 37, Nelson Wheeler Whipple
Diaries, 1863–1887, typescript by Anor Whipple, Perry Special Collections.
53
Church Historian’s Office, General Church Minutes, 1839–
1877, March 26, 1847, LDS Church History Library, CR 100 318,
Box 1, fd. 52, March 26, 1847–April 6, 1847, http://churchhistorycatalog.lds.org/ (accessed May 30, 2012). On the curse of Ham and the
emergence of a scriptural rationale for slavery and white supremacy,
see Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
red man & want to go out as a red man,” suggesting that, despite
skepticism about his religious pretensions, he was determined
not to surrender his Indianness. But suppose he was not Indian,
he proposed, still “dont these backbiters think that I [av?] feeling [even] if I was a nigger[?]” While McCary’s tone before the
assembly was mostly humble and contrite (“I have got baptism
I am thankful for it,” “if I am wrong I want to walk right”), he
was nevertheless critical of his white Mormon neighbors and
attributed their disrespect to racist and unchristian behavior.54
As he continued his oration, McCary asserted that the Mormons at Winter Quarters recognized little difference between
blacks and Indians. He declared, “I’d as like to be as a nigger
as [an] Indian as many think they are as [one?],” suggesting
that many Mormon believers saw no difference in the two races.55 Had the McCarys become disillusioned about the privileged place of American Indians within the Mormon faith after
witnessing or hearing stories of tense interactions between Mormons and Native peoples in the vicinity? While Latter-day Saint
thinking presented vague and sometimes idealized references to
American Indians, the Saints at Winter Quarters were squatting
on Indian land and actual Native people had become something
of a nuisance.56 Perhaps like other antebellum Americans, as
Deloria has put it, “they desired Indianness, not Indians.”57 For
an aspiring Indian prophet in their midst, such ambivalence was
54
General Church Minutes, March 26, 1847.
Ibid.
56
During their stay among the Mormons, the Omahas were occasionally noted for their communal ethic—a value deeply shared by
many of the Saints, some of whom had been original members of the
“Big Family” experiment in Kirtland. Campbell noted, “When any of
them got any Johnycake they would divide with each other all the
time. A Bro: said of the Indians, that although it was only one potatoe
they would divide it all round.” Campbell, Journal, 58. But others, like
Hosea Stout, regarded area Indians as “lurking” thieves. Brooks, On the
Mormon Frontier, 1:244.
57
Deloria, Playing Indian, 90.
55
116
at best dispiriting and at worst a disaster.
While this meeting is typically analyzed as evidence of emergent Mormon beliefs about blackness and the problem of both
false prophecies and secret covenants,58 it must be also considered in the context of antebellum racial performance, in which
both Lucy and William McCary were experienced. What Young
dismissed as a “rambling speech” was part of an act, composed of
set pieces that would later appear in the McCarys’ stage show
and autobiography.59 Examples include McCary’s jokes about
the bullfrog who calls for “more rum, more rum,” repeated, if
often confused, assertions about his Choctaw background, and
demonstrations of his various musical talents. Although their
meeting with Church leaders was private, McCary approached
it as an extension of his burgeoning Indian performance. And
while a meeting of the Quorum of the Twelve seems far from
the popular stage, he was—above all—a performer and clearly
regarded the assembled elders as his audience. Such an approach
helps to liberate this moment from the annals of Mormon racial
doctrine and situate it among other popular antebellum forms
and forums which, as Eric Lott has contended in his study of
blackface minstrelsy, were not composed of fixed referents but
were instead “sites of continual reconstitution,” particularly
where notions of race, gender, and sexuality are concerned.60
As he continued, McCary increasingly focused the attention
of the assembly on his body itself. He undressed, chided them
for their “mock modesty,” and donned his “red skin . . . costume.”
He invited the brethren to examine him: to feel his ribs, note his
“strait hair,” his sightless left eye, his apparently deaf left ear. Secretary Richards touched McCary’s naked abdomen, reporting, “I
58
In addition to treatments of this episode by Reeve and Bringhurst, see Russell Stevenson’s analysis in For the Cause of Righteousness:
A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830–2013 (Salt Lake City:
Greg Kofford Books, 2014), chap. 2.
59
Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 129–30.
60
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American
Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 92.
don’t discover any thing novel.”61 McCary pointed to his wife,
Lucy, saying, “Here’s the odd rib.” While he may have meant to
imply that he was Adam reincarnate, an alter ego that he had apparently adopted before, he was also trying to prove that he was
an Indian, using his “strait” hair as evidence.
Although McCary clearly invited the inspection, the scene
of his nearly nude figure being touched and examined by a group
of powerful white men, resonates loudly with contemporaneous
images of slave auctions and “scientific” examinations of racialized bodies.62 As such, the encounter highlights the degree to
which the body was both the subject of and a site of debates
about race and identity, not only among the Mormons, but beyond them as well.
Finally, McCary came to what he believed was the heart of
the matter—his white wife. This, he contended, was the central
objection to his presence in Winter Quarters. He declared, “So
long as a White woman is so much in the way, good God why
dont they give me a red woman . . . as my Wife is not ashamed
I dont think you will be ashamed.”63 It is unclear whether he
hoped to add a plural wife or exchange his white wife for a “red
woman,” but these statements combined with his earlier reference to hurtful comments about the “nigger and his white wife”
imply that his marriage to Lucy Stanton was the central complaint against him or, at the very least, that he had chosen to
emphasize this particular aspect of the controversy in order to
distract the Church leaders from concerns about his prophesying
and secret covenants.
After getting dressed, McCary continued to focus the quorum’s attention on the bodily aspects of his presumed race. He
pressed Young about his status, saying, “I am not a Prest., or
an leader of the ppl but a common bror.—because I am a little
61
General Church Minutes, 1839–1877, March 26, 1847.
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 139–57.
63
62
118
shade darker,” thus suggesting that he could not receive priesthood ordination because of his race. But Young cut him off saying, “Your body is not what is your mission” and later averring,
“We dont care about the color.” Despite Young’s protestations,
these responses implied that he was indeed concerned with race
and its place in Mormon thinking. On the question of McCary’s identity, he asserted, “Its nothing to do with the blood for of
one blood has God made all flesh, we have to repent c [&] regain what we av lost—we av one of the best Elders an African
in Lowell—a barber.” He was referring to Q. Walker Lewis, a
free black man recently ordained as an elder in the Melchizedek
Priesthood in Massachusetts.64
Young’s decision to compare McCary to Lewis is particularly revealing since both men inspired controversies within the
Church.65 The statement also implied that Young thought McCary was clearly of African ancestry, despite his claims to the
contrary. Mentioning Lewis’s profession as a barber, the antebellum vocation most closely associated with free black men,
further revealed that Young thought of the two men in similar
ways.66 While he claimed that their race was of no consequence
with respect to their position in the Church, he could not help
pointing it out anyway. Nevertheless, he appeared to offer McCary assurance that his race (whatever it might be) was no impediment to participation in the Church.
64
Ibid.; Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks, 90–91; O’Donovan,
“The Mormon Priesthood Ban and Elder Q. Walker Lewis.” Reeve
provides a more elaborate explanation of the scriptural origins of
Young’s statements in Religion of a Different Color, chap. 5.
65
Bringhurst, Saints, Slaves, and Blacks, 98.
66
Ira Berlin notes, “Free Negro barbers could be found in every
Southern city, and despite the proscriptive pressures free Negroes
faced in other trades, the number of black barbers grew steadily during
the antebellum years. By the eve of the Civil War, the trade had become so closely identified with free Negroes that an English visitor
proclaimed it their ‘birthright.’” Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free
Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 236.
Still not satisfied that the president spoke for all and now
desperately seeking a guarantee of physical safety in Winter Quarters, McCary pressed further, “Do I hear that from
all[?]” and received an “aye” from the brethren. Elder Heber
C. Kimball asked him, “dont you feel a good spirit—here bro
William[?]”67 Sighing his relief, McCary replied, “Yes—thank
God—there r 2 or 3 men at the end of the Camp who want to
kill me.”68 While Church leaders may have been chiefly concerned with McCary’s sectarian pretensions in the midst of a
broader schismatic crisis, the “prophet” himself suggested that
local Mormon disapproval of him was also grounded in his
presumed race and his marriage to a white woman.69
For her part, Lucy Stanton McCary took a different approach
to deflecting criticism. In the midst of the meeting, she defiantly asked Young and the Twelve whether they truly believed the
Bible. She stated that while some of it had been fulfilled, some
“was not translated right.” Young responded by affirming that
they believed in the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants, as well as the redemptive power of baptism.
Although the Church minutes record only this exchange, her
presence at the meeting and her participation generally with her
husband in Winter Quarters should not be overlooked. Indeed,
despite the asymmetry of records documenting her participation
in these events compared with those noting her husband’s activities, Mrs. McCary was the “white woman . . . in the way.”
67
Ibid.
69
By the end of the year, Young and other Church leaders would
again confront a situation involving interracial marriage when they
discussed the union of “African” Elder Lewis’s son, Enoch, with a
white woman. This time, Young appeared much less accepting and asserted that it was against both law and nature for their “seed” to be
“amalgamated.” As evidence of the taint of black blood, he referred
specifically to William McCary, calling him “the negro prophet” and
averring that he was cast out by the Potawatomis because of his “negro
blood.” Young quoted in Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, 135–36.
68
120
In closing his testimony, William McCary tried to lighten
the moment by joking, “If we dont be bel [sic] the bible, we r in
a poor fix for [Stumpers],” implying that he saw little difference
between the Mormons and other popular religious movements
of the day. But he also took the opportunity to again mention
his Choctaw ancestry and his intention to take his wife to meet
his people, refocusing the apostles’ attention on his identity—his
Indianness—rather than allowing questions of spiritual or sexual
indecency to predominate.70
While Church leaders were trying to sanction him or at least
caution him, McCary took their guarded assurances of spiritual
equality to mean that he could forge ahead with both his controversial marriage and his prophetic pretensions. By April, he had
established a headquarters across the Missouri River at a place
called Mosquito Creek. According to an observer, he had “induced some to follow him,” by telling them that he was “a prophet the ancient of days whose hair was as wool.” This continued
fixation on the texture of his hair suggests that concerns about
his perceived race continued to vex him and that he attempted
to use scriptural (specifically Abrahamic) explanations to deflect
them. The allusion also hints that Lucy’s knowledge of the Bible
and Mormon scriptures was instrumental in honing her husband’s public persona. Despite a scathing condemnation of such
schismatic sects delivered by Orson Pratt, neither William nor
Lucy McCary was slowed by the rebuke.71
By mid-1847, the McCarys’ following among the Springville
70
Brooks, On the Mormon Frontier, 1:244. The biblical allusion is
to Daniel 7:9 in which the Ancient of Days was said to have hair like
wool. Although some versions indicate that his hair was white like
wool, others state that his clothing was white but say nothing about
the color of the wooly hair. The McCarys apparently emphasized the
latter interpretation, using William McCary’s frequently mentioned
hair texture to support his claim of transmigration, while simultaneously explaining away apparent evidence of African ancestry.
71
Branch members at Mosquito Creek had grown.72 Despite opposition, McCary had proceeded to build his “kind of religion”
with the help of his white wife. Nelson Whipple, who had converted in 1841 and worked as an assistant to Springville Branch
president Samuel Williams, later recalled, “He [McCary] . . . had
converted a good many to his kind of religion. It appeared that
he understood the slight of hand, the black art or that he was
a magician or something the kind, and had fooled some of the
ignorant in that way.”73 Since no accounts survive (or have yet
been located) from the point of view of the McCarys’ followers
at Winter Quarters, it is difficult to determine precisely what
drew them to him. Considering the extraordinarily trying conditions for many people at the temporary settlement, some Mormons may have simply been desperate for the sort of change an
enigmatic Indian prophet represented.
According to Whipple, the McCarys held separate meetings for men and women and swore both to a covenant of secrecy. While this separation of the sexes might be evidence of
an emergent doctrine of sorts, it may have also been an effort
to conceal the nature of their activities. Whipple alleged that
McCary had crafted his own version of “celestial marriage” and
“had a number of women sealed to him in his way which was as
follows; He had a house in which this ordnance was performed.
His wife Lucy Stanton was in the room at the time of the performance, no others were admitted. The form of sealing was for
the women to bed with him, in the daytime as I am informed
three different times by which they were sealed to the fullest
extent.”74
In recounting the experience of “one Mrs. Howard who revolt72
Here I follow the chronology of the McCarys’ time at Winter
Quarters postulated by Reeve, as opposed to the timeline evident in
Bringhurst and O’Donovan. Reeve, Religion of a Different Color, chap.
5.
73
Whipple, “History of Nelson Wheeler Whipple,” 30, 37, Perry
Special Collections.
74
Ibid., 37.
122
ed and ran when she found what the sealing ordnance really was,”
Whipple claimed that “Mrs. McCarry tried her best to prevent
her escape from the house.” As a consequence of Howard’s flight,
the McCarys’ secret sexual covenant was revealed. Mrs. Howard
“went home and told her husband, Mr. Howard of the affair and
who they were that had been sealed in that way to the old darkey.” Mr. Howard then called on Sessions Chase who, according to
Whipple, had also been a follower of “the nigger prophet” but was
unaware that his own wife had been through the sexual sealing
ceremony, presumably because the men’s and women’s meetings
were always held separately. When Chase confronted his wife, a
woman “upwards of sixty years of age,” she admitted as much. According to Whipple, Chase “was very much astonished at the idea
and it is said that he did not speak a loud word for about three
weeks that anyone knew of.”75 By mid-summer, McCary had fled
to Missouri “on a fast trot.” His erstwhile followers were disgraced
and cut off from the Church, although all but one were later rebaptized. McCary bore the brunt of local anger; at least one Mormon father declared his intention to “shoot him if he could find
him for having tried to kiss his girls.”76
After departing from the Mormon flock, the McCarys headed east and made a remarkable decision. Their experiences at
Winter Quarters convinced them that if they were going to remain together, they had to disguise their unorthodox religious
practices and deal with the twin problem of his blackness and
her whiteness, as they had done in Cincinnati. The solution, reflecting the broader problem of “unassemblable” American iden75
Ibid.; Brooks, On the Mormon Frontier, 1:307.
Whipple, “History,” 38. Whipple attributed the threat to Ha[r]mon Cutler. While there is no reason to doubt the veracity of Whipple’s account of this episode, it is worth noting that he recorded his
version of events sixteen years after the fact. In addition, it is possible
that the McCarys’ former followers may have exaggerated the degree
to which they were fooled or victimized in order to hide their shame
at having participated in such sexually charged schismatic activities.
76
tities, was for both of them to become Indians once more.77 They
quickly devised new names and honed their act.
By the fall of 1847, they were performing in Baltimore and
Washington, D.C., alongside professional Indians like George
Copway. In early 1848, they published the autobiography of
“Okah Tubbee, alias William Chubbee,” asserting that he was
the long-lost son of a Choctaw chief. Lucy McCary now went
by “Laah Ceil Manatoi Elaah Tubbee,” claiming that she was a
Delaware/Mohawk princess.78 They expanded their stage shows
and made quite a splash on the East Coast, presenting concerts
and orations before large audiences from Pennsylvania to New
Hampshire, with notable runs at Barnum’s American Museum
and a number of fashionable venues around Boston.
In each place, they further refined and practiced their Indianness, ever reminded of the troubles at Winter Quarters. For
Okah Tubbee (the former William McCary), claiming Choctaw ancestry enabled him to market himself to eastern antebellum audiences captivated by “vanishing” Indians, while suppressing suspicions of African descent that would associate him with
slavery and amplify concerns about his relationship with a white
woman. Laah Ceil (the former Lucy Stanton) performed a Mohawk/Delaware persona to capitalize on her audiences’ (and possibly her own) fascination with Native peoples and to conceal an
77
Deloria, Playing Indian, 5, asserts, “Indianness provided impetus
and precondition for the creative assembling of an ultimately unassemblable American identity.”
78
The text went through three editions: Rev. L. L. Allen, A Thrilling Sketch of the Life of the Distinguished Chief Okah Tubbee Alias, Wm.
Chubbee, Son of the Head Chief, Mosholeh Tubbee, of the Choctaw Nation of Indians (New York: n.pub., 1848); Laah Ceil Manatoi Elaah
Tubbee, A Sketch of the Life of Okah Tubbee: Alias, William Chubbee,
Son of the Head Chief, Mosholeh Tubbee, of the Choctaw Nation of Indians (Springfield, Mass: H. S. Taylor, 1848); Laah Ceil Manatoi Elaah
Tubbee, A Sketch of the Life of Okah Tubbee: Alias, William Chubbee, Son
of the Head Chief, Mosholeh Tubbee, of the Choctaw Nation of Indians
(Toronto: Henry Stephens, 1852).
124
interracial relationship that had already cost them a great deal.
Since William McCary’s relationship with “white sister” Lucy
Stanton had been so much “in the way,” taking or making “a red
one” could solve the problem. The birth of their son Mosholeh in
1849, just one year before the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act,
again raised the stakes of racial (mis)recognition and made protecting themselves from persecution even more vital.
TAKING THE INDIAN ACT ON THE ROAD
Other capable scholars have written about the myriad ways
in which the “McCary episode” may have contributed to policies
and attitudes on race within the LDS Church. Instead, I want to
highlight the ways in which the McCarys/Tubbees’ experiences
among the Mormons shaped their subsequent on- and off-stage
performances of Indianness.
Before and after Winter Quarters, Laah Ceil used her invented Indian identity to mediate her relationship to Mormonism. Adopting an Indian persona allowed her to fulfill her deep
sense of mission to the Lamanites and carve out a special place
for herself in the emergent religion.79 As her childhood vision
and early experiments with “speaking Injun” reveal, she experienced her spirituality through the enactment of Indianness.
Presenting herself as a Mohawk/Delaware woman after Winter
Quarters allowed her to preserve, but also revise, her place in the
faith and its place in her life. In addition, the editions of Okah
Tubbee’s autobiography that she helped to prepare incorporated
considerable elements from Mormon practice, including an emphasis on visions and prophecies, as well as a “patriarchal blessing” that she referred to as an Indian custom.80 The same blend79
Interestingly, the consistent emphasis on patrilineality and patriarchy in the autobiography contrasts with the long-documented practices of matrilineality and matrifocality evident in most southeastern
American Indian societies during the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, including the Choctaws from whom Tubbee claimed descent. The incongruous emphasis may reflect the influence of Laah
80
ing had characterized their religious movement in Cincinnati,
where they presented themselves as Indian prophets but offered
blessings and covenants derived from LDS Church practices.
Becoming Indian was also a way for Laah Ceil to disguise
her faith, for which she and her family had been cruelly persecuted. For example, she used their composite autobiography to
critique anti-Mormonism, which she cloaked in the terms of Indian persecution and removal. One section depicts the turmoil
of Indian removal in terms that could easily have described her
own experience as a young mother, forced from her home during
the Mormon War, as indeed she and many other Mormons
were: “Pressing her little one to her bosom, covering its little face
with her burning tears . . . she moves on . . . often in her migrations to the far west, does [sic] scenes of the past crowd upon her
memory.” Later, she refers to divisions among the Indians about
“so many different yet right ways to worship one God, all taken
from the Bible,” a thinly veiled reference to the schismatic controversies at Winter Quarters and beyond.81 In the end, she was
remarkably successful in passing as an Indian. She maintained
her guise well after she was no longer in her husband’s company,
even convincing modern scholars that her “spiritual awakenings
. . . dreams, and visions” were evidence of “Delaware cultural traditions” rather than Mormon practices.82
Ceil’s Mormon faith far more than it reflects any awareness of indigenous North American kinship patterns. See Charles M. Hudson, The
Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976).
On the Choctaw kinship specifically, see Patricia Galloway, “‘The
Chief Who Is Your Father’: Choctaw and French Views of the Diplomatic Relation,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast,
edited by Peter S. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 249–78; and James
Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws
from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1999), among others.
81
Allen, A Thrilling Sketch, 5; Tubbee, A Sketch of the Life (1852), 82.
82
For example, in his study of the autobiography, Jonathan Brennan
126
The pair’s public performances also frequently bore evidence
of their experiences among the Mormons. While their primary
act featured music, they often included brief orations, alluding
vaguely to their efforts to promote Christianity among the scattered western tribes. Their experiences of performing Indianness among the Mormons also influenced their stage shows, including demonstrations of glossolalia that they said were Indian
tongues.83 More importantly, they had learned in Winter Quarargues: “The autobiography of Okah Tubbee and Laah Ceil demonstrates a fascinating merging of African American and Native American traditions. . . . Their autobiography shares with Native American
collaborative autobiographies the use of prefatory and appendatory
documentation, the inclusion of tribal histories, the narration of spiritual awakenings, conversion, dreams, and visions, especially through
the Delaware cultural traditions with which Laah Ceil was familiar.”
However, he mistakes signs of her Mormon upbringing for American
Indian religious traditions. See Brennan, “Speaking Cross Boundaries:
A Nineteenth-Century African-Native American Autobiography,” in
his edited collection When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native
American Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 56–
57. Similarly, Arnold Krupat includes Tubbee and Ceil’s co-authored
narrative as an example of Indian as-told-to autobiography but asserts
that it is not bi-culturally composed as were other Indian autobiographies since Tubbee and Ceil were both Indians. Krupat, “The Indian
Autobiography: Origins, Type, and Function,” American Literature 53,
no. 1 (1981): 24 note 3. Even Daniel F. Littlefield Jr., who conducted
the most extensive research on the autobiography to date, maintained
that Laah Ceil was Delaware and possibly Mahican or Stockbridge,
though he offered no evidence for these conclusions. Littlefield, “Introduction,” The Life of Okah Tubbee (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), xvi. The first scholar to suggest a connection between
Okah Tubbee and William McCary (and by extension, Laah Ceil and
Lucy Stanton) was Patrick Polk, “History That Reveals Itself, History
That Names Itself,” Journal of Mormon History 35, no. 3 (2009): 230–
33. Scholars outside Mormon history are still largely unaware of the
connection.
83
“Castle Garden,” New York Herald, July 12, 1848, col. F; “A Negro
ters that neutralizing the threat of Okah Tubbee’s blackness required both of them to be Indian. As long as he was identified as
black and she white, problems could arise—particularly after the
birth of their son. But if he was a “red man,” then he must have
a red woman, so a red woman she became.84
When another white woman got “in the way,” Okah Tubbee and Laah Ceil again used their performative Indianness as a
means of deflecting criticism related to their identities and their
marital practices. One final controversial episode underscores
how their experiences among the Mormons influenced their later enactments of Native personae.
In the summer of 1851, two sensational news stories threatened to expose the Tubbees. First, newspapers from New Orleans to New Haven announced that the “celebrated Choctaw
flutist” Okah Tubbee was actually a “negro barber” and “a worthy
rival of Barnum in the humbugging line.”85 Then, word began to
spread that the “old imposter” had taken another wife—a white
woman named Sarah Marlett—in a public ceremony at Niagara
Falls.86 Laah Ceil’s role in this union is unclear. Was this another experiment in sexual covenants and/or a stab at plural marriage, practiced by Joseph Smith in the mid-1830s, made a forTurned Indian,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), July 8, 1851; “Okah
Tubbee,” Buffalo [N.Y.] Commercial Advertiser, August 9, 1851, 3. The
Shakers were also engaged in such activities, as were other Protestant
sects during the antebellum era. Erik Seeman, “Native Spirits, Shaker Visions: Speaking with the Dead in the Early Republic,” paper delivered at the Society for Early American History, Philadelphia, 2014,
copy in my possession.
84
85
News of his “true identity” was carried in more than fifty papers,
but for the initial report, see “A Negro Turned Indian,” Louisville [Ky.]
Courier, June 28, 1851, 2.
86
News of Tubbee’s nuptials appeared in at least twenty papers
from Natchez, Mississippi, to Manchester, England. A representative
account is “Romance and Matrimony,” Barre Gazette, September 5,
1851, 9.
128
mal, though secret, doctrine in the early 1840s, and announced
publicly in 1852 in Utah?87 Or was she the unsuspecting dupe
of a philandering husband? In either case, stories about Tubbee’s
apparent bigamy were fused to questions about his race and the
resulting controversy demanded a swift response.
In defense of his actions, Tubbee argued that his first union
had been a marriage in the Indian fashion and did not preclude
him from taking other wives.88 One newspaper noted that he
said he was married to his first wife “only for a term of years, according to the custom of his nation—that the time had expired, and
he renounced her, as the laws of the Choctaws permitted him
to do.”89 Similar references to a vague “Indian custom” of taking
multiple wives appeared in a variety of other papers as the news
traveled.90 Such allusions to Indian marriage practices would
have resonated with readers and audiences accustomed to reading serialized fiction about “Indian romance,” attending lectures
on “Indian manners and customs,” and seeing performances of
“Indian war and marriage dances.”91 Okah Tubbee capitalized
87
Claudia Lauper Bushman and Richard Lyman Bushman, Building the Kingdom: A History of Mormons in America (1999; rpt., New
York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 30.
88
“Okah Tubbee,” Buffalo [N.Y.] Commercial Advertiser, September 1, 1851, 3.
89
Ibid.; emphasis mine.
90
See, e.g., “Okah Tubbee, Again,” Hartford [Conn.] Daily Courant, September 3, 1851, ProQuest Historical Newspapers (accessed
February 26, 2010); “A Romance Spoiled,” Newport Daily News, Newport, Rhode Island, September 17, 1851, http://access.newspaperarchive.com/ (accessed June 7, 2013); “Okah Tubbee,” Cleveland (Ohio)
Herald, September 1 and 17, 1851, col. C, Gale Cengage 19th Century Newspapers Database (accessed April 13, 2011); “The Romance of
a Story Destroyed,” Spectator (New York), September 11, 1851, Readex Database, New York State Historical Newspapers, 1733–1822 (accessed June 15, 2013); “More about Okah Tubbee,” Mississippi Free
Trader (Natchez), September 24, 1851, 4.
91
See, for example, advertisements and stories in these disparate
papers: Untitled notice, Daily Ohio Statesman (Columbus), June 10,
on popular beliefs about Indian marital practices to explain away
his apparent plural marriage, using the occasion to underscore or
amplify his claims to Indianness. When the second Mrs. Tubbee
filed suit for bigamy, defense attorneys argued that Okah Tubbee and Laah Ceil had never been legally married, echoing their
earlier statements to the press.92
Interestingly, the growing emphasis on Tubbee’s identity in
the context of the bigamy case deflected attention away from
Laah Ceil’s identity. Rather than becoming the subject of public
scrutiny, she became a pathetic figure—“a simple Indian squaw,”
deluded by a fast-talking “Negro” confidence man intent on taking as many wives as possible. Her claims to Indianness stood
unexamined in the shadow of Tubbee’s great and dangerous
humbug. This was possible for at least two reasons: because she
was not black and because Okah Tubbee, observers increasingly
insisted, was.93 The apparent fact of his identity concealed the
realities of his wife’s origins, even as it underscored the ongoing
need for such concealment, suggesting the ways that antebellum
notions of race were mapped onto popular cultural understand1851, col. C, Gale Cengage 19th Century Newspapers Database (accessed April 13, 2011); “Indian Concert,” Hartford (Conn.) Daily Courant, May 27, 1850, ProQuest Historical Newspapers (accessed February 26, 2010); “Indian Courtship,” Democratic Telegraph and Texas Register [Houston Register], April 5, 1849, [1], America’s Historical Newspapers, Readex (accessed November 20, 2012).
92
Regina v. Tubbee; Ontario Court of Queen’s Bench (Chambers);
1 P.R. 98. Westlaw Canada (accessed July 29, 2011). Interestingly, the
lawsuit was also reported in “Gleanings and Sayings,” Deseret News
(Salt Lake City) December 11, 1852, 3, published by the same Willard
Richards who had once felt Tubbee’s abdomen in search of a missing
rib. I am grateful to Connell O’Donovan for bringing this source to
my attention.
93
I explore her “unmarked” whiteness and his ”marked” blackness
in relation to claims of indigenous ancestry in greater detail in my
book Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon became Famous Indians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
forthcoming 2015).
130
ings of acceptable sexual and marital practices.
The Tubbees’ use of the “Indian custom” defense during the
bigamy controversy resonates with lessons learned in Winter
Quarters. They had both dabbled in performing Indianness before 1847, but their experiences on the Missouri River led them
to fully commit to these personae afterwards. It was necessary
for both husband and wife to become Indians, on and off stage.
When they faced exposure of Okah Tubbee’s alleged African
origins, surfacing in the context of another controversial union
with a white woman, the couple doubled down on their Indian act.94 Whereas involvement with “white sister” Lucy Stanton had endangered William McCary in Winter Quarters,
her role as Okah Tubbee’s “squaw wife” became their best defense.95 Their individual racial identities were understood not
in isolation from one another nor apart from understandings of
their sexual and marital practices. Rather, these aspects of their
lived experiences shaped and reshaped one another, varying in
importance as they moved from place to place. Even in the era of
growing LDS orthodoxy, new legal regimes of white supremacy,
and emergent discourses of scientific racism, both Mormon and
broader American notions of race were still in process, particularly where Indianness was concerned, and questions of gender
and sexuality were very much “in the way.”
94
“An Old Impostor,” Mississippi Free Trader (Natchez), September 13, 1851, 2.
95
Untitled notice, New York Times, August 24, 1852, 8.
PLAYING LAMANITE:
ECSTATIC PERFORMANCE OF
AMERICAN INDIAN ROLES
IN EARLY MORMON OHIO
Christopher C. Smith
INTRODUCTION
At revivalistic Mormon meetings on Ohio’s Western Reserve in late 1830 and early 1831, Mormon converts ecstatically
acted out Book of Mormon promises concerning the “Lamanites.” Some of these performances depicted classic missionary
fantasies. Actors climbed atop stumps and fences to harangue
imaginary Indian audiences in what they believed were authentic
native languages revealed through the gift of tongues. They then
guided imaginary converts into the waters of baptism. Other
performances dramatized standard white fears of Indian cruelty
and violence. Actors tomahawked, scalped, and disemboweled
invisible foes in an epitome of the imminent apocalyptic fate of
unconverted white Americans.1
CHRISTOPHER C. SMITH {[email protected]} is a
PhD candidate in religions in North America at Claremont Graduate
University. He currently lives in Sacramento, California, and spends
most of his time trying to finish a Mormon-themed dissertation. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: I am grateful to Trevor Luke, Don Bradley,
Connell O’Donovan, Rick Grunder, Gary Bergera, Dan Vogel, Joseph
Geisner, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this issue for
serving as helpful interlocutors in the development of this article.
1
For the most important previous treatment of these phenomena,
131
132
The actors I am reasonably confident participated in these
performances are African American former slave Black Pete, indentured servant Heman Bassett, carpenter Edson Fuller, hotelier’s son Burr Riggs, twenty-year-old newlywed Minerva Whitlock, and fourteen-year-old Lucy Stanton.2 At least five of these
six actors were associated with “the Family,” a commune founded in Kirtland in February 1830 by Isaac Morley and Lyman
Wight.3 At least four belonged to an underprivileged gender,
race, or class.
Kirtland’s Family commune took its inspiration from the
socialist principles of secular reformer Robert Owen, refract-
see Mark Lyman Staker, Hearken, O Ye People: The Historical Setting of
Joseph Smith’s Ohio Revelations (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books,
2009), 74–91. Note that I use the terms “Indian” and “Lamanite” to
refer to socially constructed racial images and stereotypes rather than
to actual native peoples.
2
For biographical information, see Staker, Hearken, O Ye People,
7–9, 27–31, 79, 83, 85; “Dr. John Riggs,” Tullidge’s Quarterly Magazine
3, no. 3 ( July 1884): 282; Jan Shipps and John W. Welch, eds., The
Journals of William E. McLellin, 1831–1836 (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press/Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, 1994), 466; and Kent
Beardall, “Lucy Celesta Stanton Bassett,” http://wwwfindagrave.com/
cgi-bin?page=gr&GRid=25645512 (accessed February 13, 2015).
3
Of the six likely performers I have identified, “Black Pete,” Heman
Bassett, Edson Fuller, and Lucy Stanton all appear to have been Family
members. Whether Burr Riggs or Minerva Whitlock were members is
unclear. At the very least, Riggs attended some Mormon meetings at the
Kirtland commune by early 1831. See Staker, Hearken, O Ye People, 45,
95–96; and E. D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed: Or, a Faithful Account of
That Singular Imposition and Delusion, from Its Rise to the Present Time.
With Sketches of the Characters of Its Propagators, and a Full Detail of the
Manner in Which the Famous Golden Bible Was Brought before the World.
To Which Are Added, Inquiries into the Probability That the Historical
Part of the Said Bible Was Written by One Solomon Spalding, More Than
Twenty Years Ago, and by Him Intended to Have Been Published as a
Romance (Painesville, Ohio: E. D. Howe, 1834), 106.
Christopher C. Smith/Playing Lamanite
133
ed through a Christian primitivist lens.4 The Family practiced
community of goods and redressed some racial and gender inequalities.5 When the group converted wholesale to Mormonism, members interpreted their new faith through this communalist lens.6 Though Joseph Smith had not at first organized his
Church of Christ on communal principles, he readily embraced
this interpretation of the faith by Ohio converts.7 Smith came
from a poor family with some thin communalist ties of its own.8
4
Staker, Hearken, O Ye People, 37–48.
The prominent and seemingly unquestioned participation of Black
Pete and several women in the Lamanite manifestations constitutes
strong evidence of the Family’s leveling tendencies. After its Mormon
conversion, the Family also reportedly encouraged women to join the
commune regardless of spousal approval. This practice echoed Owen’s
efforts to liberate women from spousal “slavery” by permitting no-fault
divorce. See J. M. H[enderson]. (Chagrin, Ohio), Letter to the Editor,
n.d., in “Editorial Correspondence,” Evangelical Magazine and Gospel
Advocate (Utica, N.Y.) 2 (February 5, 1831), http://www.sidneyrigdon.
com/dbroadhu/ny/miscnyse.htm#020531 (accessed February 19,
2015); Anonymous (Marietta, Ohio), Letter to the Editor, November
16, 1831, in “Mormonism,” Salem [Mass.] Gazette, December 6, 1831,
http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/ne/miscne01.htm#120631
(accessed February 19, 2015); Nancy Towle, Vicissitudes Illustrated. In the
Experience of Nancy Towle, in Europe and America, 2d ed. (Portsmouth,
N.H.: John Caldwell, 1833), 152; and Carol A. Kolmerten, Women
in Utopia: The Ideology of Gender in American Owenite Communities
(Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998): 78.
6
Staker, Hearken, O Ye People, 37–48, 59.
7
Smith retained the Family’s basic communalist principles but
reworked its system to make more room for individual incentive and
enterprise. Ibid., 108–9, 228–36; and Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz
Y. Fox, and Dean L. May, Building the City of God: Community and
Cooperation among the Mormons, 2d ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1992), 15–21.
8
For the Smiths’ poverty, see Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph
Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 17–19,
27–29. Lucy Mack Smith briefly mentions the Christian commune that
5
134
His Book of Mormon translation praised communal behavior
and showed awareness of “inequality” and “class.”9 Ohio converts seized upon performative scripts drawn from this scripture
to express their alienation from an unjust society. In performing
the conversion of Lamanites, low-status actors aspired to paternalistic savior roles traditionally reserved for male Anglo-Protestant elites. In performing apocalyptic Lamanite violence, actors envisioned those elites’ final comeuppance.
Outside the Mormon context, white performers played Indian to dramatize a smorgasbord of social conflicts between rival white groups. Used polemically, Indian performance often
symbolized the actor’s superior Americanness as compared to
foes.10 Boston Tea Party protesters, anti-rent rioters, and Whiskey Rebels all famously painted themselves like Indians to protest undemocratic misrule.11 In another telling example from the
1850s, nativist “Know-Nothings” used Indian ceremony and regalia to mark themselves as “native Americans” in contrast to
her brother Jason established in New Brunswick. Lucy Mack Smith,
Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith the Prophet, and His Progenitors for
Many Generations (Liverpool: S. W. Richards, 1853), 52–53.
9
For explicit references to socio-economic inequality and class,
see 4 Ne. 1:26; Alma 4:15, 16:16, 28:13, 29:32, 32:2; and 3 Ne. 6:14.
For passages denouncing socio-economic injustice, see 2 Ne. 9:30,
26:20, 28:13–15; Hel. 4:11–12, 6:39–40; Alma 4:11–12; 3 Ne. 6:10–
15; 4 Ne. 1:24–28; and Mormon 8:40. At times the book offered
standard republican recipes for equality, such as ending monarchial
and aristocratic privilege and extending political rights to every man.
But elsewhere the book commended economic solutions, including
charitable and communalist behavior. See Alma 1:26–31, 4:11–14,
5:55–56, 16:16, 32:3–16, 35:9; 3 Ne. 26:19; and 4 Ne. 1:3.
10
Historians of redface performance have sometimes neglected its
polemical role in privileging particular American identities over their
competitors (as opposed to expressing general patriotic sentiment).
Philip J. Deloria acknowledges this conflictual aspect but does not
explore it in great detail. See Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 40–44, 69.
11
Ibid., 11–12, 22–24, 41–43, 69.
135
Catholic immigrants from Europe.12 But such performances
always risked backlash from opponents who imagined Indians
as the antithesis rather than the symbol of American civilization. In the culture wars of the early republic, white groups often
tarred each other as savages, half-breeds, and race traitors.13 In
this context, Indian performances could evoke potent historical
memories of white villains who breached racial solidarity by inciting natives against white foes.14
Actors produced their various Indian spectacles by adapting
two standard literary images of the Indian to many different performative traditions, such as blackface riots and carnivals.15 The
two standard literary stereotypes arose in turn from two uncomfortably coexisting philosophies of history. “Primitivism” idealized the past as a lost golden age and the Indian as a virtuous
“noble savage.” The “idea of progress” despised the past as uncivilized and the savage as vicious and ignoble. Most white Americans paradoxically believed in both philosophies of history and
both images of the Indian at once, though with considerable dif12
Dale T. Knobel, “Know-Nothings and Indians: Strange
Bedfellows?,” Western Historical Quarterly 15, no. 2 (April 1984): 175–
98.
13
Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier
in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum,
1985), 54–59, 73, 106, 137, 139.
14
Ibid., 54; Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Incidents of the Insurrection
in the Western Parts of Pennsylvania, in the Year 1794 (Philadelphia:
John McCulloch, 1795), 101–2; and Gilbert J. Hunt, The Late War,
between the United States and Great Britain, from June, 1812 to February
1815. Written in the Ancient Historical Style, 3rd ed. (New York: Daniel
D. Smith, 1819), 11, 37, 48–49, 51, 102. The Book of Mormon
similarly implies that whites who militarily ally with savages reveal
themselves as savages at heart, though it also states that God will enlist
the Lamanites for his own violent purposes. See Alma 43:4–6, 48:1–5;
Hel. 4:1–4; 3 Ne. 20:16, 21:12; and Mormon 5:24.
15
Deloria, Playing Indian, 14–15; Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and
Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988), 169–236.
136
ferences of emphasis.16 White actors could identify with the Indian in either aspect—the noble savage to claim his primitive
virtues or the ignoble to justify creative destruction and disorder.
But the duality of the stereotype meant that even performers
who identified with the noble savage risked an unsympathetic
reception.
Related to the two images of the Indian were two models of
racial difference. Most Americans agreed that some combination
of biology and environment explained racial characteristics, but
they strongly disagreed as to which was predominant. Northern
intellectuals tended to think racial traits were changeable and environmentally determined. In this view, the nation had a divine
mission to civilize the Indians. Southern and western thinkers
tended to see race as biological and unchangeable. In this view,
Anglo-Saxons had a “Manifest Destiny” to displace and destroy
the savages. Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act, which
forcibly expelled even “civilized” tribes from their lands in the
United States, marked a political triumph of the latter view.17
The Ohio Lamanite performances exhibited many of the
same cultural dynamics as secular Indian play. Ohio Mormon
converts in 1830–31 (and Shakers and Spiritualists in the following decades) adapted Lamanite/Indian imagery to a tradition of “spiritual exercises”—strange behaviors performed under
beneficent spiritual influence.18 The gift of tongues likely cata16
Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the
American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage
Books, 2011), 44–54, 72–79; Steven Conn, History’s Shadow: Native
Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 12–13, 24–26, 31–33.
17
Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, 2d
ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 32–83; Reginald
Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial
Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981),
45–48, 87–152, 190–207.
18
Staker, Hearken, O Ye People, 20–21. Anthropologically, spirit
possession can be seen as a kind of religious theater in which a
137
lyzed the adaptation, as performers who believed themselves to
be speaking Lamanite languages embellished their speech with
stereotyped gestures.
The Lamanite role performed by these actors resembled but
did not entirely reproduce the broader society’s image of the Indian. The scripts for the role came from the Book of Mormon,
though perhaps only as mediated by preachers. The Lamanite of
the Book of Mormon could be noble like Samuel and the Anti-Nephi-Lehies or ignoble and stereotypically savage.19 Both
tendencies were encoded in his racial biology—nobility in his
Israelite blood and ignobility in his dark skin.20 Whiteness remained normative, but this was a sectarian concept of whiteness
that promised to absorb Lamanites even as it excluded “Gentile”
Anglo-Protestants. Through a Mormon civilizing mission, Lamanites would be converted and their skin color miraculously
whitened. With help from Gentile converts, they would build
a New Jerusalem, massacre unconverted Anglo-Americans, and
inherit the landscape. The Gentile helpers would be adopted as
supplicant performs the identity of a spiritual being much like an actor
in a play, albeit with the difference that the supplicant believes the
being is real and is directly influencing or controlling the performance.
Janice Boddy, “Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality,”
Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 423–24; and Donald Pollock,
“Masks and the Semiotics of Identity,” Journal of Royal Anthropological
Institute 1, no. 3 (September 1995): 593–94.
19
See 2 Ne. 5; Enos 1:20; Mosiah 10:11–17; Alma 24; Hel. 13–14.
20
The hypothesis that Indians had Hebrew ancestry was very
popular during this period. Dan Vogel, Indian Origins and the Book
of Mormon: Religious Solutions from Columbus to Joseph Smith (Salt
Lake City: Signature Books, 1986), 35–52; and Richard Slotkin,
Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier,
1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 360–63.
The notion that dark skin was a curse for unrighteous behavior was a
popular explanation of African racial markers that Smith accepted and
extended to the Indians. Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical
Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press,
2002), 6–8; Vogel, Indian Origins, 50, 66.
138
Israelites and share in this inheritance.21 This vision of Lamanite
destiny was radical even for Yankee literature, though it echoed
popular Yankee belief in racial changeability and Indians’ Hebrew ancestry.22
Predictably, this vision provoked backlash. Skeptical outsiders looked on with a mixture of amusement and disgust as Mor21
In a sermon in Commerce, Illinois, on June 27, 1839, Joseph
Smith taught that “the effect of the Holy Ghost upon a Gentile is to
purge out the old blood & make him actually of the seed of Abraham
. . . a new creation by the Holy Ghost.” Lyndon W. Cook and Andrew
F. Ehat, eds., Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Accounts of the
Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious
Studies Center, 1996), 4. The doctrine that Gentiles are physically
transformed into Israelites likely dated as early as September 1832,
when Doctrine and Covenants 84:33–34 promised that faithful
priesthood holders would experience a “renewing of their bodies” and
“become the sons of Moses and of Aaron and the seed of Abraham.”
Despite the similarity of this idea to the miraculous change of Lamanite
skin color promised in the Book of Mormon, that book does not yet
contemplate the physical transformation of Gentiles. In the Book of
Mormon, converted Gentiles are “numbered among” Israel; this is the
language of adoption. See 1 Ne. 14:2, 15:1–17; 2 Ne. 10:18–19; Jacob
3, 5; Mosiah 25:12; Alma 3:6–11, 35:13–14; 3 Ne. 2:14–16, 16:8–16,
21:1–19; Mormon 7:10.
22
Vogel, Indian Origins, 66 note 93; Gossett, Race, 40–41, 241;
Robert N. Hullinger, Joseph Smith’s Response to Skepticism (Salt Lake
City: Signature Books, 1992), 54–60; Ethan Smith, View of the Hebrews;
or the Tribes of Israel in America (Poultney, Vt.: Smith & Shute, 1825),
227–50; Jonathan D. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai
Noah (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), 67, 135–37. Other salient
influences came from populist evangelical groups with a penchant for
apocalypticism, charismatic experience, and inclusive practice. The
radical northern evangelicalism that shaped early Mormons’ contrarian
religious and socio-economic views also prepared them to look to
Indians as symbolic allies. See Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization
of American Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1989), 102–7.
139
mon performers appeared to behave like “savages.”23 In Ohio
and then Missouri, Mormons’ neighbors increasingly recoded
them as non-white and saw them as allied to blacks and natives.24 And the critics were not entirely wrong, for Lamanite
performances indeed implied a Mormon solidarity with natives.
As expressions of a radical leveler sect, they also anticipated a
renewed American nation in which charismatic power would
ameliorate differences of gender, race, and class.
But despite this leveling tendency, the Ohio Lamanite performances still followed a well-worn colonial pattern of cultural
appropriation, racial stereotype, and missionary paternalism. As
a rule, Indian players were not really interested in natives. The
real subjects of such performances were the actors themselves.
To become the new natives, Old World interlopers had to absorb
or extinguish the natives’ claims on American land and identity.
Whether identifying with the noble savage or caricaturing the
ignoble one, Indian players really performed their own Americanness.25 The Lamanite ecstasies of early Mormon Ohio were
no exception. Performers played Lamanite as a means to their
desired end: the reformation of America on a Mormon model.26
23
Ezra Booth (Nelson, Ohio), Letter to I. Eddy, October 24, 1831,
in “Mormonism—No. III, Ohio Star (Ravenna, Ohio) 2 (October
27, 1831), http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/OH/miscohio.
htm#102731 (accessed February 19, 2015).
24
T. Ward Frampton, “‘Some Savage Tribe’: Race, Legal Violence,
and the Mormon War of 1838,” Journal of Mormon History 40, no. 1
(Winter 2014): 175–207.
25
Deloria, Playing Indian, 4–5; Rayna Green, “The Tribe Called
Wannabee: Playing Indian in America and Europe,” Folklore 99, no. 1
(1988): 48; Pearce, Savagism and Civilization, xvii, 5, 8; Berkhofer, The
White Man’s Indian, xvi.
26
To say the Ohio performances were self-interested is not
necessarily to say that their tendency toward racial leveling was
irrelevant or ineffectual. Some critical race theorists find that
advancements for minority groups in America have occurred mainly
when their interests converged with the self-interest of the white
140
THE LAMANITE MISSION AND THE GIFT OF TONGUES
In 1829 a poor Baptist farmer named Parley P. Pratt heard
Campbellite minister Sidney Rigdon preach in Lorain County,
Ohio, where Pratt had purchased a farm on credit and built a cabin for his young bride.27 Rigdon preached the doctrines of Alexander Campbell and Walter Scott, who a few years later would
co-found the Disciples of Christ. These “Campbellites” saw their
movement as a restoration of apostolic Christianity and a harbinger of the Millennium.28 The power of their message lay in
its simplicity: have faith, repent, be baptized for the remission of
sins, and receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. Like so many who
heard it, Pratt professed “astonishment” at this simple and intuitive distillation of “the ancient gospel in due form.” Looking back
decades later through a Mormon lens, Pratt remembered having
reservations because the Campbellites lacked “the power, and
authority, and gifts” that the Holy Ghost was supposed to impart.29 But these concerns cannot have bothered him too much
at the time, for he joined the group and became a regular exhorter. The following year he fixated on a biblical commandment
to forsake family and possessions to preach the gospel (Matt.
majority. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An
Introduction, 2d ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 23–
24.
27
Parley Parker Pratt Jr., ed., The Autobiography of Parley Parker
Pratt; One of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, Embracing the Life, Ministry and Travels, with Extracts, in
Prose and Verse, from His Various Writings (Chicago: Pratt Bros., 1874),
28, 30–31.
28
Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism
(Urbana: University of Illinois, 1993), 25.
29
Pratt, Autobiography, 32. Campbell taught that the gift of the
Holy Ghost imparted only “fruits of the Spirit” like gentleness and
self-control, not miraculous “gifts of the Spirit” which had “ceased”
and were “no longer necessary” after the apostolic age. Alexander
Campbell, “Remarks on Missionaries,” Christian Baptist (Buffaloe,
Va.) 1, no. 2 (September 1, 1823): 52.
141
9:29).30 The timing of this religious epiphany was fortuitous, for
Pratt had accumulated several bad debts. He sold his farm, “ran
away from a constable, and numerous creditors” who sought to
prevent him from leaving the area, and spent his little remaining
money buying passage to Albany, New York.31 At Rochester he
followed a spiritual impulse to leave his wife, Thankful, on the
canal boat. He set out on foot to preach Campbellism with neither purse nor scrip, and Thankful continued alone to Albany to
stay with her husband’s aunt.32
Pratt walked a bare ten miles into the New York countryside
before he heard about the Book of Mormon. He spent the entire day after his first preaching engagement reading it, skipping
meals and sleep. Deeply moved by the book, he set out the following morning to find the translator. Joseph Smith had gone to
Pennsylvania, but in Palmyra Pratt met Hyrum Smith and talked with him throughout the night. The conversation convinced
him of two important ideas. First, all sects but the Mormons
lacked the apostolic power required to perform saving ordinances. And second, the American Indians were Christ’s “other
sheep,” a remnant of Israel to be restored in preparation for the
Millennium. A few days later the two men traveled to the Whitmer homestead in Fayette, where Oliver Cowdery baptized Pratt
and laid hands on him to impart the gift of the Holy Ghost. Afterward Pratt felt possessed of newfound authority and “spoke
the word of God with power.” He then departed for a while to
visit extended family but returned to Palmyra in late September
30
Pratt’s interest in this passage may have contributed to early
rumors that Mormons “dispense[d] with the marriage covenant.” See
[H]enderson., Letter to the Editor; Towle, Vicissitudes Illustrated, 152.
31
Anonymous (Amherst, Ohio), Letter to the Editor, November
26, 1830, in “Beware of Impostors,” Painesville [Ohio] Telegraph 2
(December 14, 1830), http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/
oh/painetel.htm (accessed February 19, 2015). See also Pratt,
Autobiography, 51–53.
32
Pratt, Autobiography, 36–37.
142
and met Joseph Smith.33
Charismatic power and the restoration of Israel lay close to
the heart of the Mormon message in 1830. The Book of Mormon’s title page emphasized that it was “written to the Lamanites” and came forth “by the gift and power of God.” These
themes that Pratt found so powerful would form the kernel of
Lamanite performances when he and other missionaries carried
them back to Ohio. But because Ohio converts had a broader
repertoire of charismatic behaviors than Mormons in New York,
they would improvise and expand upon the missionaries’ rudimentary scripts in ways unimagined in the New York context.
For early New York Mormons, charismatic power primarily
meant visions and prophecy. In 1829 Hyrum Smith told a caller
that the Smith home was “a visionary house.”34 Pratt first encountered Hyrum and Oliver Cowdery at a time when they still
believed every elder was an apostle who might receive written
revelations for the Church. As Richard Bushman puts it, Joseph
Smith was still “first among equals” with authority “based on his
supernatural gifts” rather than his Church office. Elders like Oliver Cowdery and Hiram Page received their own revelations and
expected them to be treated as scripture.35
But although the New York church focused on revelations, it
also recognized and practiced other gifts. The Book of Mormon
endorsed prophecy, healing, exorcism, and speaking and interpreting “new tongues,” including the “tongue of angels” (2 Ne.
31:13–14; Morm. 9:7, 24). In April 1830 Joseph Smith cast a
devil out of Newel Knight, whose “visage and limbs distorted
and twisted in every shape and appearance possible” until the
spirit released him. At the Church’s first conference in June,
33
Ibid., 38–48.
Solomon Chamberlin, “A Short Sketch of the Life of Solomon
Chamberlin,” July 11, 1858, 8, microfilm of holograph, MS 5886, LDS
Church History Library.
35
Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 111, 120–21; and Gregory A.
Prince, Power from On High: The Development of Mormon Priesthood
(Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1995), 12–15.
34
143
some swooned under the Spirit’s power and had to be laid “on
beds, or other convenient places.”36
Whether Mormons of this period ever spoke in tongues is
unclear, although some evidence suggests they did. David Whitmer claimed in 1887 that some believers spoke in tongues before the Church’s organization in April 1830, but in his old age
Whitmer had romanticized this period of Church history in his
memory.37 An 1839 draft Church history contains a crossedout reference to tongues in New York, but the strikeout casts
doubt on its significance.38 The niece-in-law of Joseph Smith’s
contemptuous Palmyra neighbor Peter Ingersoll recorded in
1899 her husband’s telling some of her uncle’s stories. Ingersoll
claimed that, as an exhorter in 1822 or 1823, Smith used to speak
in tongues, then “interpret the unknown sounds and assure those
present they were the pure ‘Adamic language,’ the language in
which Adam courted Eve in the garden of Eden.” Unfortunately
this account’s provenance renders it suspect.39 Hiram Page wrote
in 1847 that about 1830 he saw three angels who sang to him a
“hymn in their own pure language.” But he did not give an exact date for this event; and if he produced an interpretation, it
has been lost with his other revelations.40 In any case, early New
36
”History of the Church, 1839,” 1:40–41, CR 100 102, LDS
Church History Library, in Richard E. Turley, ed., Selected Collections
from the Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
(Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2002), Vol. 1, DVD 1
(hereafter cited by volume and DVD).
37
David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond,
Mo.: David Whitmer, 1887), 33.
38
Dan Vogel and Scott C. Dunn, “‘The Tongue of Angels’:
Glossolalia among Mormonism’s Founders,” Journal of Mormon
History 19, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 2–3.
39
“Sara Melissa Ingersoll Reminiscence,” 1899, in Dan Vogel, ed.,
Early Mormon Documents, 5 vols. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books,
1996–2003), 3:391.
40
Hiram Page, Letter to William E. McLellin, May 30, 1847,
Ensign of Liberty (Kirtland, Ohio) 1 ( January 1848): 63.
144
York Mormons clearly expected the gift of tongues regardless of
whether they exercised it. This expectation would play a critical
role in Ohio’s revival outbreak.
At his followers’ request, Smith sought and received revelations in September and October 1830 designating Oliver
Cowdery, Peter Whitmer, Parley Pratt, and Ziba Peterson to
preach across the Missouri state line in Indian Territory and
also to select a site for the New Jerusalem.41 The four designated missionaries began their long walk from New York to Missouri about October 18, 1830. Along the way, the missionaries
stopped for three weeks on the Western Reserve in Ohio, where
from October 29 to November 21 they preached to thousands of
people and baptized 127 converts. Most of these were associated
with the Family commune in the town of Kirtland and its satellite community in Mayfield.42
The New York preachers then proceeded on their way to
Missouri, leaving newly ordained elders like Lyman Wight and
Isaac Morley in charge of the Ohio church. Curiously, the converts’ fervor only increased after the missionaries departed. Starting in mid-December, the Ohio church experienced a series of
spectacular spiritual manifestations that continued until Joseph
Smith stopped them the following March. These manifestations
included not only the spiritual gifts described in the Book of
Mormon, but also camp-meeting-style “exercises” such as ecstatic running, jumping, and pantomime. The pantomimes included
elaborate Lamanite performances.43
The New York missionaries laid the groundwork for these
performances during their three-week stay in the region. Although they had brought with them only a few copies of the
Book of Mormon, the preachers read aloud from the book and
outlined its concept of the Lamanite in their sermons.44 One
unconvinced newspaper correspondent paraphrased Oliver
41
Staker, Hearken, O Ye People, 49–50.
Ibid., 55–61.
43
Ibid., 63–64, 74-81.
44
Ibid., 57–58.
42
145
Cowdery as saying the new revelation was “especially designed
for the benefit, or rather the christianizing of the Aborigines of
America; who, as they affirm, are a part of the tribe of Manasseh,
and whose ancestors landed on the coast of Chili [sic] 600 years
before the coming of Christ.” In a note prefixed to this article,
the newspaper’s editor noted that “the Indians, as fast as they are
converted[,] are to become white men.”45 Another hostile correspondent said Cowdery described the book as a prophecy of the
Indians’ “final conversion to christianity,” which would “make
them a white and delightsome people, and be reinstated in the
possession of their lands of which they have been despoiled by
the whites.”46 Cowdery also proclaimed that the world “would
come to an end in two or three years” and spoke of plans to
build a “City of Refuge” in Indian Territory.47 Contemporaneous newspapers did not report how the end would come, but
Samuel F. Whitney summarized it this way in an 1885 reminiscence: “The Lamanites in three years would come and help
them exterminate the Gentiles and blood would flow down the
streets.”48 When the missionaries subsequently proceeded to
Missouri, Cowdery addressed some indigenous Lenape people
in his own sort of pantomime, a sermon salted with stereotyped
Indian phrases. As recorded by Pratt, the sermon promised that
45
A. S., “The Golden Bible, or, Campbellism Improved,” Observer
and Telegraph 1 (Hudson, Ohio), November 18, 1830, 3.
46
M[atthew]. S. C[lapp]., “Mormonism,” Painesville [Ohio]
Telegraph 2 (February 15, 1831), http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/
dbroadhu/OH/paintel2.htm#021531 (accessed February 19, 2015).
47
“Book of Mormon,” The Reflector (Palmyra, N.Y.) 2 (February
14, 1831), http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/NY/wayn1830.
htm#021431 (accessed February 19, 2015); [Eber D. Howe,] “The
Golden Bible,” Painesville [Ohio] Telegraph 2 (November 16, 1830),
http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/OH/painetel.htm#111630
(accessed February 19, 2015).
48
Samuel F. Whitney, Affidavit, March 6, 1885, in Arthur R.
Deming, 2 vols. Naked Truths about Mormonism (Oakland, Calif.:
Deming and Company), Vol. 1 ( January 1888): 3.
146
natives who converted would “be restored to all their rights and
privileges.”49 Such preaching rebelled against the very premises
of Jacksonian race politics.
The missionaries also stressed their new sect’s exclusive
possession of apostolic authority, as validated by miraculous
gifts.50 Such gifts were apparently novel to the Ohio communalists. Family theology mostly followed Alexander Campbell,
who taught that gifts and miracles had ceased after the apostolic age.51 In 1872 Campbell remembered that Sidney Rigdon—pastor of a Campbellite church in Mentor and spiritual
advisor to the Kirtland Family—had believed in miraculous
gifts by 1829. But by the time Campbell wrote this he was
bending his memories to fit the theory that Rigdon had secretly authored the Book of Mormon in the 1820s.52 Instead
the 1829 dispute concerned community of goods. Rigdon argued that this practice of the New Testament church needed to
be restored, whereas the much wealthier Campbell insisted on
the purely voluntary nature of New Testament communalism.
A recent survey by anthropologist Daymon M. Smith found
no contemporaneous evidence that Rigdon or the Family were
charismatics before the Mormon missionaries’ arrival.53 To the
contrary, Rigdon initially accused the Mormon preachers of
49
Pratt, Autobiography, 56–60.
[Howe,] “The Golden Bible”; C[lapp]., “Mormonism”; A Lover
of Truth, “The Book of Mormon,” Painesville [Ohio] Telegraph 2
(December 7, 1830), http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/OH/
painetel.htm#120730 (accessed February 20, 2015).
51
Campbell, “Remarks on Missionaries,” 52.
52
Alexander Campbell, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, Embracing
a View of the Origin, Progress and Principles of the Religious Reformation
Which He Advocated, edited by Robert Richardson, 2 vols. (Cincinnati,
Ohio: R. W. Carroll, 1872), 2:346.
53
Daymon M. Smith, Setting a Foundation, of Stones to Stumble
Over, Vol. 1 of A Cultural History of the Book of Mormon (self-published,
2013), 117–18, 131, 140–43.
50
147
baptizing for miracles rather than remission of sins.54 But if he
and the Family did not already believe in miracles, they may
have been uniquely open to persuasion on this point. Their cardinal biblical prooftext for community of goods immediately
followed a description of the “wonders and signs . . . done by
the apostles” on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:43–45).
Among the gifts discussed by the New York missionaries
while they preached in the neighborhood was the gift of healing.
According to newspaper reports, the preachers attempted to heal
a girl who had been bedridden for two years. “They prayed over
her, laying on hands, and commanded her in the name of Jesus
Christ to rise up and walk,” but she couldn’t. On another occasion Cowdery prayed for a man dying of consumption. Sidney
Rigdon, now converted and caught up in the enthusiasm, declared that the dying man “would get well, if there was a God in
Heaven!” Shortly thereafter the man died. Rigdon chalked these
failures up to the illegitimacy of sign-seeking.55 If there were any
successful healings during the missionaries’ stay, the newspapers
did not record them. But even the failed healings reveal something of the preachers’ heady expectations.
Those expectations also extended to the gift of tongues.56
In a series of critical but mostly accurate reminiscences written for the Ohio Star in 1831, dissenter Ezra Booth paraphrased
Oliver Cowdery as saying he knew by “fore knowledge” that he
54
C[lapp]., “Mormonism.”
Ibid.
56
Historian Mark Staker has argued that Ohio converts could not
have learned about tongues from the missionaries because Parley Pratt’s
1874 autobiography expressed surprise and dismay that Ohio converts
had spoken in tongues after the missionaries’ departure. Actually Pratt
listed swooning, contortions, ecstasies, fits, and false revelations among
the novel behaviors that disturbed him upon his return to Kirtland in
March 1831, but he conspicuously omitted tongues. Later portions of
the autobiography reveal that Pratt believed in the gift of tongues and
sometimes exercised it himself. Staker, Hearken, O Ye People, 25 note
23; and Pratt, Autobiography, 65, 120, 141, 152, 154, 166, 185, 354.
55
148
would be able to communicate with the western Indians “in their
own dialect” by “the gift of tongues.”57 And as the missionaries headed west from Kirtland to Missouri, they passed through
the vicinity of Parley Pratt’s old homestead. Here Pratt told an
old neighbor that “he knew, for his Heavenly Father had told
him, that when they got among the scattered tribes, there would
be as great miracles wrought, as there was at the day of Pentecost.”58 The day of Pentecost was the occasion when the biblical disciples “were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to
speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance,”
allowing them to preach to an ethnically diverse audience (Acts
2:4–12). The probable meaning of Pratt’s statement is that he
expected to be able to preach to the Lamanites in their own
languages through the spiritual gift of tongues. I hypothesize
that such assertions by the missionaries generated interest in the
topic of Lamanite tongues among Ohio converts—interest that
flowered into practice.
If this scenario is correct, the practice of the gift of tongues
may have given rise to more elaborate Lamanite performances
as tongues-speakers employed stylized Indian gestures to contextualize their utterances and to indicate the type of language
being spoken. The Shakers provide an episode that shows some
parallels. Some New York Shakers spoke in tongues as early as
the last decade of the eighteenth century. At the Watervliet,
New York, community just north of Albany in early 1800, Shaker Seth Youngs spoke in “some Indian tongue, or it appeared
57
Booth further stated that “the event has proved his presumption
false,” implying that Cowdery actually attempted this feat when he
arrived in Missouri. This is surely an assumption on Booth’s part,
though perhaps not an unlikely one. Ezra Booth (Nelson, Ohio),
Letter to I. Eddy, November 7, 1831, in “Mormonism—No. V,”
Ohio Star (Ravenna, Ohio) 2 (November 10, 1831), 3, http://www.
sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/OH/miscohio.htm#111031 (accessed
February 19, 2015).
58
Anonymous to Editor, November 26, 1830.
149
such by the gesticulations.”59 Youngs must have done this often,
for his grandson visited the Shawnees in Ohio in 1807 because
of “many visions, Indian tongues, prophecies, revelations & signs
. . . given from time to time of the spirit of God being at work
among them.”60 A few decades later, in the late 1830s and early 1840s, Shaker mediums in Watervliet and other communities spoke in Indian tongues and performed other stereotyped
behaviors such as dancing, yelling, and “gesticulating violently”
during spectacular spiritual visitations from deceased members
of many different racial groups. These manifestations differed
stylistically and theologically from the Ohio Lamanite behaviors, and no evidence directly links the Shaker and Mormon performances. Instead, they likely arose independently through a
similar process of gestural and visionary elaboration on the gift
of tongues.61
59
Thomas Brown, An Account of the People Called Shakers: Their
Faith, Doctrines, and Practice, Exemplified in the Life, Conversations,
and Experience of the Author during the Time He Belonged to the Society.
To Which Is Affixed a History of Their Rise and Progress to the Present
Day (Troy, N.Y., 1812), 46–47, 58–60, 133, 297. A Shaker community
was on Sodus Bay, twenty-five miles from Palmyra, during Joseph
Smith’s youth. He may have learned about the gift of tongues from
Shaker preachers, although I know of no corroborative evidence.
However, New Testament references were sufficiently well-known
that hypothesizing Shaker influence may be unnecessary (Acts 2:4,
10:46, 19:6; 1 Cor. 12:10, etc.). See Rick Grunder, Mormon Parallels:
A Bibliographic Source, 2d ed. (Lafayette, N.Y.: Rick Grunder Books,
2014), 2032.
60
Like the later Mormons, this Shaker missionary expressed a
sympathy for Indians that would have shocked his white contemporaries. He carefully concealed his visit from “the wicked” whites of
frontier settlements. Benjamin S. Youngs, “A Journey to the Indians,”
1807, in Edward Deming Andrews, “The Shaker Mission to the
Shawnee Indians,” Winterthur Portfolio 7 (1972): 115–16, 127.
61
See A Revelation of the Extraordinary Visitation of Departed Spirits
of Distinguished Men and Women of All Nations, and Their Manifestation
through the Living Bodies of the “Shakers” (Philadelphia: L. G. Thomas,
150
The elaborations by Ohio performers took unexpected
forms. For all their talk of Lamanites and tongues, the New
York missionaries did not teach their Ohio converts to pantomime Indian proselytism or violence. In producing such performances, Ohio converts may have drawn upon their own experiences of ecstatic bodily “exercises” such as shouting, dancing, singing, falling, jerking, laughing, and barking that often
accompanied camp-meeting revivals.62 Alternatively, perhaps
demonstrative African American worship traditions played
a role. Black Pete seems to have been a leader in the pantomime behaviors.63 Whatever their intellectual genealogy, these
improvisations expanded upon the performative scripts from
New York and exhibited considerable creativity on the part of
performers.
LAMANITE TONGUES AND “INDIAN MANOEUVERS”
Campbellite critic Josiah Jones described what may have
been the beginning of the Kirtland manifestations:
1869), 8–10; Return of Departed Spirits of the Highest Characters of
Distinction, as Well as the Indiscriminate of All Nations, into the Bodies
of the “Shakers,” or “United Society of Believers in the Second Advent of
the Messiah” (Philadelphia: J. R. Colon, 1843), 17, 35–38; Henry C.
Blinn, The Manifestation of Spiritualism among the Shakers, 1837–1847
(East Canterbury, N.H.: n.pub., 1899), 44–45, 62, 82, 85; Bridget
Bennett, “Sacred Theatres: Shakers, Spiritualists, Theatricality, and the
Indian in the 1830s and 1840s,” Drama Review 49, no. 3 (Autumn
2005): 114–34; and Edward D. Andrews, The Gift to Be Simple: Songs,
Dances, and Rituals of the American Shakers (New York: J. J. Augustin,
1940), 44, 69–75. Interestingly, the Shakers like the Mormons were
a communal movement drawn largely from the lower classes. Like
the Ohio Lamanite players, white Shaker performers were willing to
identify with the Indian in part because they rejected the dominant
Protestant culture and its hierarchies. Priscilla J. Brewer, “The
Demographic Features of the Shaker Decline, 1787–1900,” Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 15, no. 1 (Summer 1984): 39, 42.
62
Staker, Hearken, O Ye People, 19–20, 22–23.
63
Ibid., 11–18.
151
About five or six weeks ago some of them began to have visions
and revelations, and to prophesy, as they say. They said a man by
the name of [Lyman] Wight, who was ordained their elder with
authority to lay on hands, one night in meeting, had what they
call “the Power of God,” and that his face and hands shone so
that it was plain to be seen by all in the room, and that he sung a
song which no one ever heard before, and which they said was the
most melodious that they ever listened to. It was sung in another
tongue.64
Wight’s experience was an early trickle of what would become a spiritual flood. Over the next few months Ohio Mormons experienced many ecstatic phenomena, including the Lamanite ones.
As previously mentioned, six Lamanite performers can be
identified with some confidence. Skeptical Campbellite schoolteacher Jesse Jasper Moss saw three young Mormons, “one a
Negro,” preaching to imaginary Indians in Kirtland.65 Moss’s
“Negro” was surely Black Pete. The two companions may have
included Heman Bassett, Edson Fuller, or Burr Riggs. Observers saw these young white men engage in many of the same
sorts of worship practices as Pete, including baptizing imaginary converts. In fact, Bassett, Fuller, and Riggs were often
mentioned in close proximity to descriptions of Indian manifestations.66 In addition to young men like those named above,
64
Josiah Jones, “History of the Mormonites,” The Evangelist
(Carthage, Ohio) 9 ( June 1, 1841): 132–36, http://www.sidneyrigdon.
com/dbroadhu/oh/evan1832.htm#060141 (accessed February 19,
2015).
65
Jesse Jasper Moss, “Autobiography of a Pioneer Preacher,” edited
by M. M. Moss, Christian Standard, January 26, 1938, http://www.
solomonspalding.com/docs/Wil1878a.htm#1938 (accessed February
19, 2015).
66
Staker, Hearken, O Ye People, 79–80; Howe, Mormonism Unvailed,
105–6; and George A. Smith, November 15, 1864, Journal of Discourses,
26 vols. (London and Liverpool: LDS Booksellers Depot, 1854–
86), 11:4; Jones, “History of the Mormonites”; Levi W. Hancock,
152
Josiah Jones reported that “girls from twelve to twenty years
old” took part in the “Indian capers.”67 Jones didn’t name these
girls, but fourteen-year-old Lucy Stanton is a likely candidate.
In an 1884 reminiscence, former Mormon Reuben P. Harmon
described the practice of Indian tongues and then noted that
“Lucy Stanton was a leader in the power business.”68 Samuel F. Whitney in 1885 identified another female participant
as “Harvey Whitcomb’s wife, recently married.” This is almost
certainly a reference to Minerva Whitlock, who married Harvey G. Whitlock in 1830.69
Despite the socially marginal gender, race, or class of four
of these performers, the Family appears to have accepted their
charismatic power. Nor were their performances rigidly constrained by gendered performance codes. Reuben P. Harmon
remembered that “women were usually laid on the beds,”
but he also claimed that when Black Pete got the power he
“would run over the hills” and “white women would chase him
about.”70 Samuel F. Whitney remembered both genders participating in running and swooning behaviors. “I have seen men
Autobiography, ca. 1854, 78–79, microfilm of holograph, MS 8174,
LDS Church History Library.
67
Jones, “History of the Mormonites.”
68
Reuben P. Harmon, Affidavit, December 16, 1884, in Arthur
R. Deming, 2 vols. Naked Truths about Mormonism (Oakland, Calif.:
Deming and Company), Vol. 1, no. 2 ( January 1888): 3. Lucy Stanton
went on to marry Heman Bassett’s brother Oliver and then mulatto
Indian impersonator Warner (or William) McCary. As McCary’s wife,
Lucy impersonated an Indian princess. Staker, Hearken, O Ye People,
85; Connell O’Donovan, “Brigham Young, African-Americans and
Plural Marriage: Schism and the Beginnings of Black Priesthood
Denial,” in Persistence of Polygamy: From Joseph’s Martyrdom to the First
Manifesto, 1844–1890, edited by Newell G. Bringhurst and Craig L.
Foster (Independence, Mo.: John Whitmer Books, 2013), 62. See also
Angela Hudson’s article, “William McCary, Lucy Stanton, and the
Performance of Race at Winter Quarters and Beyond” in this issue.
69
Whitney, Affidavit, March 6, 1885.
70
Harmon, Affidavit, December 16, 1884.
153
and women who claimed to have the power laid indiscriminately on the bed and trundle-bed,” he wrote. “Some would
talk Injun.”71 Josiah Jones similarly described both “men and
women” participating in “Indian capers and motions.” The
Family was a group that rejected rigid social hierarchies; and
in its ecstatic practices, those hierarchies were diminished or
abolished.72
Several eyewitnesses described Indian tongue-speaking
during the Ohio meetings. Converts “articulated sounds,” Mormon dissenter Ezra Booth summarized in 1831, “which but few
persons professed to understand.” Others sometimes translated
these sounds by the spiritual gift of interpretation.73 Reuben P.
Harmon reminisced fifty-four years later that meetings at the
Isaac Morley home were orderly “until they got the power and
began to talk in unknown tongues. Some called it talking Injun.”74 Another former Mormon, Samuel F. Whitney, recalled
the same phenomenon: Minerva Whitlock “had the power and
was lying on the bed talking Injun.”75 Assessments of the phenomenon varied widely. A convert who had traded with Indians
told onlookers that he recognized the sounds as an Indian dialect.76 But to Campbellite critic Jesse Moss, tongues sounded
71
Jones, “History of the Mormonites.”
73
Booth to Eddy, October 24, 1831.
74
75
76
Booth to Eddy, October 24, 1831. Dissenter John Corrill similarly
remembered that when he first witnessed tongues-speaking as a new
convert, “persons in the room, who took no part with them, declared,
from the knowledge they had of the Indian languages, that the tongues
spoken were regular Indian dialects, which I was also informed, on
inquiry, the persons who spoke had never learned.” John Corrill, A
Brief History of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints, (Commonly
Called Mormons;) Including an Account of Their Doctrine and Discipline;
with the Reasons of the Author for Leaving the Church (St. Louis: John
Corrill, 1839), 9.
72
154
like “all sorts of gibberish.”77
The more elaborate forms of Indian performance often occurred during or immediately following a visionary trance. In
some cases, actors believed their performances accurately depicted events occurring in the faraway Indian Territory. Campbellite
Josiah Jones wrote in late January or early February 1831,
While in these visions they say they are carried away in the spirit
to the Lamanites, . . . that they can see the Indians on the banks of
the streams at the West waiting to be baptized; and they can hear
them sing and see them perform many of the Indian manoeuvres,
which they try to imitate in various ways[.] . . . These young men
and women will lay sometimes for hours almost lifeless to appearance, and when they begin to recover, they begin to pray in a low
voice or whisper, and after a little time, to act, they say, as the Indians did where they were carried by the spirit.78
Jones found the performances ridiculous and childlike. “If
any one of their brethren or sisters talk to them in Indian,” he
said, “it will so please them that they will laugh, and set out many
Indian capers and motions.”79
Jones’s telling made such performances sound like nothing
more than reproductions of stereotyped Indian gestures. While
that may accurately describe some of the manifestations, other
witnesses described mainly performances that sought to transform Indian gestural tropes into Lamanite ones by situating
77
Moss, “Autobiography of a Pioneer Preacher.”
Jones, “History of the Mormonites.” See also Booth to Eddy,
October 24, 1831. For the date of Jones’s writing, see Staker, Hearken,
O Ye People, 77.
79
Jones, “History of the Mormonites.” Although Jones’s assessment
must be taken with a grain of salt, the reference to laughter suggests
that at least some performers may have seen a literal element of “play”
in ecstatic Lamanite performances. Other witnesses gave additional
examples of apparently clownish behavior during the revival. Staker,
Hearken, O Ye People, 82, argues that alcohol played a role in some of
the manifestations, “because each worshipper was encouraged to eat
and drink his fill [of bread and wine] during the sacrament.”
78
155
them in specific eschatological contexts. The performances, in
fact, seem to have clustered into two main groups: those that
portrayed proselytizing the Lamanites and those that portrayed
apocalyptic Lamanite violence.
In the first type of performance, Mormons mainly played
the roles of white missionaries, though they may also have occasionally acted as Lamanite converts.80 Most of the eyewitnesses
to the Ohio Lamanite manifestations reported some variant of
this type of performance, which according to Samuel F. Whitney
emerged early in the region’s charismatic outpouring.81 Most
commonly, performers would “fancy themselves addressing a
congregation of their red brethren; mounted on a stump, or the
fence, or from some elevated situation, would harangue their
assembly until they had convinced or converted them.”82 Such
preaching, delivered in tongues, was directed to “imaginary congregations.”83 Whitney complained that these loud, disruptive
performances continued late into the night: “I have been awakened and gone to my window nights and seen them on stumps
preaching.”84 In a variant of this practice, “some would slide or
scoot on the floor, with the rapidity of a serpent, which [they]
termed sailing in the boat to the Lamanites, preaching the gospel.”85 After preaching to imaginary Lamanites, actors then performed imaginary Lamanite baptisms. “In this exercise,” Ezra
Booth noted, “some of them actually went into the water; and in
the water, performed the ceremony used in baptizing.”86 Whit80
82
83
Ibid. See also Howe, Mormonism Unvailed, 104–5; Whitney,
Affidavit, March 6, 1885; Moss, “Autobiography of a Pioneer Preacher.”
84
85
Bruce N. Westergren, ed., From Historian to Dissident: The Book of
John Whitmer (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), 57. This entry
in John Whitmer’s narrative history was probably penned in June 1831.
86
Booth to Eddy, October 24, 1831. See also C[lapp].,
“Mormonism.”
81
156
ney noted that “pieces of rails and sticks” were sometimes used in
these baptismal performances in place of Lamanite converts.87
Apparently such performances of Lamanite proselytism
were assigned two interpretations. One held that they were visionary portrayals of Mormon missionary successes then occurring in Indian Territory, while the other proposed that they were
“an extraordinary work of the Lord, designed to prepare those
young men for the Indian mission.”88
The second major type of performance involved graphic portrayals of Lamanite violence. A skeptical newspaper correspondent noted in February 1831: “Sometimes, in these exercises the
young men would rise and play before the people, going through
all the Indian maneuvers of knocking down, scalping, ripping
open, and taking out the bowels.”89 Jesse Moss, too, described
seeing performers pretend to “tomahawk and scalp each other, and rip open the bowels and tear out the entrails.” Echoing Whitney’s complaint about late-night uproar, Moss groused
that the “night was frequently made hideous by their unearthly
screams and yells.”90 Church historian John Whitmer also described this behavior. “Some would fancy to themselves that they
had the sword of Laban and would wield it as expert as a light
dragoon,” he wrote in 1831, and “some would act like an Indian
in the act of scalping.”91 The available sources do not clearly say
what these performances of Lamanite violence meant to participants, but it seems probable that they enacted the Book of Mormon prophecies that Lamanites would engage in apocalyptic destruction of unrepentant Gentiles (3 Ne. 20:16).92
87
88
Howe, Mormonism Unvailed, 126; Booth to Eddy, October 24,
1831.
89
C[lapp]., “Mormonism.”
Moss, “Autobiography of a Pioneer Preacher.”
91
Westergren, Book of John Whitmer, 57.
92
Contrast Samuel Brown’s interpretation of such manifestations
as enactments of “the sacred theater of dying to sin” in Samuel Morris
Brown, In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon
90
157
Outsiders took note of the threatening nature of Mormon Lamanite activities. Ezra Booth concluded that Mormons
sought to incite Indian violence against whites through their
missionary work. “Should success attend their endeavors; and
the minds of the Indians become inflamed with that enthusiastic spirit which Mormonism inspires, they may be inclined to
try the experiment, whether ‘by the shedding of blood,’ they can
expel the white inhabitants, or reduce them to a state of servitude; and by this means, regain the possession of the lands occupied by their forefathers.”93 Samuel F. Whitney, too, framed
his descriptions of Lamanite performances with the graphic observation that Mormons expected Lamanites to fill the streets
with Gentile blood.94 Nor did outsiders miss the more subtle
challenges the manifestations posed to race and gender hierarchies. Reuben P. Harmon stereotyped Black Pete as “a low cunning illiterate negro,” and Jesse Moss interrupted Pete’s ecstatic
performances with cynical pranks designed to make him seem
ridiculous.95 When Whitney described performative interactions between men and women, he used words like “promiscuous” and “indiscriminately” to mark the violation of patriarchal
values.96 When Harmon described white women chasing Black
Pete, he painted a picture designed to scandalize a white supremacist audience.97
But for the most part observers reacted with humor, stressing
the fanatical absurdity of the performances more than the implied threat. “Indian capers” and “talking Injun” seemed absurd
Conquest of Death (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 108.
93
Ezra Booth (Nelson, Ohio), Letter to I. Eddy, November 14,
1831, in Ohio Star (Ravenna, Ohio) 2 (November 17, 1831), http://
www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/OH/miscohio.htm#111731
(accessed February 19, 2015).
94
95
Harmon, Affidavit, December 16, 1884; Moss, “Autobiography
of a Pioneer Preacher.”
96
97
158
partly because of the incongruity of civilized whites identifying
with non-white savages. In playing Lamanite, white Mormons
racially debased themselves in the eyes of their critics. Booth expressed this sentiment more vividly than anyone. “These actors,”
he said, “assumed the visage of the savage, and so nearly imitated him, not only in language, but in gestures and actions, that it
seemed the soul and body were completely metamorphosed into
the Indian.”98 In short, critics took advantage of Mormon converts’ Indian performances to lampoon the movement as racially
non-white.
AFTERMATH AND AFTERSHOCKS
The outburst of ecstatic manifestations in Ohio was fairly
short-lived. It shortly proved too radical for Joseph Smith, who
arrived in early February 1831 with the somewhat respectable
stature of a successful religious leader. He promptly began regulating the exercise of spiritual gifts and, by the end of February,
shut down would-be prophetess Laura Hubbell by dictating a
commandment in which he claimed sole authority to receive
revelation for the Church (D&C 43).99 Nighttime services
were discontinued by early March, when Smith reported in a
letter to his brother that he had “overcome” Satanic irregularities in the Ohio church and restored order. Also in March, he
dictated revelations stressing the need for the Saints to exercise
careful discernment with respect to spiritual gifts and “operations” (D&C 46:27).100 In April, Smith dictated a revelation
that rebuked the community for receiving spirits they “could
not understand,” likely a reference to the gift of tongues (D&C
50:13–23). The Ohio church seems to have mostly discontinued tongues until their reintroduction by converts from New
98
Hubbell was the sister of Lamanite performer Edson Fuller.
Whether she participated in any of the Lamanite manifestations is
unknown. Staker, Hearken, O Ye People, 79–80, 111–13.
100
Ibid., 136–38.
99
159
York a year and a half later.101
This deemphasis of the spiritual gifts coincided with a deemphasis of Lamanites and the building of the New Jerusalem.
Recognizing that his best hope for respectability lay with the
large and predominantly white Mormon community in Ohio,
Smith focused his administrative energies there. Acutely aware
that his teachings about Lamanite destiny attracted bad publicity, he allowed them for a time to recede into the background.
When he did discuss Lamanites after this date, he sometimes
did so in coded language to avert racially charged criticism from
his enemies.102 In November 1832, New York convert Brigham
Young arrived in Kirtland and reintroduced the gift of tongues.
Smith reapproved the practice but now interpreted it as “the
pure Adamic language.” This interpretation became the dominant view of tongues thenceforward.103
The shift from Lamanite to Adamic tongues was part of a
broader shift in Smith’s thinking about American identity and
sacred history. While Lamanites remained occasional characters
in his teachings about the ancient American past, he increasingly focused on a more primeval history for the nation—one that
made it the site of the Garden of Eden and the setting of the
early chapters of the biblical book of Genesis.104 This new em101
Vogel and Dunn, “The Tongue of Angels,” 5–6, 9.
For instance, Jonathan Dunham’s Indian mission was
euphemistically termed an “exploring excursion to the west.” G. St. John
Stott, “New Jerusalem Abandoned: The Failure to Carry Mormonism
to the Delaware,” Journal of American Studies 21, no. 1 (April 1987):
80–85; and Ronald W. Walker, “Seeking the ‘Remnant’: The Native
American during the Joseph Smith Period,” Journal of Mormon History
19, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 2–33.
103
Vogel and Dunn, “The Tongue of Angels,” 9.
104
See, for example, Joseph Smith Jr., Journal, May 19, 1838, 44–45,
the Joseph Smith Papers Online, Journals, id:6664 (accessed November
24, 2013); Samuel D. Tyler, “A Daily Journal of the Traveling of the
Camp of Latter-day Saints Which Sent Out from Kirtland for Zion
July 6th 1838,” September 25, 1838, 67, microfilm of holograph, MS
102
160
phasis on the (presumably white) primeval patriarchs inspired its
fair share of ridicule but raised no troublesome questions about
the newly respectable prophet’s racial loyalties.
Despite Smith’s best efforts, both the phenomenon of Lamanite tongues and the reactionary racial critique of it by observers spread to Jackson County, Missouri. Throughout the next
two years, lay Mormon visionaries and tongues-interpreters in
Jackson County periodically predicted an uprising in which Lamanites would massacre unconverted white settlers and procure
their lands for use by Mormons. For instance, an April 1833 letter of Frederick G. Williams quoted a Missouri Mormon’s inspired interpretation of a prophecy given in tongues: “that if we
will not fight for ourselves, the Indians will fight for us.” Williams admonished that although “this may be true,” the interpreter should not have made it public.105 This caution did nothing to stem the tide of Lamanite phenomena, for two months
later “most of the church” in Independence “received the gift of
tongues, to speak in the language of the Lemanites[.] . . . It was
given to some in each branch of the church to interpret what was
spoken; and also it was given to many of us to prophesy of things
shortly to take place.”106
Confronted with such data, Gentile observers constant1761, LDS Church History Library; and Leland Homer Gentry and
Todd M. Compton, Fire and Sword: A History of the Latter-day Saints
in Northern Missouri, 1836–39 (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books,
2010), 149–68.
105
F. G. Williams (Kirtland, Ohio), Letter to the Saints in Missouri,
October 10, 1833, Times and Seasons 6 (April 15, 1845): 864–65.
See also Joseph Smith (Hiram, Ohio), Letter to William W. Phelps
(Independence, Mo.), July 31, 1832, 5, Joseph Smith Collection, 1827–
1844, MS 155, Box 2, fd. 3, LDS Church History Library, in Turley,
Selected Collections, 1:20.
106
“Extracts of Letters from a Mormonite” (Independence, Mo.),
December 1833, The Unitarian (Cambridge, Mass.) 1 (May 1, 1834):
251–53. For additional evidence of abundant tongue-speaking in
Missouri, see Vogel and Dunn, “The Tongue of Angels,” 13–14.
161
ly expressed fears of a Mormon-Indian alliance. One such rumor made the rounds on the evening of November 4, 1833, and
armed men flooded the streets of Independence the next morning.107 Although similar Lamanite performances had incited no
violence in Ohio, racial anxieties in Jackson County were closer
to the surface. Here on the frontier, native resistance still posed
a real and present danger to the colonial order. Few possibilities
seemed more threatening to frontiersmen than a rival colonialism that might harness native power—or be harnessed by native
power—in the competition for land and resources.108
The county’s old citizens were also mostly southerners. Amid
intense sectional tensions over the issue of slavery, they needed little encouragement to suspect their new Yankee Mormon
neighbors of being race traitors. This fear, more than anything
else, motivated the forcible expulsion of Mormons from Jackson County in November 1833. In fact, expulsions of Mormons
107
Benton Pixley, “Mormonites,” Christian Register (Boston, Mass.)
22 (April 6, 1833), http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/NE/
miscne01.htm#040633 (accessed February 19, 2015); Isaac McCoy
(Shawnee, Mo.), Letter to the Editors, Western Monitor, November
28, 1833, reprinted in “The Disturbances in Jackson County,” Daily
Missouri Republican (St. Louis) 12 (December 20, 1833), http://
www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/MO/Misr1833.htm#122033
(accessed February 19, 2015); J. M. Henderson (Chagrin, Ohio),
Letter to the Postmaster at Independence, Mo., April 29, 1834, in
“Another Mormon War Threatened!” Missouri Intelligencer and Boon’s
Lick Advertiser 17 ( June 7, 1834), http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/
dbroadhu/MO/Miss1831.htm#060734 (accessed February 19, 2015);
Parley P. Pratt, History of the Late Persecution Inflicted by the State of
Missouri upon the Mormons, in Which Ten Thousand American Citizens
Were Robbed, Plundered, and Driven from the State, and Many Others
Imprisoned, Martyred, &c. for Their Religion, and All This by Military
Force, by Order of the Executive (Detroit, Mich.: Parley P. Pratt, 1839),
18.
108
Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, North American Indians:
A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010),
35–39; Pearce, Savagism and Civilization, 53, 55.
162
from several counties over the next few years and an attempt to
exterminate them in 1838 self-consciously took cues from Indian policy, as if Mormons themselves were Indians.109
Ecstatic Lamanite manifestations cropped up after 1833
only occasionally and in attenuated forms. Church patriarch
Joseph Smith Sr. promised several recipients of his patriarchal
blessings in 1836 and 1837 that they would “speak to the aboriginal inhabitants of this continent . . . in their own tongue by
the power of the Holy Ghost” and “understand their languages
by the power of the spirit,” but there is little evidence that recipients attempted these feats.110 An exceptional case of Lamanite
tongue-speaking occurred during the summer of 1838 in Chautauqua County, New York, where new convert Jesse Wentworth
Crosby witnessed “persons who had never spoken with an Indian in their lives” speaking the “language or dialect of various
tribes.” Crosby was impressed by the apparent authenticity of
these tongues, as signaled by stylized “gesture” and the “manner
in which it was spoken.” In his autobiography, Crosby reported
that he had “since traveled among various tribes of Indians” and
recognized their verbal and non-verbal communication styles
from his memories of the Chautauqua manifestations.111
CONCLUSION
In a developing market economy rife with socio-economic inequalities and religious hypocrisy, a poor farm laborer from
New York founded a new religious movement that reimagined
109
Frampton, “Some Savage Tribe,” 179–83, 196–97.
H. Michael Marquardt, comp., Early Patriarchal Blessings of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2007), 93–94 (Abel Butterfield), 118–19 ( Jonathan
Fisher), 128–29 ( John Lytle), 134 (Russell Potter), 162–63 (Hannah
Elizabeth Adams).
111
Jesse Wentworth Crosby, “The History and Journal of Jesse W.
Crosby,” ca. 1869, typescript, Book of Abraham Project, http://www.
boap.org/LDS/Early-Saints/JWCrosby.html (accessed December 23,
2013).
110
163
Indians as “Lamanites” and positioned them at the heart of the
movement’s vision for social reform. Almost immediately after
the Church’s founding, missionaries set out for Missouri with
the expectation that they could preach to the natives through
the spiritual gift of tongues. En route, the missionaries converted
congregations of communalists in Ohio and sparked a dramatic revival. Among the converts was a small group of mixed-race
and mixed-gender enthusiasts who felt drawn to the character
of the Lamanite, perhaps both as a fellow victim of Jacksonian
culture and as a symbol of their primitivist religious and communal values.
Not satisfied to merely speak in Lamanite tongues, these
converts contextualized and expanded upon their utterances
through ecstatic performances. Elaborating upon scripts borrowed from the Book of Mormon, they performed the Indian in
both his noble and ignoble aspects. As the “noble savage,” Indians accepted Mormon baptism and thereby displayed the superiority of their diverse communitarian cult over Protestant rivals.
As ignoble savages, they embodied the wrath of both God and
the converts themselves against a decadent Protestant American culture. These performances implicitly challenged not only
religious and socio-economic but also racial hierarchies at a moment when white Manifest Destiny was triumphing in national
politics.
The performances finally proved too radical for Joseph
Smith, who worked to increase the movement’s respectability by
deemphasizing Lamanites and imposing order and hierarchy on
the Church in Ohio. Despite his efforts, the practice of speaking
in Lamanite tongues spread to Missouri, where it contributed to
tensions between Mormons and their neighbors. In both Ohio
and Missouri, white Protestant rivals seized upon Mormons’ ecstatic Lamanite performances as an opportunity to racially code
them as non-white savages.
Although on one level the Ohio Lamanite performances implicitly challenged Jacksonian social hierarchies, on another level
they were self-interested, colonial, and racialist. Playing Lama-
164
nite was a kind of cultural appropriation. Ohio converts assumed
Lamanite identities to lay claim to the antiquity and destiny of
this group as imagined in the Book of Mormon. They nearly always played white roles in conjunction with Lamanite personas.
Lamanites mattered only in relationship to themselves and their
white rivals.112 The relationships displayed in these performances were hierarchically structured, placing non-native Mormon
missionaries in a classic paternalistic position over their Lamanite charges. If performers also placed Lamanites in a superior
position to white Protestants, this was more a demotion of Protestants than a promotion of Indians.
Most importantly, performers dramatized not the complex
and diverse identities of real natives, but rather stereotyped images drawn from white American culture and Mormon sacred
texts. Although the performers surely believed they accessed real
natives through their ecstatic experiences, this belief only made
them more confident in perpetuating stereotypes that actually
sprang from white imaginations, sapping native peoples’ power
to make themselves understood.
One respect in which the Lamanite manifestations departed
somewhat from the usual colonial pattern was in their expectation of future native survival and prosperity.113 Though by no
112
See also Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Surrogate Americans:
Masculinity, Masquerade, and the Formation of a National Identity,”
PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association 119, no. 5
(October 2004): 1329.
113
Some historians have argued that the Book of Mormon’s
positive vision of Lamanite destiny softened the violence of
Mormon colonialism in Utah. Although Mormons appropriated and
stereotyped native identity just like everyone else, they at least generally
acknowledged and affirmed natives’ right to be alive. See Floyd A.
O’Neil and Stanford J. Layton, “Of Pride and Politics: Brigham Young
as Indian Superintendent,” Utah Historical Quarterly 46 (1978): 238;
Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience (New
York: Vintage Books, 1980), 147–48; and John G. Turner, Brigham
Young: Pioneer Prophet (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard
165
means unprecedented, this expectation was unusual even among
Yankees. Most early nineteenth-century intellectuals viewed and
performed Indians as “vanished” people of the past, for whom
white Americans now served as surrogates. For instance, Shaker performers in the late 1830s and early 1840s understood
themselves as mediums for the spirits of deceased Indian people.114 Mormon performers, by contrast, regarded themselves as
prophetically displaying what absent but living Lamanites were
doing in faraway places or would do in the future. Mormon performances also purported to prepare young Mormon men to
seek out “real” Lamanites on the mission field. Even so, few early
Mormons actually undertook missions to the Lamanites; most
were content to watch Indian conversion and apocalypse unfold
in dramatic enactment at a safe remove from real natives. And
even insofar as performance expressed a sincere Mormon desire
for a “real” Lamanite presence, the desire was more for the imagined Lamanite to be realized than for real natives to be encountered and engaged in all their ethnic and cultural diversity. In
other words, real natives were desired mainly so that they might
become players in scripted white fantasies and accomplices in
their own stereotyping.115
Ultimately, then, the Ohio Lamanite performers merely appropriated and adapted colonial cultural forms to express their
interests as an alienated class. Still, one cannot help but appreciate the performances’ subversive dimensions. However self-interested and stereotyped their vision of the Lamanite, it was a vision radical enough to upset the keepers of a more powerful and
University Press, 2012), 208.
114
Jill Lane, “ImpersoNation: Toward a Theory of Black-, Red,
and Yellowface in the Americas,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern
Language Association 123, no. 5 (October 2008): 1730–31; SmithRosenberg, “Surrogate Americans,” 1331; Deloria, Playing Indian,
3–4; and Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the
Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2008), 69–70, 78–91.
115
Green, “The Tribe Called Wannabee,” 30.
166
more explicitly racialist colonial order. In Missouri, Mormons
paid the price of this radicalism.
MATAKITE, MORMON CONVERSIONS,
AND MĀORI-ISRAELITE IDENTITY
WORK IN COLONIAL NEW ZEALAND
Ian G. Barber
The early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints in Aotearoa/New Zealand in southern Polynesia is associated with an intriguing cross-cultural engagement.1 In the ninth deIAN G. BARBER {[email protected]} is associate professor
in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University
of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. Primary research was faciliatated
by the following institutions and their ever-helpful staffs: Alexander
Turnbull Library, Wellington; Hocken Library, Dunedin; Nelson Provincial Museum, Nelson (all in New Zealand); Huntington Library,
San Marino, California; LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City;
L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham
Young University, Provo, Utah. Research was undertaken in part
during a Fulbright Scholarship based in the Department of Anthropology, Brigham Young University, fall semester 2011, where department chair Professor Charles Nuckolls is thanked in particular. University of Otago grants funded research visits to California and Utah
in 2012 and 2013. Les O’Neill, illustrator, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Otago, completed the maps.
I acknowledge with aroha nui those tangata whenua throughout New
Zealand who have shared relevant whānau histories and traditions. I
accept full responsibility for subsequent textual and cultural-historical
interpretations and any errors.
1
I use “LDS,” “Mormon,” and “Mormonism” to refer to the
Church hereafter in text. Aoteroa has been in use as a Māori name for
New Zealand from the mid-nineteenth century and by some national
institutions from the end of the following century. It is not used in
subsequent running text. Macrons identify the long Māori vowel in
accordance with current convention and local use when known, other
167
168
cade of the nineteenth century, thousands of indigenous Māori of
more populous Te Ika a Māui or North Island became Mormons as
a result of the efforts of Anglo-American LDS missionaries. A rolling wave of conversions spread between sub-tribal kin group (hapū)
settlements in southern, eastern, and northern districts in particular.
Consequently, a new religious dialogue crossed North Island and,
after the 1880s, Te Tau Ihu (northern South Island) to (re)connect
discrete Māori communities of descent (tangata whenua 2) in an
original, bicultural society.3
This historical engagement is surprising at first glance. It octhan in quotes and citations where the original form is followed.
2
Literally the “people of the land.” This term could be a regional or,
from the nineteenth century, ethnic referent.
3
Research publications on the historical Māori-Mormon identity
include (by surname) Ian G. Barber, “Between Biculturalism and
Assimilation: The Changing Place of Maori Culture in the Twentieth
Century New Zealand Mormon Church,” New Zealand Journal of
History 29, no. 2 (October 1995): 142–69; R. Lanier Britsch, Unto the
Islands of the Sea: A History of the Latter-day Saints in the Pacific (Salt
Lake City: Deseret Book, 1986); Brian Hunt, Zion in New Zealand
(Templeview, Hamilton, New Zealand: Church College of New
Zealand, 1974); Robert Joseph, “Intercultural Exchange, Matakite
Māori and the Mormon Church,” in Mana Māori and Christianity,
edited by Hugh Morrison, Lachy Paterson, Brett Knowles, and
Murray Rae (Wellington, New Zealand: Huia Publishers 2012), 43–
72; Selwyn Kātene, ed., Turning the Hearts of the Children: Early Māori
Leaders in the Mormon Church (Wellington, New Zealand: Steele
Roberts Publishers, 2014); Peter Lineham, “The Mormon Message in
the Context of Maori Culture,” Journal of Mormon History 17 (1991):
62–93; Marjorie Newton, Tiki and Temple: The Mormon Mission
in New Zealand, 1854–1958 (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books,
2012); Newton, Mormon and Maori (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford
Books, 2014); Grant Underwood, “Mormonism, the Maori and
Cultural Authenticity,” Journal of Pacific History 35, no. 2 (2000): 133–
46. An important, unpublished university thesis is Ian Rewi Barker,
“The Connexion: The Mormon Church and the Maori People” (M.A.
thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 1967).
Ian G. Barber/MĀori-Israelite Identity in New Zealand 169
East Pacific location map showing Polynesia and the islands of
Aotearoa/New Zealand and elsewhere discussed in text.
curred after decades of Māori dissatisfaction with British colonial government in New Zealand (1841–1907). At its core, this
disaffection was caused by breaches of the colony’s founding document of governance and rights, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.
Affected Māori communities faced the ongoing loss of land and
other resources. In response, new social and religious movements
emerged among the tangata whenua to emphasize Māori rangatiratanga (authority), resistance, and the restoration of alienated lands.4 Māori prophets (collectively ngā poropiti) who em4
Important scholarly overviews of New Zealand’s pre- through
post-colonial history include Atholl Anderson, Judith Binney, and
Aroha Harris, Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History (Wellington:
170
ployed biblical imagery led many of these movements through
and beyond the nineteenth century in a novel iteration of the
traditional matakite (meaning seer; in the more formal office, tohunga matakite).5 The Mormon missionaries would both comBridget Williams Books, 2014); James Belich, Making Peoples: A
History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of
the Nineteenth Century (Auckland, New Zealand: Allen Lane/Penguin,
1996); Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from
the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland, New Zealand: Allen Lane/
Penguin, 2001); Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand
(Auckland, New Zealand: Penguin, 2003). For detailed analysis
of the cultural and legal history of the Treaty of Waitangi see Paul
McHugh, Māori Magna Carta: New Zealand Law and the Treaty of
Waitangi (Auckland, New Zealand: Oxford University Press, 1991)
and Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, 2d ed. (Wellington, New
Zealand: Bridget Williams Books, 2011). The two most significant
comparative studies of the later nineteenth-century Māori prophet
movements and their antecedents are Bronwyn Elsmore, Mana from
Heaven: A Century of Maori Prophets in New Zealand (1989; new
edition, Auckland, New Zealand: Reed, 1999) and Elsmore, Like Them
That Dream: The Maori and the Old Testament (1985; rev. ed., Auckland,
New Zealand: Reed, 2000). For a concise and occasionally alternative
perspective on the poropiti, see Judith Binney, “Ancestral Voices: Maori
Prophet Leaders,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand,
edited by Keith Sinclair (Auckland, New Zealand: Oxford University
Press, 1990), 153–84.
5
An influential classic discussion of matakite in Māori history,
ethnography, and tradition is Elsdon Best, Maori Religion and
Mythology Part 1 (1924; Wellington, New Zealand: Government
Printer, 1976), 279–304, 410–12; available at http://nzetc.victoria.
ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Bes01Reli-t1-body-d6-d3.html (accessed
July 2014). Best (p. 279) notes that matakite can denote “a seer, any
person believed to be possessed of second sight, one who practises
divination; also any act of divination, or any utterance that embodies a
prophecy or augury” (279). Joseph (“Intercultural Exchange”) refers to
traditional and nineteenth-century Māori seers as “tohunga matakite.”
This combined term describes the office of a religious expert or priest
New Zealand location map showing approximate areas of tribal
and primary poropiti influence, regions (including current regional
boundaries for Taranaki, Waikato, and Wairarapa in broken line)
and places discussed in text.
pete with and build on the successes of these prophet (poropiti)
movements.
Historians have pointed to a convergence of interests and similarities to explain the late nineteenth-century wave of Māori-Mormon conversions.6 From a faithful history perspective, Mormon
(tohunga) with special insight and prophetic gifts. Best, Maori Religion,
261–65. Nineteenth-century poropiti diverged increasingly from the
more traditional matakite office in the adoption of some biblical forms
and the assumption of a shared if not pan-tribal jurisdiction. Binney,
“Ancestral Voices”; Elsmore, Mana from Heaven; Elsmore, Like Them
That Dream.
6
For example, see Barker, “The Connexion”; Britsch, Unto the Islands
of the Sea; Newton, Maori and Mormon; Underwood, “Mormonism,
172
historian R. Lanier Britsch observes: “Even though Polynesians of
all island groups have taken well to the restored gospel, the Maoris
appear to have been prepared in special ways for the coming of the
Mormon missionaries.”7 For Britsch and other Mormon writers,
one preparatory pathway involved several pre-1883 predictions
by earlier tohunga matakite and nineteenth-century poropiti of the
coming of a new religion for Māori. In a frequently told LDS
narrative, these prophecies anticipated the later nineteenth-century Mormon advent among tangata whenua, where “the Maori gave the Latter-day Saints their prophets.”8 Pāora (Paul) Te
Pōtangaroa of Wairarapa (southeastern North Island) is arguably
the best-documented and most frequently cited of these Māori
seers in Mormon accounts.9 The association of Māori matakite or
the Maori and Cultural Authenticity.”
7
Britsch, Unto the Islands of the Sea, 272.
8
Underwood, “Mormonism, the Maori and Cultural Authenticity,”
142.
9
Brief reports of these predictions by various New Zealand LDS
missionaries appeared in the late nineteenth-century Utah Mormon
press. John S. Ferris, “Correspondence,” Opotiki, Bay of Plenty,
North Island, New Zealand, Deseret News Weekly, November 23,
1881: 683; Alma Greenwood, “My New Zealand Mission,” Juvenile
Instructor 20, no. 14 ( July 15, 1885): 222; Joseph N. Heywood,
“Australasian Mission,” Deseret News Weekly, May 24, 1890, 733. The
first published Māori-Mormon account of a matakite prophecy linked
to the LDS advent was translated in B. G. [Benjamin Goddard], “A
Maori Prophet,” Juvenile Instructor 37, no. 5 (March 1, 1902): 15253; Goddard published the account related by Hirini Whaanga. The
New Zealand LDS mission press promoted Māori-language texts
of the prophecies thereafter: for example, He Poropititanga Enei: Na
Nga Poropiti Maori o Nga Wa o Mua (Korongata, New Zealand: Te
Karere Press, 1927) and Hamiora Kaumau, “He Poropititanga a Nga
Maori Mo Te Hahi,” Te Karere [The Messenger] 32, no. 9 (Hepetema
[September] 1938): 275–76. Throughout the twentieth century, former
New Zealand missionaries published translated accounts, including
Nolan P. Olsen, “New Zealand—Our Maori Home,” Improvement Era
35, no. 7 (May 1935): 444, 446 (silently synthesizing more than one
prophecies and mass Mormon conversions has been an important strand of cultural-historical continuity and pride among LDS
tangata whenua to the present.10
Māori predictions of a new religion and future for the tangata
whenua can be read in other ways as well. Non-LDS and even
LDS scholars note that several Māori religious groups from the
nineteenth century and into the twentieth century have connected
these matakite with the rise of their own movements, including
the prophecies of the oft-cited Te Pōtangaroa.11 The biculturmatakite account); Matthew Cowley, “Maori Chief Predicts Coming
of L.D.S. Missionaries,” Improvement Era 53, no. 9 (September 1950):
696–98, 754–56; William A. Cole and Elwin W. Jensen, Israel in the
Pacific (Salt Lake City: Utah Genealogical Society, 1961), 389–92.
Comparative studies by later LDS writers include R. Lanier Britsch,
“Maori Traditions and the Mormon Church,” New Era, June 1981,
37–46; Britsch, Unto the Islands of the Sea, 272–76; Hunt, Zion in
New Zealand, 9–11; Joseph, “Intercultural Exchange”; Newton, Tiki
and Temple, 41–43; Newton, Maori and Mormon, 1–3; Underwood,
“Mormonism, the Maori and Cultural Authenticity.” Original (i.e.,
non-derivative) research on the topic by non-Mormon scholars
includes Angela Ballara and Keith Cairns, “Te Potangaroa, Paora,” The
Dictionary of New Zealand Biography: Te Ara—The Encyclopedia of New
Zealand, updated October 30, 2012, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/
biographies/1t57/te-potangaroa-paora (accessed July 2014); Elsmore,
Mana from Heaven, 151, 248–55; Lineham, “The Mormon Message,”
86–89.
10
Joseph, “Intercultural Exchange”; Kātene, Turning the Hearts
of the Children; Underwood, “Mormonism, the Maori and Cultural
Authenticity”; see also Anon., “Belonging to a Latter-day Saint
Ward Is Something to Celebrate,” [LDS] Church News and Events
[New Zealand], January 7, 2012, https://www.lds.org/church/news/
belonging-to-a-latter-day-saint-ward-is-something-to-celebrate
(accessed July 2014).
11
For acknowledgements by Mormon scholars see Joseph,
“Intercultural Exchange,” 58, 68; Newton, Tiki and Temple, 43, and (for
a more analytical discussion) Newton, Maori and Mormon, 1–3. NonLDS scholars have tended to downplay the Mormon association and
174
al content of the nineteenth-century Māori-Mormon tradition
has been critiqued also. Historian of Māori religious movements
Bronwyn Elsmore acknowledges that “the Mormon alternative
was established for some years at least” but concludes that Mormonism “was essentially another foreign message which also did
not answer the needs of the Maori.”12 Historian of religion in
New Zealand Peter Lineham argues that, although the Mormon
missionaries identified with Māori “to some extent,” Māori culture would prove “problematic” in the New Zealand LDS mission
over time. For Lineham, the Mormons accepted Māori culture
“only on certain conditions,” where “relative success looks different in different periods.” In Lineham’s view, “the so-called unique
relationship between the Latter-day Saints and the Maori people
proves to have little substance to it,” even though “aspects of the
Mormon message greatly appealed to the Maori.”13
Unsurprisingly, a number of Māori-Mormon scholars have
not accepted these arguments.14 However, all those who have
studied the subject agree that mass Māori conversions to a European (albeit Anglo-American) religious movement in the 1880s
was something quite unusual for the decade, even if the substantive bicultural content of this engagement is debated.
Beliefs about the Israelite origins of Māori represent another
connection between several poropiti movements and Mormons.
Britsch opines that the shared assumption “helped to establish a
significance of these prophecies. Ballara and Cairns, “Te Potangaroa”;
Elsmore, Mana from Heaven, 151, 252; Lineham, “The Mormon
Message,” 87–88.
12
Elsmore, Mana from Heaven, 151–52.
13
Lineham, “The Mormon Message,” 91–92. On the bicultural
complexities and problems that Lineham refers to, see Barber,
“Between Biculturalism and Assimilation”; Marjorie Newton, “From
Tolerance to House Cleaning: LDS Leadership Response to Maori
Marriage Customs, 1890–1990,” Journal of Mormon History 22 (Fall
1996): 72–91; Newton, Maori and Mormon.
14
Joseph, “Intercultural Exchange”; Kātene, Turning the Hearts of
the Children.
bond between Mormons and Maori” as LDS missionaries linked
Polynesians to the ancient American-Israelites of the Book of
Mormon.15 From the outset, the LDS narrative in New Zealand
expanded on the Book of Mormon description of the well-laden
vessels constructed by ship-builder Hagoth that were launched
“into the west sea” between B.C. 56–55 and “never heard of more”
(Alma 63:5–8). For the missionaries, Hagoth’s lost ships and
voyagers explained Polynesian origins.16 Newton argues that this
narrative development “aptly fitted the pan-tribal [Māori] canoe
stories” and adds: “Enthusiastically adopting a Mormon identity
as ‘Lamanites’ [a Book of Mormon group], they [Māori] felt a
sense of ownership of the LDS Church.”17
The assumption that nineteenth-century Māori adopted a
Lamanite identity underscores the complex history of what one
scholar calls “hemispheric Lamanite identification.”18 Ostensibly,
this assumption has the support of earlier twentieth-century LDS
missionary Nolan Olsen who described Māori in lineal terms as
“a remnant of the Lamanites, and thus of the House of Israel” in
a general Church publication.19 This lineal referent links Māori
15
Britsch, Unto the Islands of the Sea, 278.
See Robert E. Parsons, “Hagoth and the Polynesians,” in The
Book of Mormon: Alma, the Testimony of the Word, edited by Monte
S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young
University Religious Studies Center, 1992), 249–62, and for a more
critical perspective, Norman Douglas, “The Sons of Lehi and the Seed
of Cain: Racial Myths in Mormon Scripture and Their Relevance to
the Pacific Islands,” Journal of Religious History 8 ( June 1974): 90–104;
also discussed below.
17
Newton, Tiki and Temple, 47. Newton qualifies this statement
from the missionary side of the encounter in the observation that
“while some Mormon missionaries working in New Zealand from the
early 1880s called the Maori people Nephites, most referred to them
as Lamanites.” Newton, Mormon and Maori, 31.
18
John-Charles Duffy, “The Use of ‘Lamanite’ in Official LDS
Discourse,” Journal of Mormon History 34, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 126–
29, 132–35.
19
Olsen, “New Zealand—Our Maori Home,” 444.
16
176
to a rebellious Book of Mormon people who received the “mark”
or “curse” of a dark skin “because of their transgression.” These
“cursed” Book of Mormon Lamanites were opposed historically
to the more righteous and white-skinned Nephites.20
Categories of Lamanite and Nephite association in the Book
of Mormon can be interpreted in non-lineal and even, to an extent, non-racialist terms as well. However, later nineteenth-century Anglo-American Mormons were not inclined toward exegesis of this nature.21 Accordingly, LDS missionaries applied
racialist lineal imagery in the negative stereotyping of Māori on
occasion.22 Until the later twentieth century, the narrative as explained by LDS exegetes also provided that the Lamanite mark
of a dark skin could be removed through conversion, either as a
result of intermarriage or by miraculous means.23 However, as
indicated above, the later nineteenth-century LDS missionary
account of Polynesian origins linked Māori and other Polynesians textually to the faithful Nephites associated with Hagoth
(also a Nephite), not the Lamanites.24 Ambiguity would follow.
An example is Olsen’s 1932 explanation of his lineal
Māori-Lamanite link (above) with reference to the Nephite
Hagoth chronology and text.25 Aikau has summarized the trou20
LDS Book of Mormon: 2 Nephi 5:21–24; Alma 3:4–19.
For a scholarly treatment of this topic that is sensitive to the
urtext as well as changing LDS interpretations of relevant Book of
Mormon scripture, see Armand L. Mauss, All Abraham’s Children:
Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2003), 48–52, 115–21, 127–28. Newton, Mormon
and Maori, 35, documents non-lineal interpretations of the term
“Lamanite” by Mormon exegetes from the latter twentieth century.
22
Lineham, “The Mormon Message,” 82–83. See discussion below.
23
Mauss, All Abraham’s Children; Newton, Mormon and Maori, 34.
24
Duffy, “The Use of ‘Lamanite,’” 127–28; see also Britsch, Unto
the Islands of the Sea, 278.
25
Olsen, “New Zealand—Our Maori Home,” 444. For a review
of the confusion and contradiction that surrounded this notion as it
was carried into the twentieth century in New Zealand, see Newton,
21
bling legacy of this narrative imprecision for Polynesian Hawaiian Mormon identity: “The question that continues to be debated . . . is whether Polynesians were originally Lamanites or
Nephites . . . [T]he racial formation of Lamanites as cursed with
‘blackness’ and Nephites blessed with ‘whiteness’ persists.”26
This article investigates the incorporation of these racialist
and lineal ideas as well as relevant matakite narratives in the creation of a novel Māori-Mormon identity. I am motivated to explore these developments theoretically as they elucidate the dynamic “identity work” involved in the construction of new ethnicities, or ethnogenesis, including the concept of “race.” Ethnogenesis has become a popular humanities and social science
paradigm.27 This popularity tracks widespread scholarly rejecMormon and Maori, 12–36.
26
Hokulani K. Aikau, A Chosen People, A Promised Land: Mormonism
and Race in Hawai’i (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2012), 43.
27
Interpretive studies or reviews of ethnogenesis from the
perspectives of history, anthropology, and archaeology include Jonathan
D. Hill, ed., History, Power, and Identity: Ethnogenesis in the Americas,
1492–1992 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996); Di Hu,
“Approaches to the Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Past and Emergent
Perspectives,” Journal of Archaeological Research 21 (2013): 371–402;
Eugeen E. Roosens, Creating Ethnicity: The Process of Ethnogenesis,
Vol. 5 in Frontiers of Anthropology Series (Thousand Oaks,
Calif.: Sage Publications, 1989); Barbara L. Voss, The Archaeology of
Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2008). On the broader concept of
“identity work” with its application to various social collectives, see Jo
Reger, Daniel J. Myers, and Rachel L. Einwohner, eds., Identity Work in
Social Movements (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008)
and David A. Snow and Doug McAdam, “Identity Work Processes in
the Context of Social Movements: Clarifying the Identity/Movement
Nexus,” in Sheldon Stryker, Timothy J. Owens, and Robert W. White,
eds., Self, Identity, and Social Movements (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000), 41–67. Mauss, All Abraham’s Children, 12–
13, applies the concept of identity work to describe “the process of
178
tion of the notion that “ethnic” and in particular, so-called “racial” types and boundaries have precise historical, lineal, or (especially) biological foundations.28 Rather, “social scientists have
come increasingly to understand that the collective construction
by a people of their own ethnic and genealogical past is probably
more important than the historical and empirical realities, even
if these could be scientifically determined.”29 Arguably this process can be identified in the construction of an “emergent” nineteenth-century Anglo-Mormon ethnic Abrahamic identity in
the western United States.30 The New Zealand situation investigated in this article thus elucidates the dynamic cross-national
intersection of neo-Israelite identity work involving two discrete
and previously unconnected peoples.
MĀORI ORIGINS AND BIBLICAL PEOPLES:
EARLY PĀKEHĀ SPECULATIONS
There are Pākehā (British settler) and Māori trajectories for
the etiological narratives that linked tangata whenua and biblical peoples in pre-1880s New Zealand. The British trajectocollective construction of lineage or ethnic identity” among various
Mormon peoples.
28
For example, see Mauss, All Abraham’s Children, 5–8; Gregory
E. Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American
Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006), 5–8; Voss, The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis, 11–
12.
29
Mauss, All Abraham’s Children, 6.
30
Armand L. Mauss, “Mormons and Ethnics: Variable Historical
and International Implications of an Appealing Concept,” in Brigham
Y. Card, Herbert C. Northcott, John E. Foster, Howard Palmer, and
George K. Jarvis, eds., The Mormon Presence in Canada (Edmonton,
Alberta, Canada: University of Alberta Press, 1990), 332–52. Mauss,
All Abraham’s Children, 11–13, has since referenced both “ethnogenesis”
and “identity work” in a discussion of nineteenth-century AngloAmerican Mormon identity construction that promotes the broader
notion of “identity work” in particular.
ry is generally associated with the first Christian New Zealand
mission in 1814, led by Anglican Church Missionary Society
(CMS) cleric Samuel Marsden to Te Tai Tokerau (“the northern
tide”: northern North Island).31 On November 9, 1819, Marsden wrote: “With respect to the origin of the natives of these
[New Zealand] islands . . . I am inclined to think that they have
sprung from some dispersed Jews . . . and have by some means
got into the island from Asia.” This idea was advanced on several grounds, including biblical similarities to Māori culture, and
Marsden’s personal observation that Māori “have like the Jews a
great natural turn for traffic.”32
The assumption of Māori links to ancient Mediterranean
(including biblical) peoples was widespread among literary
New Zealand visitors and settlers by the mid-nineteenth century.33 These ideas were not just promoted in support of theological arguments. Visiting German physician, naturalist, and geologist Ernest Dieffenbach considered the question of Māori origins as a subject of historical curiosity. He was reminded by the
“fine and regular cast” of the “New Zealanders,” the “Jewish expression of their features, the very light colour of their skin, and
the whole of their customs” of “that primitive Asiatico-African
civilization which attained its greatest height under the empires
of the Phenicians [sic] Syrians, and Carthaginians.”34
31
K. R. Howe, The Quest for Origins: Who First Discovered and Settled New Zealand and the Pacific Islands? (Auckland, New Zealand:
Penguin Books, 2003), 38; M. P. K. Sorenson, Maori Origins and Migrations: The Genesis of Some Pakeha Myths and Legends (Auckland, New
Zealand: Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press, 1979),
14–15.
33
Sorenson, Maori Origins and Migrations, 16.
34
Ernest Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand; With Contributions
to the Geography, Geology, Botany, and Natural History of That Country,
2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1843), 2:98–99. Dieffenbach followed
racialist assumptions of the time in referring to the western Pacific
“Austral negroes and the Malayans” as “inferior both in physical
strength and mental capabilities to the Polynesians” (2:98).
180
Comparative observations like these underscored missionary
arguments for Israelite-Māori identity and redemption in the
nineteenth-century colony. For example, in the 1850s Anglican
missionary and sometime naturalist Richard Taylor saw in “the
history of the New Zealand race” the journeys of “one of the
lost tribes of Israel.” Against “progressive development doctrine,”
these Israelites had abandoned God to become nomadic wanderers in Taylor’s view, “a bye-word [sic] and a reproach among
the nations.” On reaching New Zealand, Taylor argued, they had
“fallen to their lowest state of degradation, given up to the fiercest passions, consumed and being consumed.” Even so, Taylor
allowed, from this lowly state they were now able to repent and
return to God.35
NGĀ POROPITI AND ISRAELITE IDENTITY
For many Māori, notions of Israelite identity were woven into
the matakite and teachings of ngā poropiti. These set the agenda for
Māori-Israelite identity work in colonial New Zealand. The first
such records emerged among hapū (sub-tribes) of the northern
North Island Ngāpuhi tribal (iwi) confederation from Tai Tokerau where Marsden and other Anglican missionaries had preached.
In the 1830s, a new matakite movement formed around claims
that the serpent deity Te Nākahi (named after the Hebrew transliteration of the serpent of Genesis 3) had appeared to Ngāpuhi
tohunga. One of these tohunga (Te Atua Wera, formerly Papahurihia) offered matakite services to Ngāpuhi leader Hone Heke in an
1845 war with colonial forces.36 Heke himself compared his own
35
Richard Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, or New Zealand and Its Inhabitants,
Illustrating the Origin, Manners, Customs, Mythology, Religion,
Rites, Songs, Proverbs, Fables, and Language of the Natives (London:
Wertheim and Macintosh, 1855), 6–7. For his critique of “progressive
development doctrine,” see p. 8.
36
Anderson, Binney, and Harris, Tangata Whenua, 233–34; Judith
Binney, “Papahurihia: Some Thoughts on Interpretation,” Journal of
the Polynesian Society 75, no. 3 (1966): 321–31; Binney, “Papahurihia,
Pukerenga, Te Atua Wera and Te Nākahi: How Many Prophets?”
people to the persecuted children of Israel.37 Chroniclers of the
1830s reported that Te Nākahi followers observed Saturday as the
Sabbath, mixed “portions of the Holy Scriptures which they have
learned with their old superstitions,” and identified themselves as
Hurai ( Jews). Setting a precedent, these followers turned Hebrew
identity against CMS theology and, in connection with Hone
Heke, the post-1840 colonial establishment.38
The notion of Māori identity with, if not descent from, scattered Israel began to be reported among a number of other North
Island iwi from around the mid-nineteenth century. An association with Israelite suffering and resistance characterized the Pai
Mārire (Good and Peaceful) movement of the 1860s. Pai Mārire founder Te Ua Haumene of Taranaki reported a visitation by
the Archangel Gabriel (accompanied by Michael in one account)
who announced the approach of the last days and the divine call
of Te Ua as a prophet in 1862. Te Ua was commanded to cast
off the European settler yoke and promised “the restoration of
the birthright of Israel (the Maori people) in the land of Canaan
(New Zealand).” This restoration would be accomplished “after
a great day of deliverance in which the unrighteous would perish.”39 Thereafter the new prophet identified his followers as the
people of Gabriel and Michael who were merged with local atua,
or gods, Rura and Riki respectively. He also taught that Māori
were Jews (Hurai) descended from Shem, with Jehovah as their
Journal of the Polynesian Society 116, no. 3 (2007): 309–20; Elsmore,
Like Them That Dream, 109–15; Ormond Wilson, “Papahurihia, First
Maori Prophet,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 74, no. 4 (1965): 475.
37
Elsmore, Like Them That Dream, 72, 73–74.
38
Anderson, Binney, and Harris, Tangata Whenua, 198–99; Wilson,
“Papahurihia,” 473-83 (quotations on p. 475).
39
Lyndsay Head, “The Gospel of Te Ua Haumene,” Journal of the
Polynesian Society 101, no. 1 (1992): 7–44; Head, “Te Ua Haumene,”
The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara—The Encyclopedia of
New Zealand, updated October 30, 2012; for quotation, see http://
www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t79/te-ua-haumene (accessed
July 2014); see also Elsmore, Mana from Heaven, 168–70.
182
God, while Europeans were descendants of Japheth with Jesus as
their Lord.40 Te Ua would found and lead Pai Mārire (commonly Hauhau or Hauhauism, especially in its political expression)
through military operations against colonial forces in the 1860s
and in a more peaceful expression thereafter. Fundamentally Pai
Mārire encouraged millennial expectations, including the anticipation that Māori would recover their land—the New Canaan.41
Beginning with Pai Mārire, matakite Māori movements drew
on Israelite identity and deliverance in an increasingly pan-tribal
discourse. This pattern was reinforced and echoed by the Waikato-based Kīngitanga (King movement) that formed around
the 1858 coronation of a Māori monarch with the support of a
large number of North Island iwi. The coronation followed the
scriptural model of the Hebrew monarchy as much as (if not
more than) British precedent.42 Tūkāroto Matutaera Pōtatau Te
Wherowhero Tāwhiao, the second Māori king, was renowned
for his matakite-like leadership and prophecies, especially after
the passage of the New Zealand Settlements Act of 1863 that
confiscated more than a million acres of generally prime agricultural Waikato tribal land.
40
Anderson, Binney, and Harris, Tangata Whenua, 268–71; Elsmore,
Like Them That Dream, 125–27; Elsmore, Mana from Heaven, 172, 174,
177, 180, 181, 235; Head, “Te Ua Haumene.” For a comprehensive
overview of the movement, including further historical details of
identity work, see Paul Clark, “Hauhau”: The Pai Marire Search for
Maori Identity (Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press,
1975). The interpretation of the British as the children of Japheth and
Māori as the children of Shem was promoted by other tangata whenua
groups as well. Anderson, Binney, and Harris, Tangata Whenua, 239–
40.
41
Clark, “Hauhau,” Elsmore, Mana from Heaven, 175, 177–78, 180.
42
Elsmore, Like Them That Dream, 150–51; Elsmore, Mana from
Heaven, 233–35; Michael King, Te Puea, 2d ed. (1982; rpt., Auckland,
New Zealand: Sceptre NZ, 1987), 23–25. On the emergence and
context of nineteenth-century Māori pan-tribalism, see Belich,
Making Peoples, 232–34, 244–45.
Gottfried Lindauer, Tawhiao Matutaera Potatau Te Wherowhero, second Māori king, 1882, oil on canvas, Tāwhiao’s status as a
rangatira (leader) is illustrated by a full-face tattoo (moko), a feather of the now-extinct huia (Heteralocha acutirostris) worn on his
head, a feather cloak, and a patu parāoa (whalebone club). Public
domain image from Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ATawhiao_Matutaera_Potatau_Te_Wherowhero%2C_by_Gottfried_Landauer.jpg.
183
184
Between 1864 and 1881, Tāwhiao closed the southwestern
Waikato Māori lands that remained under Kīngitanga jurisdiction (Te Rohe Pōtae or the “King Country”) to European
settlement. During this time, he frequently related the plight
and prophesied deliverance of the biblical Israelites to his own
and allied iwi of the Tainui tribal confederation.43 The message of deliverance was underscored in 1875 when Tāwhiao
introduced a religion that synthesized biblical and traditional
concepts. Known as Tariao (“the forerunner or herald” of the
dawn star), its precepts emphasized peaceful relations between
Māori and Pākehā as well as millennialism, which anticipated
a new age with the return of Christ.44 As historian Michael
King notes: “like other nineteenth century Maori prophets he
[Tāwhiao] associated the physical and spiritual disinheritance
of his people with the condition of the children of Abraham
wandering in the wilderness, oppressed, seeking Messianic liberation.”45
This historical context and the forerunner status of Tariao
helps to situate Tāwhiao’s reported 1879 prediction that “my
church is [still] coming” (“kei te haere mai toku hahi”). Mormons would apply this matakite to the LDS advent in New Zealand.46 In the earliest published Mormon missionary report of
this prophecy (1881), Elder John Ferris was informed that the
43
Anderson, Binney, and Harris, Tangata Whenua, 259, 262–68;
Michael King, Te Puea, 25–29, 167; R. T. Mahuta, “The Kingitanga,”
in Michael King, ed., Te Ao Hurihuri: Aspects of Maoritanga (Auckland,
New Zealand: Reed, 1992), 162–69; Mahuta, “Tawhiao, Tukaroto
Matutaera Potatau Te Wherowhero,” The Dictionary of New Zealand
Biography, Te Ara—The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated August
22. 2013, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/2t14/tawhiaotukaroto-matutaera-potatau-te-wherowhero (accessed July 2014).
44
Elsmore, Like Them That Dream, 150–53; Elsmore, Mana from
Heaven, 233–43.
45
King, Te Puea, 167.
46
Kaumau, “He Poropititanga,” 275; translation/interpretation
mine.
king’s counselor had told people “of the king’s country” that he
(Ferris) “was the same man that he told them about two years
ago that would come from a far country and give them the good
church, and that . . . there were two more coming and that then
the Maoris would have no more war . . . and many good things
would come to them.” After Ferris visited a chief who knew of
this prophecy and preached for three hours “on the principles of
the gospel,” the chief declared “Cappi-te-clerkea he-a-my, which
is the good church is come.”47 Also in 1881, Ferris wrote a letter reporting that “more than a year ago the king said a white
man would come across the sea and preach to them [Māori]
the true gospel.”48 In twentieth-century Mormon iterations, the
ministers of this predicted church from afar (or across the sea)
would pray with upraised hands, travel in pairs and live with the
people.49 Allowing for source variation and LDS gloss, the basic idea that, in 1879, Tāwhiao predicted the coming of a good
church, perhaps from overseas, is consistent with the king’s larger contemporary message of divine Māori deliverance blended
with Christian millennialism.
Tāwhiao’s example signals the emergence of a new, later nineteenth-century class of poropiti associated with pan-tribal revitalization movements. As Elsmore observes, the seer was more
likely to have received a prophetic designation “in the biblical
47
Ferris, “Correspondence,” 683. The Māori is recognizable as
“ka pai te ‘clerkea’ [church: idiosyncratic] haramai [poss. haere mai],”
where “ka pai” does mean, quite literally, good (in the “good church”).
48
William M. Bromley, Journals, 2 vols., June 16, 1881, 1:97, MS
1913, microfilm of holograph, 1 reel, LDS Church History Library,
Salt Lake City. Bromley’s journals have been published in a limited
circulation family history as well. Fred Bromley Hodson, None Shall
Exceed Thee: The Life and Journals of William Bromley (Yorba Linda,
Calif.: Shumway Family History Services, 1990).
49
Olsen, “New Zealand—Our Maori Home,” 446. Olsen silently
blends Tāwhiao’s with other prophecies. See also Kaumau, “He
Poropititanga,” 275; Hunt, Zion in New Zealand, 9.
186
sense.”50 This was clearly the case with Te Ua. Ringatū Church
founder Te Kooti also reported visionary calls from God and
angels, especially the Archangel Michael, or Mikaere. The first
visions occurred while Te Kooti was in exile in the later 1860s
on offshore Rēkohu (Chatham Island/Wharekauri), a situation
that the prophet likened to the exile of Israel. Te Kooti identified his followers as descendants of the twelve tribes of Israel and brought forth a compilation of prophetic sayings (kupu
whakaari). Te Kooti’s prophecies through the 1870s and 1880s
expanded on the scriptural promise that Jehovah would remember his covenant to Abraham and restore the lands appropriated
by European settlers to the faithful remnant or morehu (survivors). As one 1880s prophecy put it: “Hold fast to my words, so
that I shall give your land to you, and to your descendants after
you.”51
A number of these movements claimed that their rise had
been predicted in historical matakite. Te Kooti taught that Māhia
tohunga Te Toiroa foretold the rise of the Ringatū Church. Ringatū accounts cite several matakite from Te Toiroa dated to the
later eighteenth century and the earlier nineteenth century when
Toiroa visited personally with the young Te Kooti on more than
one occasion. In one translated account, Toiroa told Te Kooti
that he saw him “drifting across the waters of Poverty Bay” and
weeping. Then, “not long returned, you had a church with the
upraised hand.” In the 1880s Te Kooti explained that this matakite anticipated the name Ringatū (upraised hand) with reference to the ceremonial raising of hands in Ringatū Church services during the closing words of prayers.52 As discussed below,
50
Elsmore, Mana from Heaven, 157.
Judith Binney, Redemption Songs: A Life of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te
Turuki (Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press/Bridget
Williams Books, 1995), 25–29, 65–79, 289–91 (quotation p. 291); see
also Elsmore, Like Them That Dream, 132–39, and Elsmore, Mana from
Heaven, 200–210.
52
Wi Tarei, “A Church Called Ringatu,” in Michael King, ed., Te
Ao Hurihuri: Aspects of Maoritanga (Auckland, New Zealand: Reed,
51
In this undated photograph (ca. late 1930s), Mormon missionaries
Elders E. Jensen and V. Lloyd stand with New Zealand Mission Relief Society President Polly Duncan outside the large whare whakairo (carved meeting house) Ngā Tau e Waru, Te Ore Ore, Wairarapa,
New Zealand. At this place, poropiti Paora Te Pōtangaroa prophesied of the coming of a new church for Māori and buried the text of a
covenant (He Kawenata) under a stone in 1881. Elwin and Jensen,
Israel in the Pacific, 390.
some Māori would link Toiroa’s matakite to the Mormon advent
instead in the 1880s.
Elsmore observes that all of the 1870s prophet movements “were still specifically motivated by the land issue,” where
Māori “continued to identify themselves with the ancient Israelites.”53 However, the resolution of the land problem in a self-governing colony (after 1853) with a rapidly expanding settler population called for different solutions. The 1875 outline of Tariao’s
peaceful precepts, Tāwhiao’s promise that a new or good church
would come and the teachings of Te Kooti after 1873 all signal a
shift away from open conflict. Deliverance would come by divine
1992), 138–43 (quotation p. 141); Binney, Redemption Songs, 11–16,
24–25, 58, 420-21.
53
188
means rather than through warfare.54 In the 1870s and 1880s,
former Pai Mārire adherent and prophet of peace Te Whiti o
Rongomai also inspired the tangata whenua who had gathered
to Parihaka, a small village surrounded by confiscated Taranaki
Māori land, with the doctrine of passive resistance.55
These developments situate the post-1860 rise of Pāora Te
Pōtangaroa among local iwi Ngāti Kahungunu to become New
Zealand Mormonism’s most frequently cited Māori poropiti.56 Near the end of his life (died 1881), Te Pōtangaroa was involved with the construction of a large whare whakairo (carved
meeting house) at Te Ore Ore in the Waiarapa region. It was
named Ngā Tau e Waru (The Eight Years) to mock the predictions of rival seer Te Kere that the house would take eight
years to construct. (The house was completed between 1878 and
1881). In 1881 Te Pōtangaroa delivered a number of prophecies
celebrating the completion of this whare. Among these was the
famous prediction of “a religious denomination coming for us”
that the Mormons would soon apply to themselves. Reminiscent
of Tāwhiao’s 1879 prophecy, this prediction as translated from
one source signaled the open nature of Te Pōtangaroa’s movement in the proclamation, “Let the churches into the house—
there will be a time when a religion will emerge for you and I
[sic] and the Maori people.”57
54
Conflict between Te Kooti’s followers and other Māori, including
Tāwhiao, ceased from 1873 after Te Kooti expressed a desire to “live at
peace.” Binney, Redemption Songs, 271–72.
55
Anderson, Binney, and Harris, Tangata Whenua, 296–301;
Dick Scott, Ask That Mountain: The Story of Parihaka (Auckland, New
Zealand: Reed/Southern Cross, 1981).
56
The personal noun Ngāti is the prefix for a descent group at iwi
(i.e., tribe or tribal confederation) or hapū (sub-tribal) level.
57
Elsmore, Mana from Heaven, 252; her English language text is
sourced to an unpublished and undated translation by Jim Rimene
titled “The Prophecies of Paora Potangaroa,” cited hereafter as
Rimene, “Prophecies.” For a Māori language text of these prophecies,
see “Prophetic Sayings,” 1869–81, typescript, Te Whaiti family papers,
In March 1881, Te Pōtangaroa also wove biblical language
into a covenant (He Kawenata) that set out the “hidden words”
(“nga kupu ngaro”) revealed by “the spirit of Jehovah” (“te wairua
e Ihowa”) at Ngā Tau e Waru. The revelation identifies predictive
themes for each of the years 1881 through 1883. Several variant
Māori texts are extant. The text translated above is from a holograph dated March 16, 1881, that was reportedly photographed
before burial at Ngā Tau e Waru in the same year. The reproduction was given to New Zealand mission president (thereafter apostle) Matthew Cowley in the mid-twentieth century. It is
archived by the LDS Church History Library (hereafter LDS
copy). A second text dated March 21, 1881, is collated in a typescript of prophecies in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington (hereafter Turnbull copy). Bronwyn Elsmore reproduces a
third typescript in cursive font (hereafter Elsmore copy) beside
the photo of an English translation (the last clearly influenced
by Cowley’s translation, below) that is kept at the rebuilt whare
Ngā Tau e Waru in Te Ore Ore.58
Commentators have relied on Cowley’s selective published
translation of the March 16, 1881, document (LDS copy) to interpret the enigmatic year themes of the covenant. A twentieth-century Mormon spin is evident in Cowley’s otherwise caMS Papers 6571–045, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New
Zealand.
58
“He Kawenata, Whakamaharatanga Tenei” [currently catalogued
in error as “He Kawenta”], March 16, 1881, photograph of holograph
and microfilm, MS 18617, LDS Church History Library; Rimene,
“Prophetic Sayings,” March 21, 1881, 2; Elsmore, Mana from Heaven,
250–51. Cowley’s account of the recovery and translation of the March
16, 1881, text (LDS copy) is in Cowley, “Maori Chief.” A previously
published text of the last includes, as the copier suspected it might,
a number of errors. Hunt, Zion in New Zealand, 12. The Māori texts
of the covenant reproduced above follow the original except for basic
orthographic standardization (e.g., “Ko te” for “Kote”). University of
Otago colleagues Paul Tapsell and Richard Walter offered helpful
observations on the translation of derived nouns in these texts.
190
pable work. Cowley interprets the first predictive year theme as
the “day of the fullness” with reference to the 1881 preaching of
the “fullness of the [LDS] gospel” to Māori.59 Here “fullness” is
a translation of the derived noun whānuitanga (in all extant accounts). The stative verb whānui means to be “broad, wide, extensive.” In the influential 1868 Māori Bible, this derived noun
translates as the “length” or “breadth” of the land in several verses. More recently a notable scholar of Māori applies the noun to
describe nationwide and international “extensions” of tikanga or
custom.60 The notion of a considerable expanse or extent is common in these uses. Consistently, in the Turnbull copy the “whanuitanga” is over “both of the islands, everywhere” (my translation of “ki runga ki nga motu e rua nei puta noa”).61 Consequently, “the day of the great extension” seems more convincing
as a translation of this year theme.
Cowley’s Mormonism is especially influential in reading
1882 as the year of the “sealing.” For Cowley, this was the year
Māori would learn of the “sealing ordinances” of the LDS temple, where “sealing” references the derived noun kopinga (again,
in all extant accounts). The verb kopi means “to be shut, closed,
doubled together (as of anything hinged or jointed).” In this
59
Cowley, “Maori Chief,” 697–98.
The definition of whānui follows John C. Moorfield, Te Aka
Māori-English, English-Māori Dictionary and Index, 3rd ed. (Auckland, New Zealand: Pearson, 2011) online: http://www.maoridictionary.co.nz (accessed July 2014). Bible verses (1868) are Ihaia (Isaiah)
8:8, Hopa ( Job) 38:18, Hapakuku (Habakkuk) 1:6. Ko te Paipera Tapu,
Ara, Ko te Kawenata Tawhito me te Kawenata Hou (Ranana (London): He mea ta ki te Perehi a W. M. Watts, ma te Komiti ta Paipera
mo Ingarangi mo te Ao Katoa, 1868), online at: https://archive.org/
details/kotepaiperatapua00barl (accessed February 2015). The more
recent use of the noun is in the Chapter 19 heading Te Whānuitanga
o te Tikanga Māori (“Extensions of Tikanga Māori”) in Hirini Moko
Mead, Tikanga Māori: Living by Māori Values (Wellington, New Zealand: Huia Publishers, 2003), 323
61
Rimene, “Prophetic Sayings,” March 21, 1881, 2.
60
context a re-binding or re-joining of linked parts, such as the return of cognate peoples (e.g., iwi, scattered Israel) to the original
fold, seems more plausible. Consistently, the LDS copy refers in
a subsequent place to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (“Ko
te Hipi ngaro o te whare o Iharaira”: this text is in Elsmore also).
Cowley related his translation for 1883 (“the year of ‘the
honoring’—of ‘great faith’”) to the “great honor and great faith”
associated with the conversion of “great numbers” of Te Pōtangaroa’s Ngāti Kahungunu people in 1883 (discussed below).62 The
phrase that Cowley reads as great faith (“kia kaha te whakapono”) is separated by a period from the Māori loan word “honore”
(honor or honoring) in year 1883 in all accounts, and precedes
the citation of Romans 13:7 in the LDS and Elsmore copies.
(Turnbull does not quote the New Testament text.) A more general reference may be intended. In the Turnbull and Elsmore
copies, 1883 is the year both of the honour and “the judgment”
(“te whakahenga” in Turnbull).63 Overall, Te Pōtanagaroa’s revelation seems to predict a country-wide expansion in 1881, perhaps of strong faith, followed by a rejoining of scattered iwi or
lost Israelites in 1882. The year 1883 is marked by honor, perhaps
the honor owed to Jehovah, and conversely, of judgment (especially in the meaning of condemnation) where due (per Romans
13:7).
Like other contemporary poropiti, Te Pōtangaroa was also a
prophet of the whenua. In 1881 at Ngā Tau e Waru, Te Pōtan62
Cowley, “Maori Chief,” 697–98; Moorfield, Te Aka (for definition
of kopi).
63
Elsmore has te whakaheanga. Both noun forms are derived from
the verb whakahē (“to disagree, contradict, find fault with, condemn,
object to, criticise”: Moorfield, Te Aka). In the 1868 Māori Bible
translation, whakahē and whakahēnga (or variants) stand in for the
verb “to judge” or noun forms of judgment in Matiu (Matthew) 7:2,
Ruka (Luke) 19:22 (“whakahēanga,” macron sic), Roma (Romans)
2:2–3 (noun variant “whakahekanga” in Rom. 2:2), 1 Pita (Peter) 4:6
(“whakaheanga”), and for the allied meanings of “condemned” and
“condemnation” in Hoani ( John) 3:18–19. Ko te Paipera Tapu.
192
garoa presented a flag divided into sections to represent the substantial area of the country under the power of Pākehā. The significantly smaller white borders on the margins were identified
as the lands “that belong to us.” Te Pōtangaroa instructed the
people to cease fragmenting the land and to “unite the place that
God set aside for us.”64 As biographers Angela Ballara and Keith
Cairns note, Te Pōtangaroa “had been moved to prophecy by the
failure of his people to understand the process by which they
were dispossessing themselves.”65
In spite of doctrinal differences and even conflict among
some of these movements, commonalities and implications for
nineteenth-century Māori ethnogenesis are evident. As historian James Belich observes, from the 1850s on, Māori religion
merged into “something quite close to a distinguishing and unifying ideology.”66 Over the remainder of the nineteenth century,
an identity with the Hurai and, increasingly, with Israel in exile
crossed boundaries of descent and land. This conceptualization
saw various iwi united under influential leaders who blended
matakite and Hebrew prophet roles and practices within rituals
of revitalization. Narratives of scriptural descent and belonging
reinforced a sense of chosenness to underscore promises vouchsafed to the remnant, or morehu, of spiritual redemption and the
return of land. For example, Parihaka became the New Jerusalem where Te Whiti and fellow prophet Tohu encouraged the
people with promises of land restoration. These promises were
chanted to poi (dances performed with a swinging ball) reiterating Hebrew scriptural texts. In the words of one chant: “The
days of thy mourning shall be ended. . . . Thy people shall inherit the land for ever.”67 In contrast, “Europeans were known
as Tauiwi—Gentiles.”68 The lineal connection sometimes linked
64
Rimene, “Prophecies,” translation in Elsmore, Mana from
Heaven, 249.
65
Ballara and Cairns, “Te Potangaroa.”
66
Belich, Making Peoples, 223.
67
Scott, Ask That Mountain, 28.
68
specific ancestral Israelites. A Parihaka chant presented one such
connection in the form “he uri na Hohepa na nga tupuna” to describe descent from “Joseph of the ancestors.”69
MERGING PROPHETS, PROMISES, AND TOHU
In late nineteenth-century New Zealand, Lineham observes,
“the Latter-day Saints were quite like the independent prophet movements.”70 At least six different poropiti described angelic visits and calls,71 including the influential Te Ua and Te
Kooti. As well, in the earliest known LDS record of Te Pōtangaroa’s prophecy (April 5, 1883) it was “an angele [that] came
to him [Te Pōtangaroa] & told him . . . a new religion would
come.”72 These angelic ministrants followed biblical and traditional precedents, in the latter case referencing the intercession
of traditional atua.73 The 1880s LDS message that an angel had
appeared to a new prophet to reveal the Book of Mormon with
its announcement of the gathering and redemption of scattered
Israel must have resonated.
If belief in new revelation was a critical Mormon-poropiti
similarity, so also was the conviction that Māori were lineal heirs
of God’s covenant promises to Abraham. For many followers
69
A. H. Reed, From East Cape to Cape Egmont: On Foot at EightySix (Wellington, New Zealand: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1962), 2023 (for the full chant in Māori). The English interpretation is mine.
The translation published by Reed, following Canon Hohepa Taepa,
glosses “na nga tupuna” idiosyncratically as “other great chiefs” (ibid.,
201, 203). I follow a more standard interpretation of the plural ngā
tūpuna (alt. tīpuna) as “the ancestors.”
70
Lineham, “The Mormon Message,” 86.
71
72
Alma Greenwood, Journal [“Diary” in catalogue], vol. 1,
1883, April 5, 1883, 76, holograph, MSS 336, L. Tom Perry Special
Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University,
electronic copy: http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/
collection/MMD/id/37513/rec/1 (accessed July 2014).
73
Elsmore, Mana from Heaven, 155–56.
194
of the poropiti, the biblical tohu (signs) of divine revelation that
demonstrated Jehovah’s approval of his ancient people continued from traditional into more biblical forms of matakite and
supernatural ministrations. As pan-tribal prophets, the poropiti
were, in effect, the prophets of Israel in New Zealand: the tangata whenua.
Resonance is not the same thing as acceptance, of course. In
that regard, things started badly for the LDS missionaries. As
Lineham observes, the visit of “the excitable” John P. Sorenson
to Te Whiti at Parihaka in 1881 was such a disaster that the missionary ritually “shook the dust off his feet as he left.”74 Sorenson’s zealousness did not sit well with other New Zealand LDS
missionaries who wanted to tap the influence of Te Whiti and
Tāwhiao.75 As indicated above, Elder John S. Ferris saw himself
as the beneficiary of the 1879 Kīngitanga prophecy while based
at Opotiki in the Bay of Plenty. In July 1881, Ferris even wrote
to the Auckland-based LDS mission president, William Bromley, “that the Maori king has sent a delegation . . . inviting him to
meet . . . December next also expressing a belief in the truth of
the gospel as taught by the Latter day Saints.” Ferris added: “The
king wishes the Book of Mormon translated into the Maori language.”76 Elder Charles Anderson became the first LDS missionary “to present the Gospel to the king of the Maories” late
in 1884. Tāwhiao received Anderson “cordially” and “encouraged
him in his labors.” Elder William Gardner held “a number of interviews” with the king thereafter.77
74
Lineham, “The Mormon Message,” 79–80; see also Newton,
Tiki and Temple, 30–31.
75
Bromley, Journals, March 12, June 13, 18, and 22, July 7, and 19
1881, 1:58, 96, 98, 100, 105, 110–11; John Solomon Ferris, Journals
(5 vols., 1880–82), June 4, 1881, holograph, MS 1435 (microfilm, reel
1), LDS Church History Library; Newton, Tiki and Temple, 29–32. In
contrast to Sorenson, Elder Ferris even predicted that “Te Whiti will
yet embrace the gospel.” Bromley, Journals, July 7, 1881, 1:105.
76
Bromley, Journal, July 14, 1881, 1:108.
77
“From New Zealand,” Deseret News Weekly, March 24, 1886, 153;
However, in spite of these engagements and the 1883 newspaper report of the king’s conversion to LDS belief, there is no
evidence that Tāwhiao endorsed Mormonism beyond the early
1880s.78 Anderson observed from his 1884 interview that “the
King’s idea of religion, like that of all unconverted Maoris, is a
very hazy one.” Gardner’s journal also indicates that Tāwhiao
was polite but noncommittal during their meeting. With some
insight, the missionary observed that Tāwhiao “had been visited by preasts [sic] of different denominations till it was getting
rather old for him.”79 No love was lost, it seems, between the
king and Gardner thereafter. In 1885 the LDS missionary referred dismissively to “the flimsy religion of the King.”80 Two
years later Gardner spoke “a long time” with LDS Māori “about
fals [sic] Prophets as King Tawhiao was going around leading
the people in his church and some of the saints had gone.” For
Gardner, those LDS Māori members who had “gone to King
see also Charles Anderson [extracts from letter, December 3, 1884,
Waoutu], “The New Zealand Mission,” Deseret News Weekly, February
18, 1885, 78.
78
In March 1883 a local newspaper recounted Tāwhiao’s
participation in a meeting held by “the Wairapapa Natives” to discuss
their “future prospects.” In this account, Tāwhiao declares: “I was some
time ago converted to a belief in the Mormon faith . . . my people in
the North are believers also in Mormonism, and it is my wish that all
the Maoris should be of that faith. It is my word to all the Maoris that
they should believe in Mormonism.” Anon., “A Reprover of Drunken
King Tawhiao,” Wairarapa Standard 17 (March 7, 1883): [2]. Joseph,
“Intercultural Exchange,” 65, comments that the account “appears to
be exaggerated somewhat.” Certainly, the reporting is tendentious.
Tāwhiao is characterised as a “wicked and sensual old wretch” who had
adopted the Mormon creed to afford “some sanction to the profligate
practices of his daily and nightly life” (“the intemperate use” of alcohol
excepted). Anon, “A Reprover.”
79
Anderson, “The New Zealand Mission”; William Gardner,
Journal, March 7, 1885, holograph, MS 2884, LDS Church History
Library.
80
Gardner, Journals, June 4, 1885.
196
Tawhiaos Church” were in apostasy. Excommunication followed
for some.81 On Tāwhiao’s death in 1894, LDS missionary Benjamin Goddard commented that “it has been very difficult to introduce the Gospel among them [Māori]” because of Tāwhiao’s
influence over his own and other iwi.82
Tāwhiao’s apparent lack of interest in Mormonism as the
possible church of his matakite did not dissuade some late nineteenth-century Mormons of Tainui affiliation who still accepted the king’s prophetic authority. This pattern raises the issue
of local legitimization. Like the Mormons, Māori traditionally
accepted that portentous events, supernatural interventions and
tohu (signs, symbols, tokens) were ubiquitous. The experience of
such was not confined to the tohunga or rangatira. Instead, in
tangata whenua communities of descent, reports of local portents and potentially significant visions and dreams were discussed closely and referred to the appropriate tohunga for interpretation if required. In that regard, the tohunga matakite was a
signified, specialist seer of the hapū or iwi rather than the sole
possessor of foresight. The Hebrew scriptural record of the comparable reception and interpretation of signs, visions, and dreams
was influential on many tangata whenua. In nineteenth-century Māori identity work, these cultural parallels were viewed as
further evidence of an Israelite connection.83 Here it is important to note that a number of tangata whenua reported local visions, supernatural portents, prophecies, and dreams that directed them to the LDS missionaries. In one notable example that
impressed the missionaries, Hare Teimana of Waikato was bap81
Ibid., May 19, 25, 1887. The missionaries may have been concerned in particular about perceptions of Tāwhiao’s divinity. Gardner
warned a meeting of “Hauhaus” (Gardner’s code for Kīngitanga adherents; ibid., February 9 and June 25, 1887) to repent “as they was
worshipping King Tawhiao.” “They did not seem to care much for my
talk,” Gardner added. Ibid., February 21, 1887.
82
Phoenix [pseud. Benjamin Goddard], “In Maoridom,” Deseret
News Weekly, October 13, 1894, 516.
83
Elsmore, Like Them That Dream, 88–89.
Ruruku, Roma. Portrait photograph (undated but ca. early 1900s),
Nelson Provincial Museum (Nelson, New Zealand), Tyree Studio Collection: 92004. Roma Ruruku was the first president of the
LDS Rangitoto Branch and father of matakite Wetekia Elkington.
According to family tradition, he heard King Tāwhiao of Waikato
prophesy of the coming of a new church for Māori. Used with iwi and
museum permission.
197
Elkington, Mrs. Wetekia. Portrait photograph (undated but ca.
early 1900s), Nelson Provincial Museum (Nelson, New Zealand),
Tyree Studio Collection: 177223. Wetekia Ruruku Elkington was
a matakite (seer) of Ngāti Koata who joined the LDS Church on
Rangitoto (D’Urville) Island in 1892. She wears a ceremonial fibre
cloak (pākē) and holds a spatulate patu parāoa (whalebone hand
club) known as a mere that is adorned with bird feathers near the
handle. These elements denote a high-status person in the historic
Māori portrait convention. Used with iwi and museum permission.
198
tized in 1882 after he recognized the Mormon teachers from a
dream of the Apostle Peter working with men on the earth.84
A salient example demonstrates how the general and more
distant prediction of a new church, in this case Tāwhiao’s prophecy, might be integrated with a local matakite to legitimize a
Mormon connection. Family narratives recall that Roma Hoera
Ruruku of Ngāti Koata heard Tāwhiao’s 1879 prophecy while
living among Tainui kin in the Waikato.85 Thereafter Ruruku’s
whānau (extended family) from Rangitoto (D’Urville Island, Te
Tau Ihu) were introduced to Mormonism through LDS Ngāti
Toa relatives at Porirua about or soon after 1890. Ruruku and
other whānau members were baptized in February 1892.
Prior to this time, family histories recall that Ruruku’s daughter Wetekia had experienced the dream of a flying bird that
transformed into a book. In one family account of this dream,
a voice declared in Māori: “O ye house of Israel whom I have
spared, how oft will I gather you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, if ye will repent and return unto me with
full purpose of heart.” In this account, Wetekia recognised the
Book of Mormon soon after her father was called to be branch
president as “the book in her dream.” Wetekia also recognised
the declaration in her dream from the text of 3 Nephi 10 of the
LDS Book of Mormon.86 By November 1893, Ruruku as “Pres84
Hunt, Zion in New Zealand, 14–16; Lineham, “The Mormon
Message,” 86.
85
Nolamay Campbell, “He Matakite—A Visionary: Wetekia
Ruruku Elkington 1879–1957,” in Kātene, Turning the Hearts of the
Children, 161; Hunt, Zion in New Zealand, 10; Joseph, “Intercultural
Exchange,” 63–64; Hilary Mitchell and John Mitchell, Te Tau Ihu o
te Waka—A History of Maori of Nelson and Marlborough. Volume 2: Te
Ara Hou—The New Society (Wellington: Huia Publishers in association
with Wakatu Incorporation, 2007), 111.
86
There are two published family accounts of these events that
differ in small details: Campbell, “He Matakite—A Visionary,” 160–
62, and Joy Hippolite, “Wetekia Ruruku Elkington, 1879–1957,”
in The Book of New Zealand Women: Ko Kui Ma Te Kaupapa, edited
200
ident of Rangitoto branch” reported to a Church conference that
his branch was in “a prosperous condition.” He also “spoke on
the precious truths of the Gospel brought by the true servants of
God to this remnant of the House of Israel.”87
Wetekia was also respected as an important leader, “visionary and prophet for her people” into the twentieth century. Her
vision, example, and matakite status are recognized among LDS
descendants, practicing and otherwise, to the present day.88 In
effect, Wetekia’s dream portent with its promise of the gathering
of Israel would extend Tāwhiao’s prophecy as the foundation of
a persisting Ngāti Koata Mormon identity.
Te Pōtangaroa’s prophecy of the coming of a new church
for Māori also highlights the importance of a locally interpreted tohu. Jim Rimene’s account of Te Pōtangaroa’s first matakite
includes a level of uncertainty in the prediction that “perhaps
it [the new church] will come from the sea, perhaps it will
emerge here.” This uncertainty is consistent with Greenwood’s
contemporary observation that an angel had told the seer that
“in ’82 or ’83, all the religions Among the Maoris would be
by Charlotte McDonald, Merimeri Penfold, and Bridget Williams
(Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams Books, 1991), 205–7.
The quotation in text follows Nolamay Campbell’s account, after 3
Nephi 10:6. In Joy Hippolite’s version, Wetekia’s dream declaration
is a variant of the text as iterated through 3 Nephi 10:4–6. Hippolite,
“Wetekia Ruruku Elkington,” 205.
87
Benjamin Goddard, “Journal of Benjamin Goddard’s Missionary
Labors in New Zealand and Australia during the Years, 1892, 1893,
1894 & 1895,” November 25, 1893, 475, typescript at http://www.
goddardfamily.com/benjournal.html (accessed July 2014).
88
Quotation from Mitchell and Mitchell, Te Tau Ihu, 111, citing
a family source. Granddaughter Nolamay Campbell notes also that
Wetekia was considered “a matakite by her extended family.” Campbell,
“He Matakite—A Visionary,” 158. As a young person growing up in
the northern South Island LDS Nelson Branch in the 1970s–1980s,
I recall accounts of Wetekia’s experiences as a seer and her Book of
Mormon dream as related by descendants in Church meetings and on
other occasions. See also Hippolite, “Wetekia Ruruku Elkington,” 207.
done away with & a new religion would come, but [he] did not
know where it would come from.” Greenwood added: “Some
think that the religion we preach is the new one which was to
come.”89 Greenwood’s account suggests that a local interpretation of the 1883 year-sign from Te Pōtangaroa’s covenant sanctioned Mormonism as the new church for “some.” This is consistent with the account by missionary William T. Stewart in a
letter to Church president John Taylor dated January 31, 1884.
Stewart advised: “[A prophet] told them in 1883 that the true
gospel would be brought them, that it would be taken from a
stone. Some of them firmly believe the Book of Mormon, being presented them in this year, to be the exact fulfillment of
the predictions of their prophecy.”90 In the first instance, the
gospel taken from a “stone” may refer to the placement of the
covenant under a memorial stone at Ngā Tau e Waru before Te
Pōtangaroa’s death: a stone that was understood to offer guidance whenever people had a problem.91 The tohu of the Book of
Mormon may reference the reported burial of the golden plates
in a stone box, or perhaps even the book’s translation by means
of seer stones. In either case, the local, site-specific interpretation of a matakite is apparent.
A further, often-cited 1880s conversion account linked to a
matakite promise is also instructive, both as a poropiti-Mormon
parallel and to clarify the importance of tohu in securing a local Mormon identity.92 In 1884, Mormon missionaries met with
and baptized numerous Ngāti Kahungunu and members of related east coast iwi to the north of the Wairarapa district. In an
89
Rimene, “Prophecies,” in Elsmore, Mana from Heaven, 252;
Greenwood, Journal, April 5, 1883, 76–77.
90
Cited in Mary Stewart Lee and Marion Stewart Peterson, eds.,
History of William Thomas Stewart (Provo, Utah: William Thomas
Stewart Family Organization, 1972), 25.
91
Elsmore, Mana from Heaven, 252, 253.
92
See Britch, Unto the Islands of the Sea, 272–73; Underwood,
“Mormonism, the Maori and Cultural Authenticity,” 142–43; Joseph,
“Intercultural Exchange,” 48–51.
202
account published in 1902, Hirini Whaanga from Nuhaka reported that, at the close of one of these meetings held in Korongata, southern Hawke Bay, Elder William Stewart raised his
hands to invoke God’s blessings upon the congregation. On seeing this gesture, local non-LDS man Te Teira Marutu arose and
declared “that this was the church of which his forefather [Ārama Toiroa] prophesied.” Elder Stewart baptized Te Teira and his
family thereafter. At meetings in Te Māhia district to the northeast, “the old home of Arama Toiroa and his people,” Toiroa’s
descendants also related the sign of “the Elders in prayer, with
hands uplifted to heaven” to the 1830 prophecy of the coming of
the true church by “our revered forefather [Toiroa].”93
New Zealand researchers have assumed that Ārama Toiroa
is the same tohunga matakite identified in Ringatū sources as Te
Toiroa Ikariki (or Ikarihi).94 As discussed above, Te Kooti related a matikite of Te Toiroa that was said to describe Te Kooti’s
return with a karakia (religion or form of worship) of “upraised
hands.” Whaanga’s Mormon account, as related through missionary Benjamin Goddard, shares two core themes. The first
commonality is Toiroa’s prediction that the true karakia would
come “across the great ocean.” (In the Ringatū version, Te Kooti
would return “across the waters.”) The second and most critical
is that people would know when this karakia was introduced,
“for one shall stand and raise both hands to heaven.” (Ringatū
accounts describe Te Kooti’s prayerful gesture of upraised hands,
as above.)95
Lineham argues that, because Toiroa’s prophecy “was inter93
Hirini Whaanga account in Goddard, “A Maori Prophet,” 153.
See Barker, “The Connexion,” 46; Jared Christy and Robert
Joseph, “The Māori Lehi: Hirini Te Rito Whaanga 1828–1905,” in
Kātene, Turning the Hearts of the Children, 30–32; Joseph, “Intercultural
Exchange,” 53–54; Lineham, “The Mormon Message,” 87–88. Binney,
Redemption Songs, 11–13, 16, 18–19, 24–26, cites core Ringatū sources
on Toiroa.
95
Whaanga quotations from Goddard, “A Maori Prophet,” 152.
94
preted by most Maori as a prediction of the emergence of Te
Kooti . . . it cannot have helped establish the Mormon church.”
However, starting with Hirini Whaanga’s account as recorded
by Goddard in 1902, Mormon descendants of Toiroa and their
kin have insisted that this prophecy was influential in the LDS
conversion of Ngāti Kahungunu communities in and around Te
Māhia, if not elsewhere.96 Here it is relevant to note that the Ringatū Church name was first documented at Pakirikiri, northern
Poverty Bay, in February 1887, about twenty miles north of Te
Māhia. This followed the Church’s 1886 codification in Te Rohe
Pōtae of the long-standing practice of worshipful hand-raising
with the new instruction that both hands should be raised by
the tohunga.97 While further analysis of the different Toiroa accounts from LDS and Ringatū sources is not necessary here, the
proximity of these places and dates alone is instructive. It suggests that neighboring communities were discussing a matakite
about a new karakia of ceremonial hand-raising in the 1880s
around the time the Mormons arrived. In short, in both LDS
and Ringatū traditions, the hand-raising tohu validated movements that connected earlier matakite, Māori-Israelite ancestry,
and narratives of redemption for 1880s iwi of the larger east
coast Hawke Bay to Poverty Bay region.
THE BOOK OF MORMON AND MĀORI ISRAELITE IDENTITY
In late nineteenth-century New Zealand, Newton argues,
“no other church offered a coherent, exact explanation of Polynesian origins to match the story of the Book of Mormon.”98 By
the 1850s, LDS missionaries and Church leaders (including
Brigham Young) taught that Hawaiian and other central-eastern Polynesian peoples were descendants of Israel.99 The source
96
Ibid.; Joseph, “Intercultural Exchange,” 51, 53.
Binney, Redemption Songs, 420–21.
98
Newton, Tiki and Temple, 47.
99
Aikau, A Chosen People; Britsch, Islands of the Sea, 97–98, 150–
51; Douglas, “The Sons of Lehi,” 94–98; Newton, Mormon and Maori,
15–16.
97
204
of the Hagoth narrative as an explanation for Polynesian origins
is less clear. In the earliest known hint of such an interpretation,
LDS missionary Louisa Barnes Pratt told the women of Tubuai
(Tupua’i, Austral Islands) who inquired in 1851 whether “the
ancient Nephites were Europeans” that the Nephites “were the
ancient fathers of the Tahitians.”100 (The Tahitians of the Society Islands are found to the north of the smaller and less populous Austral group.) It is possible that Pratt was speaking in
broad terms only, of course.
Years later, Church President Joseph F. Smith remembered
that he had pondered about the account of Hagoth’s ships
in relation to Polynesian origins as he noticed sawn American driftwood on Hawaiian beaches during his mission in the
1850s.101 By 1868 George Reynolds could justify the “well understood” view that Hawaiians and other Polynesians (including New Zealanders) “are of the same stock as the Lamanites”
in an official Church publication with reference to the Hagoth
narrative. Reynolds wrote that there was a “general impression”
that some “adventurous Nephite sailor of old” had drifted to
the Pacific Islands, as in the account of Hagoth’s two large
ships sailing from the “north west coast of South America” that
were “never heard of more.” Foreshadowing the racialist Nephite-Lamanite confusion that would follow, Reynolds opined
that this Nephite connection explained the “fairness of complexion” of the Polynesians compared to “their neighbors” who
dwelt “nearer the Asiatic shore.”102
100
Louisa Barnes Pratt, “Journal of Louisa Barnes Pratt,” October
8, 1851, in Kate B. Carter, comp. and ed., Heart Throbs of the West, 12
vols. (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1939–51), 8:273.
101
Quoted in Newton, Tiki and Temple, 129, and Mormon and
Maori, 25–26.
102
G.R. [George Reynolds], “Man and His Varieties,” Juvenile
Instructor 3, no. 19 (October 1, 1868): 146. About eight years later,
Hugh Knough, “A Trip to Our Antipodes,” Juvenile Instructor 11,
no. 16 (August 15, 1876): 187–88, discussed Hagoth’s ships again in
relation to Māori origins, still with some equivocation. This article
In 1880s New Zealand, the LDS missionaries had the opportunity to introduce and adapt these doctrines of Israelite
identity to the biblically informed and literate Māori people.
They wasted no time. In 1881, Elder Ferris at Opotiki followed
an American Book of Mormon lineal narrative in teaching that
Māori were descendants of Ephraim.103 From early 1883, Elders
Alma Greenwood and Ira Hinckley consistently taught Ngāti
Kahungunu and kin of southern to east coast North Island that
the Book of Mormon explained Māori origins.104 In the later
1880s, it was standard proselyting practice for Elder William
Gardner to preach to central North Island Māori about “their
forefathers and the Book of Mormon.” A number seemed “much
interested” and indicated that they would be baptized.105 Gardner even applied Book of Mormon promises to the seed of Jacob to counter the influence of Tāwhiao and his faith. Thus in
response to the king’s pending local visit, Gardner exhorted the
Saints to diligence “and referred them to their forefathers and
the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and the promises of
the Lord to them and their children after them and they was
very much interested.”106
Hagoth’s ships were at the heart of this narrative, where the
equivocation of 1860s–1870s LDS periodical discussions gave
way to greater certainty. On April 7, 1888, Elder Ezra F. Richards gave Māori conference attenders “a short account of their
forefathers leaving the land of Jerusalem and going to America, and touched briefly upon some of their great battles, some
affirmed that “these people [Māori] are undoubtedly of the seed of
Jacob.”
103
Ferris, Journals, June 3, 1881.
104
For example, see Greenwood, Journal, April 5, 1883, 76; August
16, 1883, 171; October 13, 1883, 199; Ira N. Hinckley, Journal (Book
3), July 17, 1883, holograph, Ira N. Hinckley Papers, HM 56927–
57020, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
105
Gardner, Journal, February 20, November 26, 1887. Other
missionary sources have comparable references.
106
Gardner, Journal, February 9, 1887.
206
building boats and leaving America.”107 The scriptural basis was
noted in the minutes of the LDS Hui Tau (yearly conference) of
April 1892, where Elder Oscar Andrus identified Māori “as a
branch of the house of Israel, their forefathers having left America as recorded in the 63rd chapter of Alma.”108 In 1894 New
Zealand missionary Benjamin Goddard also cited the narrative
after summarizing an opinion that Polynesians descended partly
from Mexican kings. Goddard offered no explicit justification of
the Hagoth link,109 suggesting that the idea was generally understood and accepted.
This doctrine was not simply a one-way street. In formal
Māori oratory, the homeland epithet constructions Hawaiki-nui
(Hawaiki = homeland name; nui = large/great) and Hawaiki-roa
(= long), or in comparable forms, Tawhiti-nui (Tawhiti = distance, distant location), Tawhiti-roa and Tawhiti pāmamao (=
remote, far) are interpreted generally as rhetorical flourishes. At
the turn of the twentieth century, however, ethnologist S. Percy
Smith read the separate constructions as the discrete names of
prior homeland places.110 Here Smith had picked up on selected
nineteenth-century Māori views, including a South Island informant who described Hawaiki-nui as “a mainland (tua-whenua)
with vast plains on the side towards the sea and a high range of
snowy mountains on the inland side.”111 On May 5, 1883, Elder
Alma Greenwood recorded a Wairarapa Māori adaption of this
107
Katherine L. Paxman, Journal, April 7, 1888, 166–67, holograph,
MS 6714, fd. 2, LDS Church History Library.
108
Phoenix [pseud. for B. Goddard], “New Zealand Conference,”
Deseret News Weekly, May 28, 1892, 747.
109
Phoenix, “In Maoridom,” 516.
110
Margaret Orbell, Hawaiki: A New Approach to Maori Tradition
(Christchurch, New Zealand: Canterbury University Press, 1991), 10;
S. Percy Smith, Hawaiki: The Original Home of the Maori; With a Sketch
of Polynesian History, 2d ed. (Christchurch, New Zealand: Whitcombe
and Tombs, 1904), 47, also available at http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz//tm/
scholarly/tei-SmiHawa-t1-body-d3-d1.html (accessed July 2014).
111
Smith, Hawaiki, 47.
oratory from rangatira (leader) Te Mānihera (Te Rangitakaiwaho) of Pāpāwai, an early patron of the missionaries, who was
baptized July 21, 1883.112
Greenwood commented that he had gleaned “valuable information from Te Manihera, respecting the history of the Maori
where they came from &c.” This account identified Tawhitinui
with the island group of Fiji, the “place” from which Maori had
come to New Zealand, and Tawhitroa as the “Sandwich [Hawaiian] Islands,” where “the Maoris were before coming to Fiji.”
Tawhiti pamamao was “the Ancient Maori name for America
and means still farther a way, the country where the Maoris were
before they went to the Sandwich Islands.” “Wairuatapu” was
identified as “the ancient Maori name for Palestine . . . where the
Maoris were first, before going to America.” This was “very significant information,” Greenwood added, that was also “amply
furnished in the Book of Mormon.”113
112
Lineham, “The Mormon Message,” 73. On Te Mānihera’s
biography and status, albeit omitting details of his Mormon conversion
late in life, see Angela Ballara and Mita Carter, “Te Rangi-taka-iwaho, Te Manihera,” The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography Te Ara—
The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated October 30, 2012, http://
www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/1t69/te-rangi-taka-i-waho-temanihera (accessed July 2014).
113
Greenwood, Journal, May 15, 1883, 96–97. Underwood,
“Mormonism, the Maori and Cultural Authenticity,” 137, 139,
cites and briefly reviews Mormon and other Polynesian homeland
interpretations, including later twentieth-century anthropological
scholarship. Currently most archaeologists accept that the first settlers,
who were of Asia-Pacific origin, colonised the Society Islands from
West Polynesia about the late first millennium A.D. or the beginning
of the next millennium, and the marginal Polynesian islands of New
Zealand, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and the Hawaiian group thereafter.
The precise sequence and chronology of these events is debated still,
as is the explanation of the pre-Hispanic Polynesian cultivation
of American sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) and gourd (Lagenaria
siceraria). Anderson, Binney, and Harrris, Tangata Whenua, 16–39; Ian
G. Barber, “A Fast Yam to Polynesia: New Thinking on the Problem
208
It is unlikely that Mānihera’s interpretation was free of Mormon missionary influence at some level.114 Furthermore, LDS
Māori would debate variant readings thereafter in the historical
transmission of this narrative.115 Be that as it may, the relevant
point here is Greenwood’s insistence that the account as he recorded it constituted significant “information from Manihera.”
This statement suggests that the Pāpāwai rangatira was responsible for applying Mormon teachings to a core Māori saying in
1883. The active engagement between Māori-Mormon and missionary readings of a text is evident also in a Māori response to the
Book of Mormon account of the abduction of “the daughters of
the Lamanites” (Mosiah 20:1,4–5). Greenwood recorded: “They,
the Maoris became much animated & excited over [this] saying
that [they] had a tradition among them, which referred to similar circumstances occurring in the history of their forefathers. I
related many things found recorded in the book to them & the
more they learn of its contents, the more they are convinced of it
furnishing amply [sic] information to account for their origin.”116
In these examples it is clear that the Book of Mormon was
referenced and applied in a Māori way, just as Hebrew scriptural accounts, promises, and texts were incorporated into the
poropiti movements.
of the American Sweet Potato in Oceania,” Rapa Nui Journal 26, no.
1 (2012): 31–42; Patrick V. Kirch, “When Did the Polynesians Settle
Hawai‘i? A Review of 150 Years of Scholarly Inquiry and a Tentative
Answer,” Hawaiian Archaeology 12 (2011): 3–26; J. Wilmshurst, T. L.
Hunt, C. P. Lipo and A. J. Anderson, “High Precision Radiocarbon
Dating Shows Recent and Rapid Initial Human Colonization of East
Polynesia,” PNAS USA 108, no. 5 (2011): 1815–20.
114
Lineham, “The Mormon Message,” 81–82, documents Māori
“interrogation” of the missionaries on the subject of an Israelite
relationship in the 1880s.
115
Newton, Mormon and Maori, 20–21; Underwood, “Mormonism,
the Maori, and Cultural Authenticity,” 137–39.
116
Greenwood, Journal, October 13, 1883, 198–99 (quotation p.
199).
LAND, REDEMPTION, AND THE GATHERING
At the heart of nineteenth-century Māori ethnogenesis was a promise of lineal redemption that included the restoration of rights and lands to Israel oppressed in and by colonial
New Zealand. Mormon efforts and success could not and did
not elide these concerns. The Mormon response carried some
surprises, however.
Lineham notes that although tangata whenua who responded to the Mormon message “felt strongly” on the issue of land
grievances, the LDS missionaries remained silent on the British seizure of Māori land.117 Lineham illustrates the former
point with reference to the “wholesale secession” of Porirua
Ngāti Toa to the Mormons (including relatives of Ruruku and
Wetekia of Rangitoto). This movement followed in the wake of
a legal case that asserted a contractual and Treaty of Waitangi
breach over Anglican failure to construct a school on Māori
land donated for the purpose. In a precedent-setting ruling,
Supreme Court Chief Justice Sir James Prendergast decided in
favor of the Anglicans. On the Treaty of Waitangi argument,
Prendergast declared the treaty a “simple nullity” and opined
that the Māori signatories had been “primitive barbarians” (Wi
Parata v. The Bishop of Wellington). For many Ngāti Toa, this
ruling was a blatant alliance of the Anglican and judicial establishments in Wellington (the colony’s capital) against Māori
rights and people. It is notable that the third round of litigation over this ruling was instigated by a Mormon, Hohepa Wi
Neera, in 1902.118
On Lineham’s second point, historian Marjorie Newton
counters that a number of late nineteenth-century Mormon missionaries were well aware of these issues in spite of their public
117
Lineham, “The Mormon Message,” 77–78.
Ibid., 78; David V. Williams, A Simple Nullity? The Wi Parata
Case in New Zealand Law and History (Auckland, New Zealand:
University of Auckland Press, 2011), 124. Williams’s text is the
comprehensive legal history study of Wi Parata.
118
210
silence in New Zealand.119 Some of the fundamental injustices
of Māori land acquisition by Europeans were even recognized in
the 1876 Juvenile Instructor, which published Hugh Knough’s “A
Trip to Our Antipodes.” Knough urged: “Let us then not look
down on the Maori . . . not swindle him out of his home and
lands under the transparent fraud of barter . . . as some ‘Christian’
missionaries have done, to my own knowledge. . . . With but few
exceptions, Christian (so called) missions have been a bane and
a curse to the Maori race; for as a rule, the aim of these missionaries has been to aggrandize themselves.”120
Missionary awareness of these issues is evident from the
outset. In 1883 William Stewart, the mission president, lumped
the Treaty of Waitangi together with other pacts made between
“whites and natives” as “monuments of deception and fraud.” In
October, Stewart observed that about eighty baptized Māori in
the Waikato area had become lukewarm. Stewart commented
that they are “naturally suspicious” of the “white man” as a result
of “the deception that has been practiced on them.”121 Elders
Ira Hinckley and Alma Greenwood also met with Māori land
petitioner and delegate Sydney David Taiwhanga at Pāpāwai in
the same year. Greenwood’s journal entry is fairly noncommittal,122 but Hinckley’s recently located journal is more insightful.
119
Newton, Mormon and Maori, 10; also contra Ian G. Barber and
David Gilgen, “Between Covenant and Treaty: The LDS Future in
New Zealand,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 1 (Spring
1996): 211.
120
Knough “A Trip to Our Antipodes,” 187.
121
William Thomas Stewart, Reminiscences and Journal,
September 14, October 14, 1883, photocopy of holograph, MS 2198 1,
LDS Church History Library. The journal is also available as “Private
Journal of William T. Stewart,” holograph, MSS 6638, Perry Special
Collections.
122
After describing the treaty’s provisions to protect Māori “in
their possessions of land, timber, game & fisheries,” Greenwood
observed succinctly: “Now, the Maoris claim that the Government of
New Zealand has broken this treaty.” Greenwood, Journal, May 29,
He observed that Taiwhanga had “a petition for all of the leading men to sign to get some recompense for the land which has
been taken from them by fraud and theft.” Hinckley added: “We
read the treaty between them and England, which guaranteed
unto the Maoris the just rights of an English subject and offered
the protection and the rights of their land, fishereys, hunting,
and infact [sic] all rights. The Maoris claim that they have kept
the treaty in all respects and that the Colonials have broken it in
all particulars, and they are going to do what they can to have it
righted.”123
However, the Mormons had an original view on the restoration of Māori land rights, one framed within the developing
nineteenth-century doctrine of the latter-day gathering of Israel,
as outlined by influential apostle Orson Pratt in 1872:
Go to the Sandwich Islands, to the South Sea Islands, to Japan . . .
and you find a general resemblance in the characters and countenances of the people. Who are they? According to the Book of
Mormon, Israelites were scattered forth from time to time, and
colonies planted on these islands of the ocean. In that day the
isles will sing with joy . . . for they will give up their inhabitants,
and they will be wafted in ships to their promised land, and God
will . . . gather millions of people from these numerous isles of the
ocean, and he will bring them back to the land of their fathers.124
Pratt’s reference to the gathering of scattered Israelites from
the isles anticipated the delivery of a novel millennial message
to Polynesia. For descendants of Hagoth’s people, the promised,
scriptural “land of their fathers” was America.
It is clear that some of the missionaries were initially hesitant to preach the doctrine of the gathering openly to Māori.
However, in spite of this, an urge to return to the newly revealed
ancestral homeland seems to have been manifest among Māori
1883, 106.
123
Hinckley, Journal (Book 3), May 29, 1883.
124
Orson Pratt, February 11, 1872, Journal of Discourses, 26 vols.
(London and Liverpool: LDS Booksellers Depot, 1854–86), 14:333.
212
converts from the beginning.125 By 1886, missionary Nelson
Spicer Bishop observed that the Māori Saints of Te Māhia had
“got the spirit of gathering” so that “all they can think of . . . is
that and they want to go right away.” Bishop assured them in a
Sunday meeting that the time for gathering “was not yet but was
near in the future,” and that God would “let it be known through
the Prophet.” In 1888, Bishop recorded details of a Māori “huihui” (meeting/gathering) involving Mormons and others in the
Wairarapa where “religion was mentioned.” Mormon speakers
included J. A. Jury and “Piripiri [Philip] the big chief here” who
“had them spell bound listening to the reading on the gathering
of Israel.”126 In the same year Elder M. S. Marriott also spoke
on “the scattering of Israel” to a mission conference at Te Hauke
and exhorted the people to live the gospel so that the time would
arrive for “the gathering of the Maori people.”127
By the later 1880s, the LDS Church leadership had advised New Zealand mission authorities to discourage the idea of
Māori gathering immediately as a body.128 Even so, in a farewell
conference address at Kirikiri in the Hauraki District, mission
President William Paxman anticipated still “with pleasure . . .
the time when you shall be gathered to the land of your forefathers, the land blessed above all others, where you can help to
build up Zion and labor in the temples for your dead friends.”
To this promise Paxman added: “The time is nigh at hand when
you shall become a white and delightsome people in the sight of
the Lord.” Conference Clerk Heber Cutler added: “The Saints
125
Newton, Tiki and Temple, 77; Newton, Mormon and Maori, 153.
Nelson Spicer Bishop, “New Zealand Mission Diaries of
Nelson Spicer Bishop,” November 28, 1886, March 3, 1888, 28, 254,
typescript, 1948, BX 8670.1 B54, Perry Special Collections; copy in
Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, MS-Papers–4292–04/05.
Bishop’s original holograph journals (5 vols.) have been deposited
along with the typescript copy in the LDS Church History Library
(MS 1813).
127
Quoted in Paxman, Journal, April 9, 1888, 172.
128
Newton, Tiki and Temple, 77–78; Mormon and Maori, 153–54.
126
are greatly interested in the subject of gathering and are anxiously looking forward to the time when they will have the privilege
of going to the land of Zion to be united with the Saints and be
partakers of the many blessings they are now debarred from in
this land.”129 The homeland notion was reiterated in notes that
accompanied the April 1894 Hui Tau report. These referred to
the pending departure of Hirini and Mary Whaanga as “the first
Maori Saints permitted to return to the ancient inheritance of
their ancestors.”130
These conference minutes highlight key strands of the
1880s gathering doctrine for Māori. The blessings identified in
returning to the land of the forefathers included proxy temple
work for “dead friends,” an important consideration for a Polynesian people with strong kin bonds. The view that gathered
Māori would become a “white and delightsome people” stands
out. Paxman was not alone in teaching this Book of Mormon
doctrine. In a conference address of April 1888 at Te Hauke,
Elder Sondra Sanders Jr. gave “an account of some of the wars
and contentions that arose between the Nephites and Lamanites, also the reason that they became a dark skinned people
and the promises that had been made concerning their becoming ‘a white and delightsome people.’”131 Some Māori at least
also adopted the idea. In the Māhia Hui Tau of April 1894,
orator Ngawaea Poipoi “was listened to with breathless interest, as he fluently reviewed the history of Lehi and his sons,
showing how the Maoris inherited the dark skin through the
disobedience of their ancestors.”132
This teaching conformed to contemporary LDS expectations about the removal of the Lamanite “curse” following
129
Heber S. Cutler, “The Australasian Mission,” Deseret Weekly
News, August 17, 1889, 255.
130
Phoenix (pseud. of Benjamin Goddard), “Notes on the ‘Hui
Tau’,” Deseret News Weekly, May 19, 1894, 681–82 (quotation p. 682).
131
Paxman, Journal, April 8, 1888, 170.
132
Phoenix (pseud. of Benjamin Goddard), “In the Antipodes,”
680.
214
conversion.133 Its application in New Zealand among a people
who were considered to be Nephite descendants might seem
contradictory. However, it is broadly consistent with missionary views on the “gross darkness, sin indolence & loathsomeness” of unconverted Māori, which Alma Greenwood related
in 1883 to the Book of Mormon account of the aborigines
of America, and the “wickedness & disobedience” that had
brought about “their present state of degredation [sic] & savage condition.”134 In this late nineteenth-century Mormon
missionary adaptation of the Hagoth narrative, the implication
seems to be that Māori-Nephite ancestors had fallen to receive
a lineal, Lamanite-like “curse” in the form of a dark skin. If so,
nineteenth-century Mormon theology provided that the curse
could be lifted. This doctrine may have comforted the missionaries in the assurance that Māori gathered to Zion would identify spiritually and physically with Anglo-American Saints. For
some Māori, the doctrine may have appealed in the seeming
promise of full equality with the Europeans, including the removal of any racial barrier to acceptance.
These remarks also elucidate Mormon missionary attitudes
toward Māori rights and redemption. For the missionaries,
the restoration of both entailed gathering to Zion “to be united with the Saints”—an event they anticipated soon. In Utah,
LDS Church leaders of the 1880s had adopted an increasingly defiant and millennial tone over federal efforts to suppress
plural marriage and Church political control.135 This attitude
with its accompanying emphasis on God’s judgments had also
spread abroad, it seems. In 1883 Elder Ira Hinckley remained
133
Mauss, All Abraham’s Children, 118–20; Newton, Mormon and
Maori, 33–34.
134
Greenwood, Journal, February 1, 1883, 38; see also Lineham,
“The Mormon Message,” 82–83.
135
Dan Erickson, “As a Thief in the Night”: The Mormon Quest for
Millennial Deliverance (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998), chap.
8.
with Brother Ihaia for a night and “had quite a time with them
in the evening, on the Judgments how to preach &c.”136 In 1885,
New Zealand LDS missionary Ezra F. Richards discussed with a
visitor “my mission to call people to repentance as the great day
of Judgment is near at hand, Referred him to some Judgments
to come upon the wicked.” In March 1889 mission President
William Paxman exhorted the Saints at a Nuhaka church conference to prepare for the coming of Christ which was “near at
hand.”137 A number of missionaries anticipated that 1891 was a
year with millennial significance, an interpretation that could be
drawn from a prophecy of Joseph Smith.138 Thus, in 1888, New
Zealand missionary Joseph Heywood “spent some time in reading and conversing about the prophesies we expect will soon be
fulfilled, particularly in regard to the year 1891 as the time when
the reign of righteousness will begin.” Heywood added: “Our
impressions have been that the missionaries might be called
home before that time.”139
In this context, it is interesting to observe that an 1882 revelation to President John Taylor, Brigham Young’s successor, encouraged a new mission to North American “Lamanites.” Taylor
counseled that this work “must not be postponed if we desire to
retain the approval of God.” The Lamanites had to be instructed,
organized and treated exactly as “our white brethren.”140 For the
New Zealand missionaries, Māori conversions also had a millennial significance. In an 1885 meeting, Elder Gardner referred
“to the Maoris as being of the house of Israel, and in fullfillment
[sic] of the predictions of the Ancient prophets the pure Gospel
136
Hinckley, Journal (Book 3), September 17, 1883.
Ezra F. Richards, Journal, September 22, 1885, holograph, Ezra F.
Richards Papers, MS 4739, Box 1, fd. 1, LDS Church History Library;
Joseph Neal Heywood, Journal, March 24, 1889, 114, holograph, MS
6297, fd. 2 (microfilm, 1 reel), LDS Church History Library.
138
See Erickson, “As a Thief in the Night,” 194–95, for American
Mormon views of this apocalyptic deadline.
139
Heywood, Journal, November 30, 1888, 34.
140
Quoted in Mauss, All Abraham’s Children, 66.
137
216
had been again restored to the earth and that many of the Maories were living witness to the world that the blessings are now
on earth.”141
These teachings were broadly compatible with contemporary Māori millennialism as discussed above. Te Pōtangaroa’s
crucial 1883 year of honor and “the judgment” as recorded in
two accounts of his 1881 covenant is consistent with this view as
well. Like ngā poropiti, the Māori-Mormon take on the related
Mormon doctrines of redemption and judgment also referenced
the deprivation that many tangata whenua felt over the loss of
land and identity. As Elder Alma Greenwood noted from a visit to Korongata: “Many speeches were made in which they said,
among other things, that their race was fast fading away before
the advancement of the white man and his customs, and they
were in great darkness, religiously and otherwise. They wanted
to know where this gospel had been so long.”142 The sense of
hope that the Mormons brought to some of these communities
is captured in a previously known but (until now) anonymous
LDS Māori statement. Ira Hinckley’s recently located journal
identifies this statement’s author to be Wairarapa rangatira (Hohepa) Otene Meihana:
The other churches . . . have been trying to show us how to
obtain eternal life, but all the time they have been going up and
we have been going down (meaning they are becoming numerous
and rich while the Maori are becoming less and poorer). . . . When
you came you did not look to the rich, but to the poor with love
eating and laying where they do. . . . When the white man came
first he brought the gun to shoot the Maori with bulletts [sic].
Next he brought the Gospel to shoot the man and the land. But
the gospel that you bring shoots the King, Governor, ministers,
churches and all.
The “king” of this reference is presumably Tāwhiao. In
141
Gardner, Journal, January 17, 1885.
Alma Greenwood, “My New Zealand Mission,” Juvenile
Instructor 20, no. 17 (September 1, 1885): 258.
142
Hinckley’s account, Meihana concluded that “these facts cause
the Maoris to look at you with much importance and makes
you different from all other ministers.”143 The Mormons of the
1880s had, in effect, trumped the lot.
CONCLUSION
In this article, I have argued that Mormon growth among
late nineteenth-century tangata whenua is linked closely to the
impacts of ongoing colonization and sustained land loss facing Māori communities. The poropiti movements continued to
promise the restoration of land to Māori as dispossessed Israelites. However, that promise looked increasingly unlikely as the
young self-governing British colony consolidated, grew, and became more settled.
The decade of the 1880s with the opening up of Te Rohe
Pōtae was pivotal for Māori. As one anonymous colonial observer noted in the later 1880s, the “King Movement” and related Māori land matters “must be viewed from an entirely different standpoint now to what they were in say 1883.”144 Around
that critical time, Mormon missionaries who were prepared to
live with and as the local people introduced a gospel message of
spiritual, cultural, and racial redemption to several North Island
143
Hinckley, Journal (Book 4), May 24, 1884, quoting statement
by Otene Meihana, May 12, 1884. For the anonymous and slightly
variable published versions of Meihana’s statement, see sources in
Underwood, “Mormonism, the Maori and Cultural Authenticity,” 142
(including Greenwood, “My New Zealand Mission,” cited above).
144
Anonymous, Draft letter concerning the claims of Tāwhiao and
the King Movement, holograph, ca. 1887, MS 2531, Hocken Library,
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, who observed further
that “subsequent to 1883,” the “whole problem” had changed. The
writer clearly had in mind Tāwhiao’s 1884 trip to London to present
a petition for Māori government to Queen Victoria. New Zealand
officials intervened to prevent this presentation. Thereafter the colonial
government moved to bypass Tāwhiao in opening up Te Rohe Pōtae.
Anderson, Binney, and Harris, Tangata Whenua, 301–8.
218
iwi. The message was validated by links to earlier traditions, local tohu and ultimately, as a solution to the loss of rangatiratanga, land, and culture. In a novel approach, LDS Māori converts
were promised restoration to the American lands of their inheritance as a latter-day branch of scattered Israel. In this process
they would be gathered, redeemed, and whitened, while apocalyptic judgments were poured out upon unrepentant Gentiles in
New Zealand and elsewhere. Church records confirm that thousands of tangata whenua responded enthusiastically to this novel
millennial message of Israelite identity and American-homeland
repatriation (“the gathering”) as announced by tohu and linked
to matakite.
By 1890, the proposed gathering of international Mormon
communities (including Māori) was under review. That year signaled “the first suggestion of a change in official Church policy”
over Mormon immigration.145 In 1898, First Presidency Counselor George Q. Cannon would counsel all of the Saints “in the
various lands where they have embraced the Gospel” to remain
there and “not be anxious to break up their homes to gather to
Zion.”146 This new emphasis was reinforced by the construction
of temples outside of the continental United States beginning
in the early twentieth century. The first of these was the Hawaiian Temple (dedicated in 1919) that Māori members would patronize.147 As noted above, access to temple ordinances had been
promoted by mission President Paxman (and other missionaries)
as an important justification for the doctrine of the gathering in
1880s New Zealand. In general, millennial fervor also quieted
within Mormonism after 1890.148
The details of these doctrinal and policy changes had begun
145
Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience:
A History of the Latter-day Saints (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979),
140.
146
Qtd. in ibid.
147
Britsch, Unto the Islands of the Sea, 153–55, 302–3.
148
Erickson, “As A Thief in the Night,” 213–29.
to filter through the New Zealand mission by 1900.149 However,
the core LDS idea of Māori as American-Israelite descendants
was sustained and promoted well through the twentieth century by returned missionaries in particular, none so influential as
Apostle Matthew Cowley. This discourse emphasized a distinctive Māori spirituality and faith as a legacy from Israelite ancestors, reinforced by the experiences of Cowley and others.150 In
short, the post-1900 Māori-Israelite narrative took a less political and more devotional turn in Mormonism. Consistently, the
predictions of the matakite or poropiti were framed in the general Church press of the twentieth century as religious prophecies
eliding the context of concern for land or cultural restoration.
(See note 9.)
As I have argued elsewhere, disenchantment with the changing narrative may explain why at least two thousand LDS Māori
became involved with the church of prophet Tahupōtiki Wiremu
Rātana in the late 1920s. In contrast to the Mormons, the Rātana Church and theology continued to recognize the issues and
impacts of land alienation and treaty breaches for the morehu of
the twentieth century.151 Some of those LDS Māori who re149
Newton, Tiki and Temple, 78. Some earlier ideas persisted for
a time. For example, the gathering to America was promoted as an
ideal into the earlier twentieth century at least by several LDS Māori.
Newton, Mormon and Maori, 155–58. On occasion this ideal was
supported by New Zealand mission leaders such as President John E.
Magleby who counselled Maori in 1932 that New Zealand “was not
their homeland.” Magleby added: “A return to America would some
day be their privilege.” John Ephraim Magleby, Journal, February 14,
1932, 197, qtd. in Newton, Mormon and Maori, 158.
150
Matthew Cowley, Matthew Cowley Speaks: Discourses of Elder
Matthew Cowley of the Quorum of the Twelve of the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1954); Newton,
Tiki and Temple, 106.
151
Barber, “Between Biculturalism and Assimilation,” 152–55; see
also Newton, Tiki and Temple, 169–70, 180–81, Mormon and Maori,
159–61. On Rātana history and theology, see Keith Newman, Ratana
220
turned or remained would also continue to pursue redress for
land losses and treaty breaches with reference to local (including tribal) theologies of social justice and tikanga (tradition, custom) identity. As it continued, therefore, indigenous New Zealand Mormon identity work of the twentieth century and beyond was largely separated if not hidden in some instances from
the official Church.152 Even so, Mormon tangata whenua still
refer openly to the legacy of what one LDS Māori scholar calls
the “effective [later nineteenth century] Mormon-Māori intercultural approach” as treaty redress and associated tribal identity
work are encouraged in a more progressive and culturally respectful post-colonial New Zealand.153
Revisited: An Unfinished Legacy (Auckland, New Zealand: Reed, 2006).
152
Barber, “Between Biculturalism and Assimilation,” 167–68;
Barber and Gilpin, “Between Covenant amd Treaty.”
153
Joseph, “Intercultural Exchange,” 68–69. In the later twentieth
century, the New Zealand legislature and judiciary rejected Justice
Prendergast’s precedent-setting dismissal of the Treaty of Waitangi
discussed earlier. This rejection and the work of the Waitangi Tribunal
since in hearing retrospective treaty claims have enhanced Māori
culture and status in contemporary New Zealand society. Anderson,
Binney, and Harris, Tangata Whenua; Orange, Treaty of Waitangi;
Williams, A Simple Nullity?
“WE HAVE PROPHETESSES”:
MORMONISM IN GHANA, 1964–79
Russell W. Stevenson
In December 1978, Rebecca Mould, one of the founders of Ghanian Mormonism, learned that the long-awaited day had arrived
when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had officially
called its two first, full-time missionaries. A charismatic and devout
woman, she unfortunately did not leave a record of her response
to the news of their presence or of her reaction on meeting them,
but it must have been a joyful moment. Edwin (“Ted”) Q. Cannon,
his wife, Janath Russell Cannon, and Randall M. Mabey, and his
wife, Rachel Ivins Mabey, received a lively and cordial greeting from
the Ghanaians, who presented the missionaries with prestigious elephant chairs and ivory necklaces. Edwin Cannon and Randall M.
Mabey, both LDS high priests, baptized 124 men and women into
the LDS Church. Rebecca Mould was among them.
Mould’s work did not go unnoticed by Church leadership;
the missionaries “presented [her] with a Special Badge from
President Spencer Kimball of the Headquarters for her meritorious work in organizing the Church in the Western Region
of Ghana.” But she could no longer direct the affairs of the
Kweikuma Branch, a small city in western Ghana. Cannon and
RUSSELL W. STEVENSON {[email protected]} is a doctoral student in the African history program at Michigan State University. He has published two books, Black Mormon: The Story of Elijah Ables
(Afton, Wyo.: PrintVision, 2013) and For the Cause of Righteousness: A
Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830-2013 (Salt Lake City:
Greg Kofford Books, 2014) as well as articles for Dialogue: A Journal of
Mormon Thought and Journal of Mormon History.
221
222
Mabey had, as their first order of business, the implementation
of American Mormonism’s standards for the male priesthood.
They promptly set her apart as Relief Society president while
appointing Charles K. Ansah as the branch president with two
male counselors.1 Noticing the dissimilarities between their existing organizations and the American church, Rachel Mabey
felt that the branch members “have much to learn” but optimistically assured herself that it was a “strong branch with excellent
officers.”2
Mould felt stung by these changes. As a founding mother
of Mormonism in Ghana, she had directed her own congregation for over a decade. Her services combined the local flavor
of a home-grown Ghanaian independent church with what she
and her disciples were able to learn about Mormonism. The result showed the vibrancy of Ghana after achieving independence
in 1957 and the miracle stories drawn from decades of work by
Christian missionaries who had brought the gospel and translated the Bible into languages ranging from Igbo and Fante to
Amharic and Kinyarwanda. Mould’s dissatisfaction increased
over the next twelve months; and after the missionaries left in
December 1979, Mould established her own sect, leaving the
LDS branch stripped of its core membership. Mould had gone
from being a founding member of Mormonism in Ghana to one
its greatest threats, a schismatic who went about “poisoning the
minds of the people,” according to the minutes of a special meeting held to quell dissent in the branch.3
The rise of Mormonism in West Africa has the elements of
a modern legend, tracing a triumphalist history in which the devotion of faithful members repelled attempts at political suppression to achieve its current status, as of this writing, of 57,748
members, organized into 168 congregations and four missions.
1
Meeting Minutes, December 12, 1979, Joseph Dadzie Papers,
LDS Church History Library.
2
Rachel Ivins Mabey, Journal, December 12, 1978, LDS Church
History Library.
3
Meeting Minutes, December 24, 1978, Dadzie Papers.
Russell W. Stevenson/Mormonism in Ghana, 1964–79
223
In January 2004, President Gordon B. Hinckley applauded a riveting cultural program that drew on the talents of young members and climaxed in the dedication of the country’s first temple. The Ghanaian story presents an appealing narrative when
the U.S.-based Mormon community seeks to answer questions
about its racist past. However, such a narrative skips nimbly over
a more complicated picture of largely self-taught Africans, whose
pre-1978 pleas for missionaries and guidance met with silence or
equivocation from Mormon headquarters but who determinedly
went on to develop independent congregations founded on the
teachings of the American church.4 In the absence of American
patronage, they carved out a new Mormon faith, largely free of
the cultural structures that defined American Mormon societies.
The rise of West African Mormonism also presents white
Mormons with significant problems. The African proselytes
present one of the very few instances where a population developed a Mormon community in defiance of ecclesiastical officials. Most missionaries avoided teaching Africans and African Americans altogether given the fact that the priesthood ban
would be an insuperable impediment to baptism, priesthood ordination for men, and a bar to temple blessings. West African
Mormonism before 1978 therefore gives students of Mormon
history the opportunity to understand the ramifications of Mormon ideas when separated from their predominantly white messengers.
Exploring the history of West African Mormonism not only
requires that the Mormon people revisit their racial assumptions
and policies but also their gendered conceptions. While recog4
Although no authorized Mormon units existed in Africa except
South Africa until the missionaries’ arrival in November 1978,
these “would-be Saints,” to use James B. Allen’s phrase, considered
themselves Mormons or Latter-day Saints, and I have chosen, in the
interests of avoiding awkward circumlocutions to use that terminology
in referring to them. See James B. Allen, “Would-Be Saints: West
Africa before the 1978 Priesthood Revelation,” Journal of Mormon
History 17, no. 1 (Winter 1991): 205–47.
224
nizing that a growing number of Latter-day Saints are examining
the Church’s position on gender, most modern Mormons—white
or otherwise—have more or less accepted fairly well-delineated
gender roles, with women serving primarily as maternal figures
while men handle administrative responsibilities. In its earliest
days, West African Mormonism blurred both lines that modern
Mormonism had used to order its world. Not only had it assumed an unbestowed ecclesiastical authority previously granted only to the non-African population, but it also granted that
ecclesiastical authority to women. Indeed, Mould’s story reveals
the tensions and difficulties that faced American Mormonism as
it sought to establish itself in Ghanaian society.
This article analyzes how Mormonism serves as a useful
lens for understanding the matrix of race, gender, and religion
in post-colonial Ghana. The distinctive path that Mormonism
took in Ghana, free as it was from any Mormon missionary influence, compels students to assess the manner and degree in
which Mormonism qualifies as an African independent church.
Often considered to be a hierarchical, expansionistic faith, Mormonism nevertheless demands a different narrative within the
Ghanaian context, becoming a peculiar form of a church formed
for and by Africans without direct Western influence. The Ghanaian Mormon community subverted the American Mormon
establishment not only by inviting other theological influences
but also by encouraging Ghanaian women to wield the same ecclesiastical authority as their male peers.
PRINT CULTURE AND GHANAIAN MORMONISM
From its foundations, Mormonism has exhibited a marked
ambivalence toward the significance of the written word. That
Joseph Smith produced a large corpus of written sacred text
cannot be dismissed as incidental to his theology. In his “new
translation” of the Bible, Joseph traced writing back to Adam:
“A book of remembrance was kept, in the which was recorded,
in the language of Adam, for it was given unto as many as called
upon God to write by the spirit of inspiration” (Moses 6:5). As a
225
religion that has prided itself on living revelation, Mormonism
has not—indeed, cannot—tether itself too intimately to a process
of sacralizing textuality. Joseph Smith saw language as both a
powerful tool and oppressive burden. “Oh Lord deliver us,” Joseph Smith wrote in 1832, “in thy due time from the little narrow prison” and “totel [sic] darkness of paper pen and ink and a
crooked broken scattered and imperfect language.”5
American Mormonism instilled in West African converts
a new appreciation for the written word. Priscilla SampsonDavis of Cape Coast, Ghana, joined the American church in late
1978 after several years of informal activity and the introduction
of missionaries to the country. After her baptism, she had a vision of Ghanaian Saints shown to her by a messenger dressed
in white. “He asked me to turn around and look at the faces of
the people to see if they were all enjoying the service.” The man
asked her why some had simply “bowed their heads” rather than
sing. She responded: “Because they didn’t go to school and they
can’t read English.” The messenger asked her to “help your sisters and brothers who can’t read and who can’t join you in singing praises to Heavenly Father.” She testified that God called her
“to open the eyes of the illiterate.” She had only limited ability
to write Fante, one of the major dialects of the Akan language
and her native tongue. Determinedly, she became Ghana’s first
translator of Mormon literature into Fante.6
The great anthropologist of religion, Huston Smith, observed that “exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead
knowledge, dead facts” whereas “libraries . . . are full of them.”
Writing, Smith warns, “exacts a price, which is loss of the sense
of what is important.” Oral cultures allow for constant review,
enabling the society to “let what is trivial fade into oblivion.”7 To
5
Joseph Smith, Letter to W.W. Phelps, November 27, 1832, http://
josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/letter-to-william-w-phelps27-november-1832?p=4 (accessed December 21, 2014).
6
E. Dale LeBaron, “Gospel Pioneers in Africa,” Ensign, August
1990, 43.
7
Phil Cousineau, ed., The Way Things Are: Conversations with
226
date, the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City has
served as the primary depository for materials related to Mormonism’s official history. Abounding with documents ranging
from nineteenth-century meeting minutes to autobiographies to
personal correspondence, its documentary collections continue
to be overwhelmingly English in language and Western in origin. Though this imprint of colonialism is unintentional, it can
hardly be scrubbed from the Mormon archival experience.
To suggest that American Mormonism brought written religiosity to Ghana would be incorrect; even the unofficial congregations produced constitutions, kept meeting minutes, and sent
internal letters. In letter after letter, Mormon proselytes exhibit
an unquenchable thirst for the written word. But their thirst had
been created by conditions placed upon them by Western powers; print culture was part of colonial modernity or, one might
say, a modern system of governance by which the West integrated preindustrial peoples into its domain. Historian Sean Hawkins argues that the Lo Dagaa people of northern Ghana lived
in a precolonial world “of experience—knowledge, practice, and
speech” while the colonialists’ world was a “world on paper,” a
“world divorced from reality.” The written word provided colonialists with the “necessary psychological disposition as well
as the practical tools for colonial rule”—enumeration, measurement, and transferability of information.8 Social anthropologist
Jack Goody has observed that “knowability meant governability”
in the British Empire, and “both entailed the extensive use of
the written word.”9 For the colonizer, producing written records
enabled a different style of coercion; in 1917, when a British
officer reported death threats from some locals, his supervisor
warned them “to be careful,” for “the matter had been written
Huston Smith on the Spiritual Life (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003), 34.
8
Sean Hawkins, Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 10.
9
Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 116.
227
down.”10 When American Mormonism came to Ghana, it drew
on colonial forces that had been redefining Ghanaian culture for
two generations.
Was Mormonism and its associated writing system a colonizing force? Perhaps, but it did not represent the kind that
most scholars have associated with the missionizing impulse.
The theological significance Mormonism placed on the written word demanded a degree of Westernization, and Ghanaian
Mormons like Priscilla Sampson-Davis willingly collaborated in
the process. Its first converts were not local visionaries but educators invested in achieving and retaining access to their former
British colonial powers.
Ghanaian Mormons believed that Western powers—both
religious and secular—promised them post-independence success, a view that ran counter to the grain of how Ghana saw itself
as a leader of postcolonial Africa. Reverend Martin Luther King
attended Ghana’s official independence proceedings in 1957 and
prayed that God would “help us to see the insights that come
from this new nation.” King had “thought about the Britain that
could boast, ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’” and now
observed that “the sun hardly ever rises on the British Empire.”
In 1965, Ghana’s former president, Kwame Nkrumah, warned
that Ghana might be “in theory, independent” with “all the outward trappings of international sovereignty.” But “in reality, its
economic system and thus its political policy is directed from
outside.”11 For many African Christians of the same period, the
defining issue was “how to be both Christians and Africans at
the same time.”12 In 1969, a pioneer of black liberation thought,
James H. Cone, argued that “Christianity is not alien to Black
10
Hawkins, Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana, 11.
Kwame Nkrumah quoted in Gareth Austin and Gerardo Serra,
“West Africa,” in Vincent Barett, ed., Routledge History of the History of
Global Economic Thought (New York: Routledge, 2014), 247.
12
Harris W. Mobley, The Ghanaian’s Image of the Missionary: An
Analysis of the Published Critiques of Christian Missionaries by Ghanaians,
1897–1965 (London: Brill, 1970), 110.
11
228
Power; it is Black Power.”13
The relationship of African Christianities to white powers
might be taxonomized—and complicated—based on the nature
of their fidelity to texts. Bengt Sundkler, the noted historian of
the African Independent Church, identified two kinds of African
churches that he identified as “Ethiopian” and “Zionist.” Ethiopian churches grew largely from African adherents to European
churches who established their own congregations when they experienced neglect from their European clerics. Doctrinally orthodox and structured, these groups differed relatively little from their
European counterparts, save that Africans ran the churches rather
than Europeans. In contrast, Zionist churches made no claim to
doctrinal orthodoxy nor did they insist on fidelity to a particular organizational structure. They celebrated spontaneity and the
intermingling of local customs with tenets and practices of the
Christian faith.14 Above all, the Zionists endeavored to create
pure societies that could transcend the evils of this world. More,
they imagined their theology to be tied to a particular location, to
a physical space in the Ghanaian geography.
The convergence between these two identities depended in
part on how a group used religious texts. Ghanaian theologian
Kwame Bediako holds that the translation of biblical texts into
indigenous languages strengthened indigeneity among Zionist Christian sects. Texts served as “an independent yardstick by
which to test, and sometimes, to reject what Western missionaries taught and practiced.” Translated texts allowed new converts
to develop “new, indigenous forms of Christianity.”15
But Sundkler’s categorization might also be relevant in the
Mormon context. Sundkler himself acknowledges that “there
13
James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll,
N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2001), 38.
14
Bengt G. M. Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (Cambridge,
England: James Clarke and Co., 2004), 53–59.
15
Kwame Bediako, Epilogue, in Ype Schaaf, ed., On Their Way
Rejoicing: The History and Role of the Bible in Africa (Carlisle, England:
Paternoster, 1994), 246.
229
are cross-relations and constant inter-dependence between these
organizations” and that even “within one particular organization
which is in principle either Zionist or Ethiopian there may be
strong local tendencies towards the other type of independent
Church.”16 Gambian theologian Lamin Sanneh argues that not
only texts but also contexts can be translated across the colonial
curtain. “I see translation,” Sanneh submits, “as introducing a dynamic and pluralist factor into questions of the essence of the
religion.” Translation goes well “beyond the narrow, technical
bounds of textual work.” The African vernacularization of Christianity, Sanneh argues, is “tantamount to adopting indigenous
cultural criteria for the message, a piece of radical indigenization far greater than the standard portrayal of mission as Western cultural imperialism.” Indeed, “Christian activity in modern
Africa has taken place in ground worked suitably by Vernacular
translation.”17
The translation process, Sanneh suggests, demands that
scholars of African Christianity rethink how religious imperialism functions. Mormonism’s deep-rooted celebration of the
translation of sacred texts—the Book of Mormon, the Old Testament, and the Book of Abraham—invites us to reconsider
Sundkler’s identifying attributes of African independent churches. Mormonism does not fit neatly into either Sundkler’s Ethiopian or Zionist church. While Ghanaian Mormons sought for
the validation of their American patrons, they also immediately
and consistently integrated local customs into their worship services. Though formed independently from American Mormonism, it actively embraced American Mormon iconography and
celebrated Mormon literature.
CONSTRUCTING AFRICA IN MORMON AMERICA
Throughout the nineteenth century, Western countries con16
Sundkler, Bantu Prophets, 55.
Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on
Culture (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989), 3–4.
17
230
sidered Africa to be a dank hole of civilization, the “dark continent” not worthy of acknowledgement, except as an exotic locale
for the adventuring, safari-going class. It was the continent that
induced Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to descend
into madness, crying out: “The horror, the horror!” moments before death.
When European powers colonized Africa in the late nineteenth century, one of their primary goals was to prepare it for
the expansion of Western capital. Mormons, once colonizers
of the West, lived in Ghana primarily as colonists as well. Helen Merkeley, a former University of Utah graduate, lived in the
Gold Coast with her husband, Lon, then serving in the U.S. Air
Force.18 A. Q. Smart-Abbey, a Ghanaian public affairs official,
visited the University of Utah in 1952, hoping to become acquainted with “all sides of American life, good and bad.”19 Virginia Cutler, a professor of home economics at Brigham Young
University, assisted in the development of home economics at
the University of Ghana and delivered its commencement address in 1969.20
As Africa began to decolonize in the 1950s and 1960s,
the rhetoric changed. In 1958, the University of Utah hosted
an international exposition in which Ghanaian students wore
“brightly colored robes lightly”; the women were “heavily clad”
with jewelry and their “blousy gowns touch[ed] the floor.”21 Oc18
“L. B. Merkeley Family Here from Africa,” Salt Lake Telegram,
October 2, 1950, 17.
19
“Foreign Study Group Visits U.,” [University of ] Utah Daily
Chronicle, May 22, 1952, 1.
20
“ID Educator to Speak at BPW Meeting,” Ogden StandardExaminer, October 23, 1969, 43. For more on Mormon expatriates
in Africa, see also Russell Stevenson, “Sonia’s Awakening: White
Mormon Expatriates in Africa and the Dismantling of Mormonism’s
Racial Consensus, 1852–1978,” Journal of Mormon History 40, no. 4
(Fall 2014): 209–46.
21
Linda Broadbent and Lynne Croft, “Delegates Display Native
Costumes,” [University of ] Utah Daily Chronicle, April 19, 1958, 1.
231
casionally, a Ghanaian would visit rural Utah to study irrigation,
as soil preservationist Emmanuel Koney Okpoti did in August
1963.22 But few saw much hope for Ghana. When Ghanaian
President Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s first elected president
fell to a military coup in 1966, Mormons—like most Americans—lost hope for a genuine democracy in the fledging country.
The Davis County Clipper, published in Bountiful, Utah, opined
that Americans had wrongly expected “instant democracy” in
Ghana, especially after “having thrust it upon them.” After all,
“these are nations where criticism of all whites is frequent, and
also much criticism of the United States is heard.” It would be
“many years before we can put much hope for stability or democracy in this part of the world, idealistic nations to the contrary.”23
Obviously, opinions varied. Dr. G. Homer Durham, a Mormon political scientist teaching in Arizona, visited Africa in
1966 and returned optimistic about the possibilities of decolonization: “At last new and significant things are happening. . . .
[T]he numbers of Dutch, German, and British businessmen,
among others, who boarded every plane and checked into every hotel as I did gave evidence that private enterprise is also
stirring.” As an educational consultant to African governments,
Durham proclaimed that “Africa is no longer the dark continent
of Stanley and Livingstone. It is alive and moving, anxious and
willing (at least in the field of education) to receive help and
guidance in these times.”24 But Durham was an exception. Mormons, like Americans generally, believed that Africa lagged far
behind the modern world. BYU recreation professor Alma Heaton feared that African influence could degrade Mormon youth.
He “prophesied” that rock ’n’ roll would result in dancing that
“deteriorate[d] back to the original hollow-log sound . . . resem22
“African Visitor Studies Irrigation,” Garfield County News,
August 22, 1963, 1.
23
“African Turmoil,” Davis County Clipper, March 18, 1966, 12.
24
G. Homer Durham, “In These Times,” Improvement Era 69, no.
10 (October 1966): 891.
232
b[ing] the African stomp dance.”25
For some, rural Africa proved to be a fitting backdrop for
discovering the all-expansive reach of the (white) Mormon
community. In November 1970, Rendell M. Mabey was a Utah
attorney who enjoyed safari-style hunting, not realizing that he
would return eight years later as one of Ghana’s first American
Mormon missionaries. He had met another Mormon in what
was then Rhodesia but who had slipped from upholding Mormonism’s high personal standards. Disapprovingly, Mabey wrote
in an Improvement Era article: “I learned how important it is
that we always live our religion. If one wanted to hide from his
religion, I suppose he could not find a better place than in central Africa. . . . [But] the world is not big enough for any member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to find a
place where he can hide from the responsibilities of his membership.”26
In the United States, Mormon leaders’ views on Africa also
ran the gamut. In 1962, word from missionaries Marvin Jones
and LaMar Williams had made its way to Church President
David O. McKay that throngs of Nigerians were eager to join
the Church’s ranks. McKay found the prospects promising but
clearly saw that a mission would be unsustainable if male members could not be ordained to the priesthood. “The Lord will
have to do it. . . . Only the Lord can change it,” he told his first
counselor Hugh B. Brown. Brown later admitted that he “secretly hoped that the time would come when we could give them the
Aaronic Priesthood” as a prequel to full ordination.27
Others were less open to compromise or alternatives. They
had adopted the belief, which had hardened into doctrine during
25
Ward M. Vander Griend, “Alma Heaton: Professor of Fun” (PhD
diss., Brigham Young University, 1981), 77.
26
Rendell M. Mabey, “An African Adventure,” Improvement Era
73, no. 11 (November 1970): 141.
27
Gregory A. Prince, “David O. McKay and Blacks: Building the
Foundation for the 1978 Revelation,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon
Thought 35, no 1 (Spring 2002): 148.
233
the presidency of Brigham Young, that African people’s preparation for the gospel message remained unfinished.28 The most
common explanation fell back on a lack of valor in premortal
life. In 1967, Elder Bruce R. McConkie told an Institute of Religion class at the University of Utah that among unborn spirits
were some destined to “be the greatest mathematicians” or “have
the most persuasive personalities.” However, they were “lacking
in spirituality, and as a consequence,” he continued, writing the
next phrase vigorously on the board: “they’re Negroes.” The class
gasped in shock.29
When the white Mormon establishment came into dialogue
with Africans, they brought with them a mythos of their own.
During President McKay’s visit to South Africa in 1954—the
first by any Church president—he articulated how Mormons had
come to see blackness. When premortal man had been given a
choice between having agency under God or having universal
and unconditional salvation under Lucifer’s plan, a certain class of
humanity, McKay maintained, had been hesitant to follow God’s
plan. “Like certain molecules attract each other, our pre-existent
spirits were attracted to certain parents because of a likeness or
spiritual attraction.” The spirits born to Cain “chose that lineage
and were willing to give up certain privileges.” The missionary recording McKay’s sermon stood in awe of McKay’s teachings: “It
was so beautiful and clear how he explained it that you want to
get out and shout this gospel . . . from the housetops.”30 President
Heber C. Meeks, head of the Southern States Mission, believed
that an understanding of one’s race would be joyous news: “Would
not the negro be a happier race,” he asked “if they knew their racial
status and enjoyed the blessings of membership in the Church, its
28
Russell W. Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global
History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830–2013 (Salt Lake City: Greg
Kofford, 2014), chaps. 2, 9–10.
29
Bruce R. McConkie, Lecture at the University of Utah Institute
of Religion, October 9, 1967, AV 191, LDS Church History Library.
30
Curtis Tracy, Journal, January 17, 1954, LDS Church History
Library.
234
purifying influence in their lives . . . than in their present tragic
plite [sic] in the world?”31
African American Latter-day Saints similarly expressed
a variety of opinion on their place in the priesthood. Ruffin
Bridgeforth, a founding member of the Genesis Group (the
LDS Church’s official auxiliary for African American Saints),
told New York Times reporter Wallace Turner that, while he
hoped to receive the priesthood, he was “not going to demand
something if it could destroy me.”32 Douglas Wallace, an LDS
attorney in Vancouver, Washington, baptized Larry Lester, an
African American, in a hotel swimming pool and ordained him
to the priesthood afterward in a protest that took a more radical
form of disaffection with Church policy.33 For African American Mormons, the struggle was as it always had been: a fight to
regain the personal, mental, and spiritual sovereignty stripped
from them long ago through the slave trade. As W.E.B. DuBois
had said nearly two generations earlier, American blacks struggled with their “twoness,—an American, a Negro, two souls, two
thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one
dark body.”34
SPIRITS AND SPACE IN AFRICAN MORMONISM
Historians Jean Allman and John Parker have used the
Tongnaab shrine, a shrine affiliated with the Tallensi community in northern Ghana, to demonstrate the power Ghanaians
wielded to define their own religious practices, even within a co31
Heber C. Meeks, “Report on Visit to Cuba,” Heber C. Meeks
Papers, MS 1677, Box 2, fd. 10, L. Tom Perry Special Collections,
Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah
(hereafter Perry Special Collections).
32
Wallace Turner, “Mormons Budge Slightly on Anti-Black
Theology,” Palm Beach Post, April 16, 1972, C10.
33
Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness, 145–46.
34
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks (Rockville, Md.: Manor,
2008), 12.
235
lonial framework.35 Paul Gifford’s work on Pentecostal Christianity argues that Pentecostalism has failed to “modernize” Ghanaian society into a society stripped of superstition and mythology.36 Birgit Meyer’s work on religion and modernity in the Ewe
population demonstrates that mission efforts among Ghanaian
populations cannot be cast as mere agents of modernity but must
be understood as a lived religious experience among the proselytized.37 Ghanaian theologian, Christian G. Baeta observed that
one reason for the failure of many African Christianities is that
“our people here live with their dead. . . . We have left them dangling in the air between two worlds, without an anchorage or
spiritual home, not knowing who they are and where they really
belong.”38
Theologian Harold W. Turner has bemoaned the fact that
“we have forgotten that history always has a geography.” Christians, Turner maintains, “need a theology of space itself ” beyond
“doctrines of the church, its ministry, sacraments, and worship,
beyond even theological accounts of work, of matter, and of art
that are involved in any theology of the church building.”39 But
Mormonism always has been more than the sum of its texts or
even its prophetic tradition, as distinctive as they may be. With
a pantheon of Caucasian leaders and American sites, Mormon
theology enjoyed a theological particularity that most other
Western faith systems in Ghana did not. How could Ghanaian
35
Jean Allman and John Parker, Tongnaab: The History of a West
African God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
36
Paul Gifford, Ghana’s New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a
Globalizing African Economy(Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2004).
37
Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity
among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University
Press, 1999).
38
Mobley, The Ghanaian’s Image of the Missionary, 110.
39
Harold W. Turner, From Temple to Meeting House: The Phenomenology of Theology of Places of Worship (Boston: Walter De Gruyter,
1979), 6.
236
converts to Mormonism reappropriate a narrative so foreign to
their time and place—and in some cases, enthusiastically? As
one Ghanaian wrote to a Church leader: “I pray that this letter
reaches you while in Salt Lake City, the land I wish my bare foot
to walk on its sand, soon.”40
Most African churches had separated themselves from the
West, but the Mormon establishment had separated itself from
Africa. In 1919 the Musama Disco Christo Church, took form
when its founder, Joseph William Egyanka Appiah, broke from
the Methodist Church after seeing a vision of three angels placing a crown of glory on his head. He adopted the new prophetic name of “Jemisimiham,” became a member of Ghana’s Aborigines’ Protection Society, and provided consultation to Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah.41 That same year, James
Kwame Nkansah, a prosperous cocoa farmer, founded the African Faith Tabernacle, a church fashioned after Philadelphia’s
Faith Tabernacle Church; in 1953, Nkansah separated from the
faith and was credited with introducing the African drum into
Christian services.42 In 1942, Charles Kobla Wovenu, a Presbyterian government bureaucrat, established the Apostolic Revelation Society after receiving a revelation giving him authority to preside over his own congregation.43 By 1970, more than
420 newly originated congregations dotted the Ghanaian land40
Clement Osekre, Letter to Edwin Cannon, November 29, 1979,
Edwin Cannon Papers, MS 21299, Box 1, fd. 2, LDS Church History
Library.
41
Abamfo O. Atiemo, “Jehu-Appiah,” in Peter Clarke, ed.,
Encyclopedia of New Religious Movements (New York: Routledge,
2006), 314.
42
Robert Yaw Owusu, Kwame Nkrumah’s Liberation Thought: A
Paradigm for Religious Advocacy in Contemporary Ghana (Trenton, N.J.:
Africa World Press, 2006), 225 note 28.
43
The surname “Wovenu” was adopted according to the dictates
of a revelation. For an early study of the prophetic tradition in Ghana,
see C. G. Baëta, “Prophetism in Ghana: A Study of Some Spiritual
Churches” (PhD diss., University of London, 1959).
237
scape. Five years later, nearly one-third of Ghana’s Christian
population participated in recently formed religious sects, most
of which could be identified as “utopian,” “reformist,” “messianic,” “revivalist,” or “charismatic.”44 When American Mormonism
entered Africa in October 1978, it was shouldering its way into
what N. A. Etherington called “a crowded field” of new religious
movements in Africa. Only the year earlier, Harold W. Turner’s
Bibliography of New Religious Movements in Primal Societies provides more than 1,900 citations.45
As McConkie and others accepted a racial order within
Mormon theology, Ghanaian Mormons were establishing their
own ecclesiastical structures separate from American oversight.
West African society had long been a vibrant milieu of Christian denominations, teeming with locally originated Christian
sects. According to Christian missionary Harris Mobley, “Indigenous beliefs continued to hold an attraction for many people
in post-independence Ghana.”46 One Ghanaian Christian, E. A.
Asamoa, noted that Christianity needed “to take the world of
spirits or supernatural beings seriously” if it wanted to survive.47
GHANAIAN MORMONISM
Ghanaian Mormonism germinated in an even more eclectic context of interreligious interactions. In 1964, schoolmaster
Raphael Abraham F. Mensah, a “Christian of rare fabric,” visited
Great Britain where he first encountered Mormonism through
a friend, Lilian Clark, a Sufi mystic and visionary, then taking
the missionary lessons in Penhalls and in which he also participated.48 Feeling that his acceptance of Mormonism granted
44
Jose Antunes da Silva, “African Independent Churches: Origin
and Development,” Anthropos, Bd. 88, H. 4/6 (1993): 395–96.
45
N. A. Etherington, “The Historical Sociology of Independent
Churches in South Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 10, no. 2
(1979): 108.
46
Mobley, The Ghanaian’s Image of the Missionary, 112.
47
Ibid., 111.
48
Lilian Clark, Letter to Edwin Cannon, September 25, 1979,
238
him authority to establish ecclesiastical units, Mensah returned
to Ghana in 1967 where he began expounding Mormon teachings. One convert, John Cobbinah, recalls that Mensah had set
up a table in a public square where he “preached to anyone who
would listen.”49 Mensah’s first converts included Joseph Johnson
and Rebecca Mould. Both were members of the Acadwa Church
in Ghana. Johnson had “wonderful revelations” confirming the
truthfulness of Mormon claims, including a vision of “numerous angels with trumpets singing songs of praises to God.”50 All
believed that Mormonism could revolutionize Ghanaian society,
hoping that it would provide “a new order of civilization.” Given
that Ghanaian civil society had been rocked by a series of revolutionary coups, their heartfelt desire to establish a stable society
is unsurprising.51
Rebecca Mould’s worship services are the best-documented
and most colorful of the Mormon congregations in Ghana. They
were a syncretic blend of American Mormonism, Ghanaian Catholicism, and charismatic Pentecostalism. Calling themselves
the “Devine [sic] Order of Mount Tabborar,” the congregation
alternatively gave “victory prayers, read texts by Joseph Smith,
and sang hymns. During the hymns, the Prophetess administered ritualistic “cleanings” which, adherents believed, “shall
LDS Church History Library. Accounts differ on where he was first
exposed to Mormonism; several accounts suggest that he received
literature from a white woman while visiting Great Britain, though
another account suggests that he was baptized a member in the
United States. He likely received literature from Joseph Dadzie. “The
History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ghana
and Takoradi District,” Joseph Dadzie Papers, LDS Church History
Library. See also John Cobbinah, Fireside Address, 2001, typescript of
notes by Matthew Heiss, Church History Library.
49
John Cobbinah, Fireside Address, March 1, 2001, LDS Church
History Library.
50
Joseph Johnson, Autobiography, LDS Church History Library.
51
Mensah, Correspondence, June 7, 1971, LDS Church History
Library.
239
wash away . . . all my sins.”52 Janath Cannon reported that congregants had hired an Anglican choir director to direct their music and acquired “red graduation hat-and-gown outfits” for their
attire.53 Mould’s secretary, Joseph Dadzie, served as her archivist
and scribe. When Mould established her congregation’s steering
committee, she did not model it on traditional Christian congregations but rather more like a secret order. During the steering
committee’s first meeting at the Temple Hall, she again led them
in a commitment of absolute secrecy, “warning that any member who reveals the secrets of the Committee’s meetings goes
against the laws of God.”54
While Mould was building her congregation, its leading
male members took separate steps to consolidate their ecclesiastical authority. In April 1969, seven men gathered in Accra
to draft the first Constitution for their “Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter Day Saints.” The constitution delineated the process
of Church governance, including a discussion of the character
of the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods and the duties assigned to each. At no point does the constitution suggest either gender or race as a consideration for ordination. Its writers seemed completely unaware that the LDS Church officially
barred men of African ancestry from priesthood ordination. Instead, the Melchizedek Priesthood “has the right of presidency,
and power over all the offices in the CHURCH in administering
spiritual things.” Though Abraham Mensah had named himself
the “presiding bishop,” he acknowledged Mould’s supreme leadership over her congregation.
Although resistance to female authority was not part of the
documented procedure, it was, not surprisingly, part of Ghanian culture. Janath Cannon recorded in her diary a violent incident that had occurred eight years earlier in March 1970. Joseph
52
Kweikuma Program, n.d., Dadzie Papers.
Janath Russell Cannon, Journal, May 27, 1979, LDS Church
History Library.
54
“Inauguration of the Church Committee,” Meeting Minutes,
July 8, 1971, Dadzie Papers.
53
240
Johnson’s group was regularly holding “harvest meetings” in an
effort to attract converts. Martha Mills co-led a prayer group
with a man named Koomson in Mori, a seaside village on the
south-central Ghanian coast. Johnson recalled that after Mills
converted and persuaded her prayer group to rename itself the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Koomson expressed
his strident disapproval of the new name and, with a group of
other men, came to Mills’s home to compel her to change the
name back. When she refused, the men “used force, beating her
with a club and wounding her in the face.” Her brother stopped
the attack and called the authorities. Koomson then moved to
another town where he continued to “harass them in other ways.”
They “took away all the chairs from Sr. Mills’ meetingplace,” but
Mills “remained patient and faithful, keeping her flock together
with her strong testimony that this Church was true . . . and they
must not change the name.” Their firmness earned the respect of
Johnson and other LDS Church leaders.55
In the summer of 1972, LDS Church leaders in Accra considered implementing a proposal for “seizing [forbidding] women from giving revelations and prophecies.” Apparently, the leaders considered this policy unworkable and replaced it with one
demanding that all “dreams [and] revelations, etc. must first [be]
reported to the Pastor.”56 It is not clear whether the members
accepted this proposed policy. Mould’s disciple, Abraham Mensah, began to form a “steering committee” and asked Mould to
appoint three members to it.”57 She complied, naming Joseph
Dadzie, Samuel Mensah, and Joseph Addo-Yobbo. All of the
other committee members were also men.58
55
Cannon, Journal, September 9, 1978.
Meeting Minutes, n.d. [ca. fall 1972], Dadzie Papers.
57
Clement Osekre, Letter to Rebecca Mould, September 11, 1972,
Dadzie Papers.
58
Elders Council Meeting Minutes, September 16, 1972, Dadzie
Papers. Janath Cannon would later remark snidely that Addo-Yobbo
“gets carried away with his own eloquence.” Cannon, Diary, October
4, 1979.
56
241
After this steering committee held its first meeting in August 1972, Mensah proposed electing a national “high council”
of “Twelve Apostles” to guide its affairs. Mould was elected to
this high council with no dissenting votes.59 In addition to her
pioneering efforts and charismatic gifts, the fact that she owned
the property on which the meetinghouse stood might have enhanced her authority. According to her church’s 1969 constitution, a member “may donate his/her property or a part of it to the
Church, and that Member may be appointed an administrator
of such property for the benefit of the Church.“60 Furthermore,
Mould’s signature was required before money could be “deposited or withdrawn in the name of the Church” at the local agricultural bank.61
According to Mensah, he and others constantly urged her to
cooperate more fully with other branch leaders. In September
1973, she complained that her leadership of the congregation
in the village of Kweikuma had gone unrecognized, and Mensah reassured her, invoking particularly vivid Mormon imagery:
“Let me definitely assure you that when the record of history
and the roll call of honour of the Ghana Mission are kept up
yonder, your good name and the great work being done will also
be recalled into living memory on plates of shining gold.”62 Joseph Dadzie, her secretary, mentions that she only “occasionally
mentioned [the Book of Mormon] when preaching,” while other
leaders urged greater use of it. Clement Osekre scolded her theological innovation: “If we shelve the real practices of the LATTER-DAY SAINTS and invent other doctrines, I am afraid we
are not doing Mormonism,” though Osekre did not elaborate.
He felt certain that Mormonism “is predestined to permeate the
whole world—the Community of Nations.” Osekre considered
59
Meeting Minutes, ca. August 1972, Dadzie Papers.
Constitution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
April 27, 1969, Dadzie Papers.
61
Dadzie to the Manager, September 30, 1977, Dadzie Papers.
62
Mensah, Letter to Rebecca Mould, March 1, 1972, Dadzie
Papers.
60
242
it to be “an Eye-Opener, revealing the Existence of God; Man’s
way of life on earth and the Achievement here of the Eternal
Glories of the Kingdom of God.”63
Mould, called “The Prophetess” by her colleagues, joined the
Church in 1967 and immediately attracted a devoted following of approximately fifty disciples. Also committed to affiliating themselves with the American church, Mould’s Mormons
requested literature of various kinds, ranging from pamphlets
about Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith and his early visionary experiences to copies of Mormon scripture such as the Book
of Mormon. They met in a member’s home and held enthusiastic worship services that included “drumming, dancing, clapping
of hands, [and] collection.” Some men “doubted the true organization as was then set up, the leadership being the women,”
but Mould could command an audience and quickly won their
trust.64 In 1971, the congregation built a “wooden structure” they
called the “temple hall” on land she owned in Kweikuma.65
The movement attracted considerable criticism from surrounding Christian communities. “A lot of churches in Ghana
took notice of us and started calling us names,” Johnson remembered, including labeling their movement an “anti-Christ organization.” Persecution became so intense that “we nearly gave up
from the very outset.” Only through “much prayer and fasting
and . . . the guidance of the Holy Spirit” could they endure it, remembered Johnston. “[We] waxed strong in faith and continued
to preach the gospel without flinching.”66
Mould’s followers yearned for community and American
recognition. Formal affiliation with institutional Mormonism
seemed to promise it to them. The “light of Mormonism” ex63
Osekre, Letter to Rebecca Mould, September 5, 1973, Dadzie
Papers.
64
Dadzie, “The History of the Church in Ghana.”
65
Inaugural Minutes, July 8, 1971, Dadzie Papers.
66
Joseph W. B. Johnson, “The History of the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ghana,” n.d., n.p., photocopy in LDS
243
tended beyond the veracity of Joseph Smith’s account or the
Book of Mormon. Visions and scriptures bestowed by divine
messengers were common in independent churches, but Mormonism seemed to offer the means of building a firm community that would be the means for the “refinement” of Ghanaian society. Mould’s follows hoped to develop their educational infrastructure and longed for the Church to establish an educational
institution in Ghana “just as it . . . ha[d] done in Mexico, Tonga,
and the Argentine.”67 Frustrated by a lack of official response,
one of Mensah’s early converts, Clement Osekre, chastised LaMar Williams, the LDS Church’s early liaison with the African
communities: “Ghana SHOULD HAVE HAD a Missionary by
now to enable members to be baptized.”68
At this point, Ghana’s independent Mormons either did not
know about the priesthood ban for black men or discounted it.
Ignoring the tepid response from Salt Lake City, Clement Osekre enthusiastically proposed in 1972 to LaMar Williams: “We
are contemplating sending Dr. Mensah to Salt Lake if possible, to be ordained in order that the Ghana Mission will also
have the opportunity of enjoying the blessing and power of the
Priesthood.” The time had come, Osekre insisted, for the “radical consideration by the General Authorities to take the needful
steps in recognizing the Ghana Mission.” Mensah added that the
Saints “expect[ed] . . . full membership rights and privileges, such
as baptism, celebration of marriages and burial rights.”69 Without Western support, Mensah warned, the work would continue
to be “unstable and lacking in integrity.”70 In a follow-up note,
Osekre warned that the branches were losing members quick67
Mensah, Letter, June 7, 1971, Ghana and Nigeria Files, LDS
68
Clement Osekre, Letter to LaMar Williams, May 14, 1972,
Lynn Hilton Ghana and Nigeria Files, LDS Church History Library.
69
Osekre, Letter to LaMar Williams, May 14, 1972, LDS Church
History Library.
70
Abraham F. Mensah, Letter to First Presidency, October 21,
1970, LDS Church History Library.
244
ly.71 What, if any, response Osekre received is not known.
In July 1974 Joseph Dadzie begged President Spencer W.
Kimball: “The Church in Ghana is just like an Orphan who has
nobody to care for his welfare. . . . Please do not shatter our
faith.”72 The new president of the Church’s International Mission, James E. Faust, denied Osekre’s request, stating dismissively: “The Church is unable to send any missionaries to that part
of the world at this time. However, we will certainly keep in
mind your request.”73 For four years, the Ghanaian Saints labored alone, even as American leadership inched ever closer to
incorporating the Ghanaian Saints into the body of the Church.
Mould’s secretary, Joseph Dadzie, repeated the theme of being
orphaned in a letter to President Spencer W. Kimball in July
1977, comparing “the Church in Ghana” to “an Orphan who has
nobody to care for his welfare.”74 Johnson also felt alone: “The
Lord knew we had no one to help us, so he helped us through
revelation, daily revelation” as they “tr[ied] to do the little that
the Lord taught us to do.”75
Meanwhile, Faust sensed the changing tides. Dadzie wrote
that Faust “ordered the Church Distribution centere to send
some materials.” In November 1977, Dadzie received a new
shipment of Church literature, including “2 Melchizedek Priesthood manuals.”76 In the spring of 1978, Faust showed President
71
Clement Osekre, Correspondence, October 26, 1970, LDS
72
Dadzie, Letter to Spencer W. Kimball, July 15, 1977, Dadzie
Papers.
73
James E. Faust, Letter to Joseph Dadzie, August 31, 1977,
Dadzie Papers.
74
Joseph Dadzie, Letter to Spencer W. Kimball, July 15, 1977,
Dadzie Papers.
75
Jill Johnson, “Ghana,” part 1 of Our Story: Pioneers in West Africa, DVD, produced by Jill Johnson, rough draft, cited in “A People Prepared,” https://history.lds.org/article/ghana-pioneer-jwb-johnson?lang=eng (accessed March 4, 2015).
76
Joseph Dadzie, “History of the Church,” Dadzie Papers.
245
Kimball a stack of letters he had received in a single month from
the Ghanaians; Faust later recalled that one spoke of a “boy’s
greatest hope . . . to one day sit in the Salt Lake Tabernacle and
there hear the Lord’s prophets speak.”77 Although Faust’s response continued to be a noncommittal refusal—or even a discussion of reasons for the continued refusal, Dadzie and others
were pleased: “A new spirit entered the church,” Dadzie remembered fondly, once they had “receiv[ed] these materials and more
especially hear[d] from a General Authority of the Church.”78
In June 1978 the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve
issued a proclamation that priesthood offices would be conferred
on all worthy male members of the Church; temple ordinances would also be made available to worthy female members. As
with the main body of the Saints, he learned of the revelation
through a media outlet—in his case, the British Broadcasting
Company. Upon hearing the news, Joseph Johnson “burst into
tears of joy.”79 He “jumped and started crying and rejoicing in
the Lord with tears that now is the time that the Lord will send
missionaries to Ghana and to other parts of Africa to receive the
priesthood.”80 Book of Mormon verses that had referred to “dark
colour being a curse” had, not surprisingly, struck the Ghanaians
as disconcerting. These verses “confused us,” Dadzie recalled, but
their “doubts were cleared” upon learning of the reversal of the
ban.81
The Quorum of the Twelve during this period sought to consolidate its power, and Church leaders like McKay and particu77
James P. Bell, In the Strength of the Lord: The Life and Teachings of
James E. Faust (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1999), 122–23.
78
Dadzie, “History of the Church,” Dadzie Papers.
79
Joseph Johnson, quoted in E. Dale LeBaron, “Official Declaration
2: Revelation on the Priesthood,” in Sperry Symposium Classics: The
Doctrine and Covenants, edited by Craig K. Manscill (Provo, Utah:
BYU Religious Studies Center, 2004), 345.
80
Qtd. in “A People Prepared,” https://history.lds.org/article/
ghana-pioneer-jwb-johnson?lang=eng (accessed March 4, 2015).
81
Dadzie, “History of the Church.”
246
larly his successors—Harold B. Lee and Spencer W. Kimball—
hoped to “correlate” Church praxis and doctrine throughout the
world. Before World War II, auxiliary subordinate organizations
had enjoyed a high degree of autonomy. Loren C. Dunn, a member of the First Council of the Seventy, noted that the Mutual
Improvement Associations for teenagers were “in some respects
. . . almost a church of their own. They had their own programs
and their lives.”82
In 1960, Harold B. Lee, hoping to rein in these auxiliaries,
had tasked BYU education professor Antone K. Romney with
“coordinating and revising all of the lesson plans of all Auxiliary
Organizations.” At October general conference in 1961, President McKay announced plans to “correlate[e] our studies,” and
Lee established a “Correlation Committee,” a panel of bureaucrats that by 1964 had grown so powerful that McKay’s counselor, N. Eldon Tanner felt “the program should be very carefully
checked before we go forward.”83 By 1971, Lee’s efforts had produced a systemized vision of “priesthood home teaching; family
home evening; unified social services; the expansion and clarification of the missionary responsibilities of the seventies quorums,” and a long list of other structural changes in Church governance.84
Ghanaian Saints probably knew little about the American Church's “correlating” efforts; however, the leaders on the
ground sensed the Church’s firm organizational structure and
began strengthening their bureaucracy well before the arrival of
the missionaries. The Ghanaians cared about what American
Mormons thought. Dadzie asked American leaders if they were
to celebrate Easter; Williams responded that Dadzie should
hold the “regular program that we hold each Sunday, with the
exception that short sermons are given on the subject of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”85 In 1974, Mensah, Osekre, and oth82
Loren C. Dunn, quoted in Prince, David O. McKay, 143.
Ibid., 155.
84
Ibid., 157.
85
LaMar S. Williams, Letter to Joseph Dadzie, May 8, 1974.
83
247
ers implemented the “Woman [sic] Relief Society,” which Osekre called “very vital to the success of the Church.”86 Ironically,
the creation of this purportedly more powerful position reduced
Mould’s influence, leaving her excluded from information channels. When Mensah sought to communicate with the congregation in 1974, he did not write to “the Prophetess” directly but to
her secretary, Joseph Dadzie. Hoping to avoid completely alienating Mould, Mensah’s secretary, Clement Osekre, expressed his
“sincere greetings to Prophetess Mould in which Dr. Mensah
joins.”87
While it is tempting to suppose that Mould’s Ghanaian Mormonism brimmed with spontaneity, not all Ghanaian Mormons
felt so inclined. Men such as Clement Osekre hoped to impose
orthodoxy on the local level in tandem with American leaders’
efforts to systematize Mormonism in the American church. In
December 1978, the Cannons and Mabeys would arrive as the
first official Mormon missionaries to West Africa; here, established American Mormonism would converge—and clash—in
the rebirth of an American faith transplanted into Africa.
And there would be casualties.
INSTITUTIONALIZATION
In the fall of 1978, the Mabeys and Cannons were called to
launch formal missionary efforts in Nigeria and Ghana. Both
couples had a significant presence in Utah affairs and the LDS
Church. Rendell’s father, Charles R. Mabey, had been Utah’s
governor (1921–25), and Rendell, in addition to his law practice, had served as the Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader for the Utah State Legislature. More, he had served
as president over the Swiss Mission (1965–68). Edwin (“Ted”)
Cannon had also served three terms in Utah’s House of Rep86
Osekre, Letter to Joseph Dadzie, August 26, 1974, Dadzie
Papers. Based on the records in the Dadzie papers, no women held
hold positions of power in the congregation.
87
Ibid.
248
resentatives, had also served as president of the Swiss Mission
(1971–74) and as counselor in the International Mission, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, that covered all countries in
which the Church did not have a formal missionary presence.
He also had owned and managed the Salt Lake Stamp Company for over thirty years. His wife, Janath Russell Cannon, had
been serving as first counselor in the Relief Society general presidency at the time of their call.88
The Cannons had long shown signs of skepticism regarding
popular Mormon notions on race. In the spring of 1972, physician Lester Bush, author of what would later become the famed
Dialogue article, “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine” (a piece which
questioned whether the priesthood restriction could be traced
to Joseph Smith), lived in Cyprus, then a part of the Swiss Mission. He hosted the Cannons and found them to be “remarkably
open.” Bush found that Janath Cannon “had her own reservations about some popular ‘Church’ teachings on blacks.” Janath
found Bush’s work intriguing and “offered to index [Bush’s] references.”89
Both couples, all of whom were over the age of sixty, accepted the calling and left Salt Lake City for West Africa after a brief month of “hurried and frantic preparation.”90 Rachel
Mabey expressed both anxiety and confidence about her mission’s significance: “I can’t help feeling a little apprehensive and
nervous. . . . I can see the Lord’s hand in all the repercussions of
this call. I know it is going to be a great blessing for all our family. And we must know that it will be a blessing to the people of
88
In 1984, Rendell N. Mabey published a memoir about his
experiences establishing the American Church in Ghana and Nigeria:
Brother to Brother (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1984).
89
Lester Bush, “Writing ‘Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An
Historical Overview’ (1973): Context and Reflections,” Journal of
Mormon History 25, no 1 (Spring 1999): 246.
90
Rachel Mabey, Diary, November 2, 1978, LDS Church History
Library.
249
the country we are going to.”91 After arriving in Lagos, Nigeria, she exclaimed: “The Church has come to Nigeria!”92 They
were no less enthusiastic about the prospects for Mormonism in
Ghana. Janath Cannon recorded halfway through their missionary year that one village chief introduced the missionaries and
asked who would like to join the Church: “Evidently,” Cannon
observed, “there was an instant conversion!” In spite of the warm
welcome, Cannon wondered skeptically: “Does that mean they
expect future favors from us?” Then she rebuked herself: “Unkind
thought, I suppose.”93
Rachel fretted about whether her health could withstand life
in west Africa and begged in prayer for “a promise or assurance
of some kind that if we put everything we could into this mission we might both be preserved in health to once again return
to our beloved home & family.” Exhausted by the trip and the
oppressive heat, she confessed to being “teary & emotional. . . .
The outlook . . . seemed to me to be dark.”94 Janath Cannon’s first
impressions were also negative, but she was relieved when they
found a “nice room” at a hotel in Lagos, that did not have “holes
in the carpet or ceiling, no broken toilet seat, or cockroaches,
an abundance of running water, clean sheets. Ahh!”95 The poverty was overwhelming. Cannon experienced culture shock at
how “incredibly dirty and poor” it seemed. She looked past these
conditions, however, to characterize the people: “Very colorfully
dressed but clean & seemingly immaculate in spite of the filth
around them.”96
The American missionaries immediately went to work restructuring the Kweikuma Branch to match the Utah-based
organizational chart. Joseph Dadzie’s minutes summarized instructions that showed how other religious symbols had been
91
Ibid., November 6, 1978.
93
Ibid., May 27, 1979.
94
95
Cannon, Journal, August 5, 1979.
96
Ibid.
92
250
adopted in Mormon meeting places. The missionaries directed
the Ghanaians to remove all pictures, “especially the Crucifixion . . . from the room, leaving only the [Mormon] Tabernacle,
the Prophet Joseph Smith, and the living Prophet, Spencer W.
Kimball.”97
The new order of things unsettled members of Mould’s
branch. Dadzie “appealed to Mother to explain matters,” hoping
that her assurances would keep members in the fold. After some
discussion, the branch president “suggested that the whole matter be put into prayers for a success.”98
Mould had a formidable cohort of devoted followers. Removing her from visible Church leadership caused an uproar in
the Kweikuma Mormon community. On Christmas Eve, the
branch held a special meeting at which “Reverend” (so-designated in the minutes) John Augustus-Osei urged members to
stop spreading dissent. Mould had given “her consent before the
new changes were made,” so she hardly had the right to go back
on her word now. Why were her followers “going about poisoning the minds of the people”? Mould, also present, assured the
Saints of her support and “appealed to all members to be calm
and co-operate.”99
For the next year, Mould played by the new rules. After all,
Osei enjoyed the privilege of his affiliation with the American
church. Because he was a lecturer at Brigham Young University, the Ghanaian Saints granted him deference. So Mould supported the missionaries, cooperated with priesthood leaders,
and raised few difficulties. But financially, she was struggling.
Church service had been her primary means of income.100 Indeed, Church members had been pooling their resources for “the
maintenance of Mother Rebecca Mould and her children as she
97
Ibid.
99
100
Emmanuel Kissi, Walking in the Sand: A History of the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ghana (Provo, Utah: Brigham
Young University Press, 2004), 37–40.
98
251
has not been in any gainful business.”101 The problems of the
Ghanaian lay leadership hobbled the missionaries; Janath Cannon lamented: “It is so hard for people to get the idea of a lay
church in which everyone serves (ideally) and also earns a daily
bread elsewhere. This is a concept that should be taught before
baptism.”102 On another occasion, Mould apparently overheard
the missionaries explain to branch members that the baptisms
she had performed had been invalid because she lacked priesthood authority.103 Meanwhile, Rebecca Mould’s sister, Comfort, defected from Mormonism and started her own charismatic sect “with each speaker whipping up enthusiasm for people
to come forward with their offerings.” The Cannons dismissed
their “swinging and swaying and handkerchief-waving” sect as
juvenile. “Ted and I agreed,” Janath wrote, that “Comfort’s group
is clearly not ready for our staid, rational religion.”104
Imposing Church structures on the Ghanaians proved to be
a continual struggle for the missionaries. One morning, they arrived at the meetinghouse to find classes already underway—
with “the men on one side of the room, the women on the other being taught from the Book of Mormon by a young man,
the children sitting quietly.” Just as Janath thought they were
about to start sacrament meeting, “the women switch to a R.S.
teacher, the children gathered around an older girl teacher, the
young man moved across the choir benches to teach the other
girls, and the men continued their classwork.” Bewildered, Cannon admitted that “everything was very orderly—but what was
it?”105 When Janath tried to teach the sisters about the “importance of the father’s role” in raising children, their “expressions
grew blank.”106
However, the Ghanaians’ collective welfare initiatives im101
Meeting Minutes, February 3, 1979, Dadzie Papers.
Cannon, Diary, October 24, 1979.
103
Ibid., July 21, 1979.
104
Ibid., July 14, 1979.
105
Ibid., June 3, 1979.
106
Ibid., June 9, 1979.
102
252
pressed the missionaries. Janath recorded that, when Mould
announced she would visit an injured man, women thronged
around Mould and “pressed some money into her hand” as a donation. It was “the real Relief Society spirit if not quite the standard procedure.” Mould and the missionaries found the injured
man in his “poor little mud-hut dwelling . . . his swollen right leg
propped on a hard little low stool.” A daughter was attending to
his needs and his brother, who was blind, kept him company. Ted
Cannon bestowed a priesthood blessing of healing, and Mould
handed him the donated funds.107
Complicating the Americans’ efforts to impose a Utah-centric model on the Ghanian branch was Mould’s acclaim as a
spiritual leader in Kweikuma. One woman asked Janath Cannon “if we had prophetesses in Salt Lake.” Cannon’s textbook
response was: “We had a prophet and the Relief Society President.” The woman’s reply “took me back: ‘Well then, we are really blessed in Ghana—we have prophetesses!’” Though Cannon
tried to “explain the difference between receiving revelation for
the direction of the Church and individuals receiving revelation
for their own lives,” she made little headway.108
As a lifelong member of the Relief Society, Janath Cannon’s
views represented well-established thought on women’s roles in
the Church, even while the women’s liberation movement was
continuing to gain traction in the United States. In 1975 as part
of the correlation movement, the General Authorities had terminated all auxiliary general conferences, which had been held
annually since the late nineteenth century. Only a year earlier in
1977, a general women’s meeting layered all three women’s auxiliaries into a single ninety-minute meeting. Barbara B. Smith,
the Relief Society president to whom Janath Cannon had been a
counselor, had stepped in front of what seemed to be the irresistible momentum of ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment and,
with behind-the-scenes support from the Public Affairs De107
108
Ibid.
Ibid., July 22, 1979.
253
partment headed by Elder Gordon B. Hinckley, organized thousands of Mormon women to protest ratification or urge rescission, bringing the amendment down in defeat. Sonia Johnson,
who had become the most visible Mormon to support the ERA,
“fe[lt] almost all of my feelings of loyalty and caring centered on
women, pulled away from male gods and hierarchies.”109 Hard
on the heels of the joy produced by the June 1978 revelation
opening priesthood ordination to black men, President Kimball
told the Deseret News that the First Presidency didn’t “expect
any revelation regarding women and the priesthood.”110 American women were probably not surprised, but it left women like
Rebecca Mould, whose personal authority had developed into
institutional authority, stranded on the wrong side of the apparently uncrossable gender line.
After the missionaries departed to work in Nigeria, the
“prophetess” controversy came to a head. Mould, Dadzie recalled,
“had the support of the majority of the members” and “they
were not attending meetings on Sundays.”111 Mould apparently
hoped for a return to the 1978 status quo. On October 7, 1979,
the branch presidency, headed by Charles K. Ansah, expressed
its “wish. . .to resign because they felt members could not cooperate.”112 Augustus-Osei charged “Confusioners” with attacking
Ansah’s legitimacy. “People have been abusing the Presidency,”
Reverend Augustus-Osei charged, for failing to experience the
visions that Mother Mould had.113 More, the Church continued
to use Mould’s building for its meetings but grew increasingly
resentful of her continued ownership. In January 1979, Ansah
reminded the Saints that “the Plot and the Church Building are
the property of Mother Rebecca Mould.” Indeed, “the Church
109
Sonia Johnson, qtd. in Heather Kellogg, “Shades of Gray:
Sonia Johnson’s Life through Letters and Autobiography,” Dialogue: A
Journal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 84.
110
“Not for Women,” Deseret News, June 13, 1978, B4.
111
Dadzie, History, LDS Church History Library.
112
Meeting Minutes, October 7, 1979, Dadzie Papers.
113
Ibid.
254
has no plot nor church building of its own and it is high time the
Church finds its own plot for any future developments.”114 Ansah had asked Mould to donate her church lot to the Church,
but she refused. Mould was willing to “think over it,” though
Dadzie found that Mould “could not explain” her objection to
the proposition.115
When the “Mother President” refused, after thought, to sell
her building to the Church, the tide turned against her. Mould’s
spiritual sisters—including her own biological sister, Helena
Mould Commey—Theresa Osei, and Sarah Andolph “spoke
bitterly” against Mould, rebuking “the members attitude on the
Presidency and promised to abide by the rules of the Church.”
When Osei asked Mould if she was indeed trying to “abuse the
Presidency,” she “replied as [sic] yes.” He pressed further: Would
she “revert to the old system” of independent Mormonism—or
should the American system continue? “Mould had nothing
to say. Her sister urged the Elders to wait; could she not “put
[this] before God in prayers”? No, Osei responded. It had been
nine months since Mould had agreed to the “new arrangement.”
She had enjoyed plenty of time to make a decision. The meeting
closed without a clear resolution.
On November 18, 1979, Mould, Osei, Ansah, Dadzie, and
Addo-Yobbo, as well as Comfort Mould, Charlotte Amuah,
Sarah Bainson, and a handful of other Church leaders gathered
once again. Osei gave the opening prayer. Mould’s primary concern focused on her place in the Church. She had been a woman of authority and honor; now Charles Ansah, a man whom
she deemed to be her inferior, presided over her. Mould found
the missionaries’s priesthood structuring unacceptable: “Mother President said when it came that LDS could not recognize a
woman to do the work of God or to lead a Church, she put or
placed the matter before God and the reply was that she could
still continue to do it. She said as a result she could no longer
114
115
Presidency Council Meeting, January 21, 1979, Dadzie Papers.
Meeting Minutes, October 7, 1979, Dadzie Papers.
255
continue with L.D.S Church.” Osei washed his hands of the affair; Dadzie summarized his comments: “There is nothing that
he could say because he already belonged to L.D.S. in America
and not in Ghana.”
In the aftermath, Mould’s secretary, Joseph Dadzie, recorded that Mould could “not accept the new changes” in the restrcturing of church authority unless she was recognized as the
leader.”116 When the Cannons and Mabeys returned to Ghana
in November, Dadzie informed them of Mould’s actions. They
endeavored to bring her back, but “there was nothing they could
do to change her mind.”117 Mould left the Church, although she
continued to identify herself as an independent leader within
the broader LDS movement.118 Dadzie stayed with the American-sanctioned group.
Mould’s departure crippled the branch, leaving only forty on
the books where, a year earlier, there had been 124.119 Her departure also meant that the branch no longer had a meetinghouse. On December 24, the branch presidency (Charles K.
Ansah, Joseph Addo-Yobbo, and Joseph K. Dadzie) closed the
Kweiuma Branch. When Joseph Dadzie listed the “pioneer families of the Kweikuma Ward” in his later history, he left Rebecca
Mould off the list.120
Numbering no more than forty, the remnant “took to fasting
and prayers.” On New Year’s Eve 1979, they “ended our fasting
116
Dadzie, “History of the Church in Ghana and Takoradi,”
Dadzie Papers.
117
Ibid.
118
“Important Dates in Church History—Takoram District,” n.d.,
Dadzie Papers. In August 1982, senior missionary Sylvester Cooper
recorded: “Rebecca Mould, the Prophetess, came [with her group]
to the regional conference. They originally joined the church, but fell
away as they wanted her to be their leader.” Sylvester Cooper, Journal,
August 13, 1982, LDS Church History Library
119
“Important Dates in Church History,” Dadzie Papers.
120
Dadzie, “History of the Church in Ghana and Takoradi,”
Dadzie Papers.
256
with a watch night service” at a bakery in the neighboring city of
Takoradi. Uncertain, branch members met informally for several months until reestablishing themselves in June 1980, holding
their “first sacrament meeting” at the bakery where they held
their evening vigil on New Year’s Eve. Two years later, they relocated to the Takoradi Polytechnic School and then, to their
first official meetinghouse in July 1986. That same February,
the Kweikuma Branch, once decimated by Mould’s departure,
gained new life and was reorganized under the leadership of
President Israel Akortha and his counselors, Richard Yingurah
and Ben Bekoe.121
CONCLUSION
The expansion of Mormonism into Ghana demonstrated the
clash that the intermountain Mormon establishment would predictably face when attempting to impose the American model
of Mormonism on an African community that had been fashioning its own Mormonism while simultaneously seeking to become a new branch of the American Mormons’ establishment.
Unlike many other African independent churches, the Ghanaian
Mormons sought validation from their American parent, even
while feeling frustrated at the lag, reluctance to assign missionaries, and lack of recognition of their faith. But the Ghanaians
with whom Mormonism resonated longed for integration into
an American religious system that represented their hopes in a
decolonized world.
But what of Mormonism in the Ghanaian religious milieu?
It defies easy characterization. Although Mormonism was wellknown for its institutional opposition to the priesthood ordination of blacks, Ghanaian Mormons during the late 1960s and
early 1970s seem to have either been oblivious to this bar or else
have felt that they could work around it in some way. Although
the first possibility seems improbable, I have found no documentation acknowledging the ban on priesthood ordination un121
Cannon, Diary, July 22, 1979.
257
til it became an issue in Rebecca Mould’s claims to leadership.
Ghanaian Mormonism both proves and defies Sundkler’s
model of “Ethiopian” churches in its doctrinal and organizational commitment to an American structure; even Rebecca Mould
cared about and celebrated the day when American Mormonism
announced the 1978 priesthood revelation. However, its independence also coheres with Sundkler’s model of African Zionist
faiths that allowed spontaneity in worship, mingled local customs with traditional Christianity, and sought to create a pure
community that would transcend the world’s evils. Mormonism’s combination of organization structure and lay community
seemed to hold out hope for building an African Zion.
Rebecca Mould stood at the crossroads of this paradox of
African Mormonism as she celebrated her religion’s American
roots even while subverting them. The story of Mormonism in
the African continent endures into our day. The legacy of Rebecca Mould invites contemporary Mormons to reconsider the
meaning, trajectory, and identity of Mormonism as it expands
into the vibrant milieu of African spiritualities and Christianities found within her humble Sekondi community.
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION:
CHALLENGING MORMON
RACE SCHOLARSHIP
Gina Colvin, editor, Elise Boxer,
Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Melissa Inouye,
and Janan Graham-Russell
Note: This roundtable discussion took place September 21, 2014.
The five women, from diverse ethnic and “racial” backgrounds, have
focused their attention on the state of Mormon race scholarship.
ELISE BOXER {[email protected]} is Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakota from the Fort Peck Sioux and Assiniboine Reservation in Poplar, Montana. She is currently an assistant professor
at the University of South Dakota with a joint appointment in native studies and history. GINA COLVIN {gina.colvin@canterbury.
ac.nz} is Ngāti Porou and Ngā Puhi. She is a lecturer at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she teaches in the College of Education. JANAN GRAHAM-RUSSELL
{[email protected]} is a graduate student at the Howard
University School of Divinity, Washington, D.C. MELISSA INOUYE {[email protected]} is a lecturer in Chinese history
at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is also associate
editor of the Mormon Studies Review. LAURIE MAFFLY-KIPP
{[email protected]} is the Archer Alexander Distinguished
Chair in the Humanities at the Danforth Center on Religion and
Politics, Washington University, in St. Louis, Missouri.
Gina Colvin: What kinds of issues arise for each of you in
terms of the current status of Mormon race scholarship?
Elise Boxer: The field of Mormon studies must be expanded
258
Roundtable: Challenging Mormon Race Scholarship
259
beyond the practice of privileging a very limited and selective
interest in the history of Mormonism. At the Mormon History
Association conference in 2014, I presented a paper about the
arrival on July 24, 1847, on a panel titled “Disrupting and Considering New Directions for Indigenous Mormons and Mormon Indigenous Studies.” My paper was entitled the “Days of
47: Disrupting Mormon Settler Colonialism.”
My argument was that, in giving consideration to the indigenous voices, claims, and perspectives particularly with respect to
the “Days of ’47” annual celebrations (events that have become
a defining public discourse on Mormon settlement), the Mormon historical narrative would no longer see indigenous peoples
occupying the literal and metaphorical periphery in the state,
but rather their story would be centered in the narrative and
analysis. Indigenous peoples would no longer be marginalized
or included only when it was convenient to support a narrative
that suggested that Mormon settlers were welcomed by the indigenous tribes who occupied Utah. Instead, the displacement
and dispossession of indigenous peoples and the appropriation
of their lands and resources would be central to the discussion
about Mormon settler society.
During the question portion of my panel, one audience
member became irate. She pushed back on addressing questions
of settler colonialism, wanting to focus on the violence indigenous people displayed toward one another. Yet in the field of
indigenous history theorizing, colonization and settler colonialism are central to any discussion around the settlement of the
American West. My work simply focuses on Mormon settler
colonialism. Unfortunately, as a matter of course, these perspectives are either absent in the discussion or are resisted by a niche
group of religious historians who wish to preserve a version of
Mormon history that agrees with the religion’s triumphalist accounts of itself.
This example demonstrates the need to diversify Mormon
studies by including “Other” and “Othered” voices and perspectives. Mormon studies need to include scholars, including schol-
260
ars of color, whose perspectives are not only different, but which
challenge widely accepted narratives that fail to consider not just
indigenous perspectives, but global perspectives that do not fit
neatly into a Mormon-American perspective or experience.
Melissa Inouye: I’m really concerned with how we expand
Mormon studies beyond Mormons and also how we expand
Mormon studies outside of North America. For me the fundamental structural problems are that the majority of people who
study Mormons are North American Mormons. This dynamic means that we are moving only very incrementally beyond
the kind of North-American-centric scholarship that characterizes the field. This is not to say that the scholarship produced
by North American Mormons is bad, because we have great
scholars in Mormon studies who happen to be North American
Mormons. But for the kind of movement in Mormon studies to
which we ought to aspire, we really need to have both an international and a robust non-Mormon element as part of Mormon
studies scholarship.
North American Mormons are double insiders, which can
be an advantage but also a big disadvantage. Scholars who are
non-Mormon or who are non-North Americans have such a
valuable perspective because they invariably see a totally different picture. Non-Mormon scholars in particular are less likely
than Mormon North Americans to be crippled by self-censorship, community censorship, or unconscious assumptions that
shape a certain kind of narrative. I also think that people are
sometimes more welcoming of the perspectives of non-Mormon
scholars because they want outsiders to feel they’ve been treated
well.
Laurie Maffly-Kipp: I was laughing to myself, Melissa, when
you suggested that we as non-Mormons get special privileges.
There is a freedom, in a sense, in being an outsider. I’ve found, for
instance, that there is a freedom in what I can say. On the other
hand, I have come across people who inform me in sometimes
subtle, or not-so-subtle, ways that I don’t really understand. I’ve
run into a barrier that suggests: “Unless you’re Mormon, you
261
can’t really understand our perspective,” as if there is only one
perspective. It puts you in a difficult space.
I agree, Melissa, that in contexts such as MHA and Dialogue,
there is some will to open things up and do this work in different
ways, but it’s hard to know how that is going to take place other than by leading Mormon scholars by the hand out of North
America to look at the rest of the world.
Gina: Reflecting on what Elise has suggested, I think that one
of the most pressing issues in Mormon studies is not only that
it is American-centric but that the field has resisted the pressing
need to critique the white, middle-class, English-speaking patriarchy, and my assumption is that this is because Mormon studies
is, in general, undertheorized.
It’s likely that, for the time being, the locus of Mormon scholarship will be the United States. As a result, theoretical frameworks need to be worked out that both encourage and facilitate
more North American Mormon studies scholarship that centers
on American Polynesian, Native American, black, Latino, and
Asian Mormons, and more importantly critiques whiteness as a
powerful racial construct within Mormonism.
In addition, scholars need to pay significant attention to the
multicultural, biracial, intersectional experience and the way in
which these identities are understood in Mormon contexts. This
is not to say that North American scholars should ignore the
global Mormon experience—absolutely not, but I’m thinking
pragmatically. Theory and methodology are what travels when
contexts don’t; and so, from the U.S. position of strength in Mormon studies, some of these theoretical perspectives and methodologies need to be worked out in response to and alongside their
diverse local and international communities.
I’m thinking specifically in terms of decolonizing, critical,
feminist, queer, endarkened, post-positivist orientations that by
virtue of their rigor draw on a strong qualitative research tradition that will be instructive, will inform debate, and will offer
scholars critical and analytical tools to frame their race inquiry
in ways that are self-reflexive, work alongside and for people of
262
color, and have a strong emancipatory orientation.
Melissa: I think there are two structural problems here that
stem from the fact that our sources are closely aligned with a
central Mormon administrative superstructure. The kinds of stories we tell are related to the sources that we have. For instance,
the sources we have with regard to overseas Mormon communities are oral histories produced by the LDS Church History
Department. Those kinds of sources are shaped by the people
who are asking the questions and looking for certain kinds of
responses.
I’ve done this myself. I did Asian American and Asian Canadian interviews for the LDS Church History Department in
2003—about 150 people. These interviews began with a little
personal history and a little family background but began “in
earnest” when I asked, “How did you find the Church?” And the
bulk of the narrative is about this experience leading up to their
conversion or after their conversion. So these kinds of sources comprise the bulk of the records we have. They are also the
records that are the easiest to access and the records that have
been kept for the longest time. I’m really pleased that we have
these records, which are substantial and rich. There’s no sinister
conspiracy to privilege centralized historical narratives; it’s just a
structural problem.
Another structural problem that contributes to the dearth of
international Mormon scholarship is that, in most contexts, the
way that you justify doing Mormon history in a secular professional environment is to say that it relates to “American history.”
But if you are working in a country where Mormons are a tiny
American minority, an American-dominated minority, or just a
tiny percentage of the population and if your institution is not
particularly interested in studying America, then it’s not really a
productive use of resources for a scholar to do Mormon studies.
A third problem is that the academic study of Mormonism
is kind of a luxury pastime. This reminds me of a recent study
which found that people who go backpacking are overwhelmingly white and relatively well off. It’s fun going into the moun-
263
tains and sleeping on the ground if you can afford the gear, can
take time off from work, etc. To do Mormon scholarship, you’re
probably going to have to have a PhD and get specialized academic training, which costs money, and which also incurs an
opportunity cost. Even in affluent countries, it’s hard for smart
young people to make it through all the levels of academia to do
this work; in developing countries, the odds are really not in favor of finding a way to study Mormonism professionally.
Gina: This is why I’m suggesting we theorize the field of Mormon scholarship—particularly for international scholars. While
their academic positions might not necessarily justify work in
American religion generally and Mormon studies specifically, an
interest in exploring diverse contexts from a position of theoretical
paradigms that are well crafted and well thought through can be
excused. For instance, it would be career suicide for a New Zealand scholar to specialize in Mormon studies. However, with a
strong interest in emergent research methodologies including decolonizing methodologies, autoethnography, public ethnography,
feminism, womanism, etc., Mormonism becomes simply one of
many contexts in which I do that work.
Perhaps we could delve a little deeper now and discuss those
dynamics in Mormon studies scholarship that need to be challenged. Is the overwhelming presence of a white patriarchy in
Mormon studies an issue that we need to talk about?
Janan Graham-Russell: More often than not, you have white
males expounding their views on other races. Upholding only
one narrative forces everything that does not fit that narrative
into the realm of the “Other.” In my opinion, white American
supremacy lies at the heart of Mormon scholarship.
Laurie: Can you say more about what you mean by “white
supremacy?” That term is really loaded, and I think you might
mean something other than what I’m thinking.
Janan: By “white supremacy,” I’m talking about rhetoric that
promotes white domination, particularly in Mormon theology
where discourse about blacks and race becomes a part of the
study of Mormon history. So it’s difficult for us to separate Mor-
264
mon scholarship from that.
Gina: Are you suggesting the existence of theological trajectories that continue to sustain the ascendancy of white interests
in Mormon scholarship?
Janan: Yes, and in addition to the sociological study of Mormonism, the question of the theological justification for race differentiation in Mormonism needs more attention.
Gina: So are you suggesting that we need to pay more attention to the social contexts and the diverse stories that need to be
told so that we are able to bring more nuance to the question of
the history of Mormon race theology?
Janan: Yes.
Elise: When I think of whiteness, as a historian I frame it
as a system of power. Whiteness is about power, the power one
wields to define the racialized Other. Whiteness is fluid and
changes over time. Mormons have accessed and claimed whiteness at various times when what we need to be doing is discussing whiteness and Mormon history and thinking about the
white colonial privilege to explore issues of race, racism, and
power in the Mormon Church and its history. The question is to
challenge how Mormon history has been written and continues
to be written by scholars in the field. If we remain so focused on
Mormon religious persecution or aspects of history that interest only Mormons, we are limiting the field of Mormon studies.
When we examine early Mormon history, if we move beyond religious persecution, we can then explore and talk about moments
when Mormons access and reaffirm their whiteness.
I’m differentiating between whiteness and being ethnically
white. It is important to move beyond that. We can all agree that
Mormons were religiously persecuted, but how did they take on
the markers of mainstream society and replicate larger national
policies or attitudes regarding race? How do Mormons replicate
these mainstream value systems? Let’s look at how Mormon history is still being done. It seems possible that Mormon scholars
have historically been reluctant to engage—or in my experience
they have characteristically resisted the hard discussions—the
265
challenge that indigenous scholars raise about the work that has
already been done.
We still need to think about how we use research methodologies, especially those from indigenous peoples, because our
experiences are really unique. When writing about Mormon indigenous peoples, my own work complicates notions of indigenous identity and explores the racialized, religious identity peculiar to Mormonism manifested by a “Lamanite” identity while
also reflecting American policies of assimilation toward Indian
people. So when I think about whiteness, I continue to see how
Mormon history is a manifestation of Mormon whiteness: power and privilege given to white, male Mormon scholars.
Here’s another example. When I was a graduate student at
Arizona State, a white, male, Mormon graduate student was also
interested in doing Mormon Indian history. His argument was
that he could do American Indian history better than any American Indian person because he could approach it from an objective
position. A faculty member who was part of the original discussion
challenged his thinking: “By that argument, I can do Mormon
history as a black male because I’m not Mormon.” The graduate
student refused to accept that argument because he believed that,
because he was a Mormon, he could do Mormon history better.
He failed to make the connection to the essentialized argument
that he was making about American Indian history.
This example makes the argument seem ludicrous. Why is it
that minority groups are the exception to the general principle
that insider knowledge is valuable? These issues remain problematic, and we have to do Mormon-indigenous history differently. I edited an article recently that proposed the same standard historical narrative with which we’re all familiar. It didn’t do
anything meaningful. There was a disconnect. If you aren’t doing
your research with and for native communities, then what is the
point of your research?
Laurie: When Janan mentioned white supremacy, it brings
to mind a particular historical movement called the “white supremacist movement” that has been broadly recognized, but I
266
think we are talking about something that is a lot more pervasive and broader. The question that this raises for me is—and
I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a moment—what is the
end goal of reworking history in this context? Is it to stop white
men from talking about history? Is to get them to see things the
way that other people (whoever they might be) see history? If
so, then what is the end goal for that community? What would
that scholarly community look like, and sound like, and talk like?
And what would the Church look like? The academic community and the Church community are still pretty closely linked
here. And I’m sensitive to that. I don’t do theology. I don’t have
any goal to change the theology of the Mormon Church in significant ways, but I do have an interest in thinking about history differently because it has advantages—not just for Mormons
but for the other people. So I am curious to know what the end
goal of this project will be. Who will do the speaking? Who will
write the history? And what will be accomplished by doing it
differently?
Gina: Those are excellent questions, Laurie. My response
here is guarded. I do think that Western cultures have a tendency to ascribe value to specific knowledges that produce some
kind of return, or which adhere to a particular enterprise, whether economic or cultural. There is a propensity for deciding what
is worth knowing based upon the anticipation of a material benefit or a cultural/social advantage. This way of constituting tradable knowledge is very central to the Western capitalist project.
Every population for whom the experience of imperialism and
colonization is acquisitive and violent knows how problematic the accumulation of knowledge is in the pursuit of material
gain or the viability of the institution. I personally like the idea
of scholarship as an instrument for social justice, emancipation,
and social-cultural critique. For me, Mormon scholarship that
seeks to problematize class, social, cultural, gender, and race hegemonies in religious contexts is essential to the health of Mormonism specifically, and to religion and spirituality generally. So
I’m framing my “end goal” guardedly and with some small print.
267
But certainly, I do think that understanding why we are doing
this work, wherever it leads, is vital to the field’s vitality and relevance.
Melissa: More history is always a good thing. It’s a process
of construction. You can always build better. To switch metaphors, global Mormon history is a vast wilderness, and I’m glad
that there are already a few paths laid out. We should give credit
where credit is due. It’s not as if the people who are doing Mormon history who are white and/or North American and/or male
aren’t trying to represent the whole picture. It’s just that the field
has these structural challenges. One is language. Another is the
difficulty of getting past one’s own cultural assumptions. Still another is the economic question of opportunity cost and academic
marketability. It’s not really a question of intellectual desire, but
a question of cultural logistics.
There is already a robust appreciation for the complexity of
cultural narratives within the Church. One example is the one
I’ve already mentioned—the Church’s hiring me in 2003 to do
an oral history project on Asian American and Asian Canadian
Mormons. The LDS Church History Department already had
collections from people in Asia. They already had those Asian
narratives, but they were conscious of the fact that the experiences of Asian Americans and Asian Canadians might be very
different, and they wanted to explore those diverse perspectives.
I recall at the Layton MHA conference in 2013 a white
North American historian came away from Gina’s panel on indigenous Mormon voices wondering what she should do. She
felt that she could see how current approaches were problematic
but didn’t know what alternative approaches would look like. So
what I’m most concerned with is how we model fresh approaches and facilitate the organic growth of a new generation of Mormon historians, sociologists, and anthropologists to do the kind
of work that needs to be done.
Gina: What kind of methodological approaches are being
deployed in history to capture these previous silenced histories?
Melissa: It seems that everyone in Mormon history is trying
268
to figure out how to get at these sources. So often all that we
have are mission sources or missionary sources. I’m struggling
with this problem myself. I wrote an article for the Mormon
Studies Review1 about how we shouldn’t just produce these histories and narratives of the bureaucratic institution’s expansion.
I described the narrative as, in essence, “When the missionaries
first went to this country they experienced all kinds of linguistic
and cultural difficulties. And then they had a few families join
the church, then they had a branch which grew into a ward, then
it grew into a stake, and now we have a temple.” That’s the basic story. I have criticized this approach, but I myself am having
trouble thinking about other ways of doing this work because of
the sources we have.
So I thought, how would we do a history of the Church in
Hong Kong in a way that doesn’t adhere to those missionary
sources? One way might be to focus on places such as local buildings. But the problem with Mormonism is that it’s not necessarily rooted in a certain place. It’s geographically organized; but at
the very beginning when you are establishing a Church community, the connection of the Mormons to a particular geographical
location is quite weak because you have Mormons coming from
all over the place—from a huge catchment area. So even focusing on the history of a local place, or a meeting site, is difficult
because Mormons don’t really become rooted in a local community until they become numerous enough for their community to
be more geographically concentrated.
So I’m trying to find other ways to get at this narrative. I am
currently planning to do more work with Relief Society and Primary records from local units, which can potentially tell us a lot
about the grassroots culture and the way that local units used resources of time, talent, etc.
Gina: Historians have traditionally relied on documentary
1
Its inaugural issue appeared in November 2013. See publications.
maxwellinstitute.byu.edu. Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, “The Oak and
the Banyan: The ‘Globalization’ of Mormon Studies,” Mormon Studies
Review 1 (2014): 70–79.
269
evidence. Where there are no documents, there’s no story. Brown
and black women in particular have been largely invisibilized in
historical research, so I agree, Melissa, that we need to explore
more qualitative approaches—perspectives that would lead history into becoming more interdisciplinary. For instance, I have
an indigenous PhD student who, in exploring Maori women’s
history, used very traditional documentary sources which really
amounted to colonial men’s accounts of the lives of the women she was interested in. In some ways, she set that study up to
demonstrate that, if she relied only on the archive to tell this
story, she would quickly come to see that brown women are only
nominally present. She was left wondering how she would go
about telling the stories of her ancestresses and how she could
set about giving them a voice. So she restored and restoried these
story fragments and built on to the story in a way that engaged
her as a contemporary indigenous feminist using Kaupapa Maori and decolonizing methodologies and womanist theory. She
wrote stories of her ancestresses that she could feel proud to pass
on to her grandchildren, her mokopuna. Hers was a work born
out of activism and imagination as much as it was born out of
hard historiographical slog.
So in many respects, our work doesn’t need to be entirely
positivist to be a work of intellectual creation—which leads me
to the next question. Are we too wedded to objective histories?
Is there room for other approaches which engage the heart as
well as the data?
Laurie: Perhaps I could say a little bit more about methods
used by historians which are helpful in this respect. There are
plenty of them out there. There are people doing work in American religious history on lived religion. This represents a melding
of ethnographic approaches and archival approaches. It is something that tries to relativize. Church hierarchy is only one component of what constitutes a religious community. There is a way
of doing history from the ground up where you may not have
first-person accounts by women in the 1850s that give you some
sense of their own voices. But there are other kinds of resources
270
that you can draw on, whether it’s court records or other archival sources. Sometimes you can read against the grain of official
sources in ways that are helpful.
But to see the hierarchy of the Church—this is the way that
Catholic history was written until about the mid-1980s where
it was from pope to pope and priest to priest and building to
building. And I see Mormon history still retaining that kind of
narrative structure. It’s another piece of what Melissa was saying. But if we can look at religious communities more broadly,
we can see them as dynamic bodies that involve different kinds
of power. Hierarchy is one perhaps, but not the only one. There
are ways in which we can reimagine what a religious community
consists of. Those methods can help us write the kind of history
we’re talking about, I think. The same is true of African American religious history and Native American history. These methods offer some advice on how to give voice to those who have not
written things down. There’s archeology and anthropology and
other means that historians are starting to use. So I think all of
this stuff is out there, and younger scholars of Mormon history
are getting there and are getting to some of this.
Elise: And I would like to add that, in terms of looking at
sources, scholars should include indigenous scholars. For example, I find Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples and the work of one of my mentors,
Waziyatawin, useful in providing a theoretical framework for my
own scholarship.2 These indigenous women are pivotal to my
understanding of research with, by, and for indigenous peoples
and scholars engaged in indigenous studies. Too often, Mormon
history relies primarily on written sources to construct an under2
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and
Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999); Waziyatawin Angela
Wilson, Remember This!: Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor
Narratives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2005); Waziyatawin
Angela Wilson and Michael Yellow Bird, eds., For Indigenous Eyes
Only: A Decolonization Handbook (Santa Fe: School of Advanced
Research, 2005).
271
standing of the past. So as a historian, the task is about moving
beyond the written record. This means, in many cases, conducting
and using oral histories to better understand the historical past,
especially through a community perspective. Too often, there are
critiques of oral history and oral traditions as invalid or inaccurate,
but these sources are valued by the community, and indigenous
peoples and nations must be included.
My current book manuscript examines the LDS Church and
its relationship with indigenous peoples.3 I explore the way in
which members of the LDS Church constructed a “Lamanite”
identity for Native Americans using the Book of Mormon. Their
interactions with indigenous peoples were based on their understanding of Lamanites found in the Book of Mormon. One aspect of my manuscript is an examination of the Indian Student
Placement Program. Most of the work that has been done about
this program provides a historical narrative, focusing on the bureaucratic history as Melissa and Laurie describe. There has also
been good work done by the Charles Redd Center of Western
History at Brigham Young University. The Charles Redd Center conducted numerous oral histories with Indian students and
host families who participated in placement. How do we as historians frame these interviews and provide a theoretical framework?
Laurie’s question “What is the end goal of history?” is complicated, I see the answer as allowing all of these different histories and experiences to exist in the same space. There is not, in
fact, only one normative Mormon experience in history nor is
there a homogenous Mormon Indian experience. We may approach history in different ways, but each way is valuable and
we each contribute something to the field of Mormon studies.
Among Dakota people, if an elder recounts a story and another
elder recounts the same story in a slightly different way, they are
3
My current book manuscript is titled, “To Become White and
Delightsome”: Mormon Colonialism and the Construction of an Indigenous
Identity.
272
both accepted as truth. It is not my job as a historian to challenge
each elder’s recollection and determine who is “right” or “wrong.”
Instead, I would include both perspectives because I do not believe that there is only one history or one way of telling history.
I think that this should be an end goal of Mormon history—the
inclusion of multiple perspectives and space for them to not only
exist, but also to be respected.
When I was working on my dissertation, I used to tell my
parents and friends that their claim to fame would be, “You knew
me before I was excommunicated.” My parents didn’t find it funny. What I was talking about in my dissertation was very uncomfortable, and there was some truth behind my statement.
When I was conducting research at the LDS Church History
Library in the summer of 2009, an archivist pulled me aside and
told me that another scholar had been telling LDS archivists
that I should not be allowed access to the documents because
my work was “anti-Mormon”—an attack on the LDS Church.
I was very fortunate that this archivist did not believe what that
other scholar said and wanted me to be aware of the situation.
While I was initially taken aback and became angry, I realized
that the work I was doing was very important. My goal has been
to challenge our understanding of our shared past and to create
a space in which every perspective and lived experience is welcome, whether we agree or disagree. We have a long way to go
to get to that point.
Janan: We also need to ensure in our work that we don’t
lump all women of color together. Black women in the Church
have a unique history. Their histories deserve special exploration,
which womanist theory and theology provides. It focuses on the
experience of black women, not just in relationship to whites but
in terms of our own histories, our own experiences and emotions. It puts those experiences and feelings at the center. Right
now, that’s something that is missing in Mormon history, particularly in regard to black African women in the Church.
Gina: Womanism is avowedly anti-oppressionist and has
emancipatory goals. So this brings us around to Laurie’s ques-
273
tion: To what end do we do Mormon history? My work and
Elise’s work have an emancipatory goal and a social justice end.
Do you think there is a resistance in the Mormon history community to including, folding in, and framing historical work
around questions of social justice? And should history not be
done for the communities that these histories come out of ? Is
this the direction that Mormon history needs to be pushed toward? In reading many of these Mormon histories, I see them as
largely realist ethnographies that don’t seem to be conscious of
self in their telling.
Laurie: I wonder if that kind of work has some direct connection to the power structure of the Church. The people who
are part of that power structure are going to want to have a say
in what the end goal of that history is. It’s a profoundly conservative system just because of the way it is set up. So how Church
leaders might understand a movement for social justice coming from some kind of grass-roots effort by historians would be
threatening.
Gina: So we’re dealing with a tension between history as a
confirmation of the organization or history working against aspects of the cultural experience?
Melissa: Again, this is something we need to think about in
terms of how to move Mormon studies forward into dialogue
with other studies of religion. If we think about MHA, those
who are speaking are mostly Mormons and those who are listening are mostly Mormons. So we need to understand that audience is often a key determinant of the kinds of histories that
get produced. What other audiences could we find? How can the
study of Mormonism be interesting and useful to various scholarly audiences?
I absolutely agree with Gina that fitting the study of Mormonism into larger theoretical conversations is the way forward.
For instance, I think that the global study of Mormonism has so
much to offer conversations about transnational cultural flows,
world Christianity, and the dynamic relationship between religion and modernity.
274
For example, what I think is really interesting is framing
Mormonism as a modern melding of charisma and bureaucracy.
I think we could talk about Mormonism as a twenty-first-century religious movement that uses global resources and administration to maintain that necessary balance between charisma
and bureaucracy. If you have too much bureaucracy, you don’t
have a religious movement. If you have too much charisma, it
will spin off into all of these other things. How do you keep that
miraculous element but at the same time hold your movement
together? Various aspects of the Mormon program, such as missionaries and Church publications, can bring together all of the
most exciting things that are happening, redistribute them all
over the world, and contribute to the “charisma economy” that
allows this religious tradition to survive in the twenty-first century. That’s one way we could engage with academics outside the
field of Mormon studies.
I’m so amazed at how many nails there are in the secularization thesis coffin. After twenty years, people are still talking about
it as if we need to consider it carefully before rejecting it. To me,
this says that we still struggle with the basic categorizations and
assumptions about what religion is and what it means to people. I
see global Mormon studies as a really interesting subject for trying
to understand the relationship between these rationalized modern
structures and charisma: the prophetic voice, the visions, the healings, all of it.
Gina: That raises another issue in Mormon history: the presence of women. Don’t you think men are often the official voice
of spiritual charismas in that their stories are those privileged in
community narratives? Are feminine charismas given much attention in the telling of Mormon history?
Melissa: I’m not sure about whether this applies to Mormonism, but in my research on Chinese Christians I notice that most
charismatic stories involve women. In my history of the True
Jesus Church, a Chinese Pentecostal group, most of the miracle
stories were told by women and involved female characters. For
it to be a miracle, somebody has to “call in” the miracle, and so
275
often women are involved in that action as the observers, subjects, or healers. I see miracle stories as a really feminine space.
These stories show how women feel and experience power. It’s
not a miracle if you don’t call it a miracle. Even patriarchal structures need miracle stories.
Gina: There’s also a way in which miracle stories confirm patriarchal power as well. So there’s this tension here that needs to
be explored. I’m also wondering if we have adequately answered
the question of whether we should be grateful for the archive accumulated by white male historians?
Melissa: I’m grateful that work has already been published.
Even on a practical level, basic tasks like figuring out how many
people belonged to the LDS Church in a given place at a given
time are useful. It’s good information.
Elise: For me, the key question is access to those sources. My
experience as a grad student was that, the first time I went to do
research at the LDS Church History Library, they were pretty
guarded. One staff member was an expert in the collection on
American Indians and had responsibility for the records on native
people in the nineteenth century. He wouldn’t help me at all, even
though I asked for assistance. So I was on my own, trying to figure
out what I could access and what was available. This was interesting because two young white men were doing research for another
professor and asked this expert to help them interpret sources because they were written in an older style of English. It wasn’t until
I went to the Western History Association Conference in Salt
Lake City in 2008 that LDS Church archivists did a presentation,
trying to change perceptions about how open they were and how
everyone could access the records. After that presentation, I talked
to Bill Slaughter, one of the library’s staff, and told him, “That’s
not my experience at all.” He was very gracious to me when I went
back to the archives the following summer. I am grateful for the
work that institutional archivists do; however, work still must be
done to increase access and to improve the perception of access to
the LDS archival collections.
Laurie: I had to be interviewed informally when I first started
276
my Mormon book project. I haven’t encountered any problems.
Non-Mormon researchers often assume there will be problems
getting in, sometimes before they’ve asked. There are different
reasons why some records are restricted—legitimate reasons,
such as family records. Other cases can be more opaque and
hence more frustrating. But on the other hand, some non-Mormons have written some pretty horrible things about Mormon
history, so I see the caution of archivists as understandable if not
justifiable. This is a church. It’s not an academic establishment.
So I’ve found it useful to separate the goals of the Church from
the academic enterprise.
Janan: Back to your point, Elise. Where do you draw the
line? Often people will say that the Church is not releasing documents because they are trying to hide the truth. Where do you
draw the line between trying to keep yourself safe and trying to
cover up history?
Laurie: That’s a great question. I don’t know where they draw
the line, but they do behave conservatively most of the time. I’m
not suggesting that’s right, but I see why they are doing it, and I
wish they wouldn’t do that.
Gina: Yet we have been surprised and pleased by the forthrightness of the Church’s collection of Gospel Topics essays that
have been periodically published on its website since November 2013. While they have tackled some very difficult topics and
have softened and disrupted the kinds of hegemony that conservative and triumphalist narratives assumed in Mormon history,
there are still some gaps, particularly with respect to women and
people of color. For me, the race essay was powerful and important in revising traditional narratives of black “premortal undeservedness” to hold the priesthood but it didn’t go far enough to
turn those same academic tools on the LDS Church in order to
question “why” these narratives held, and what larger discourses
of white supremacy Mormon institutional racism hangs from.
If we can agree then that Mormon history has been traditionally done to confirm the enterprise, women of color, and those
within the Church who have grievances against the Church per-
277
haps need to find places within the community to develop new
strategies and ways of thinking, and new forms of knowledge
that create a disruption to the historical narrative. In this respect,
the object is to reform and talk back to these official histories.
Are we safe among Mormon historians doing that? It feels
as though the Mormon historians’ work has historically been
centered on confirming the Mormon enterprise, the patriarchal Mormon enterprise, the official triumphal narratives of the
Church. As a result, if we come in and say, “We’d like to re-story some narratives and surface some alternative narratives. We
want to push back and place the gendered and raced other at the
center of our concerns, and we want you to listen to the stories
of the Other. We’ve had to listen to your stories of self and your
narratives of the Other. Now we want to contest that.”
Melissa: What do you mean by the Mormon enterprise?
Gina: I mean the global Mormon enterprise, the correlated
coherent story of Mormonism that is supported in the histories along with everything that adheres to that story and confirms it. Even the most esteemed histories are joined to a central narrational thread that supports a particular emphasis on
growth, progress, development, and patriarchy rather than loss,
colonialism, incursion, hurt, and damage. The Mormon enterprise is largely a story of Mormon whiteness and its triumph in
the American West. So I would like to know if we need to make
new spaces to support work that challenges and pushes back and
surfaces alternative stories of racial, economic, and cultural harm
and oppression. Because right now, it doesn’t feel “welcome” in
Mormon studies.
In the final analysis, however, our orientation to the work is
largely dependent upon our identity. How is your racial or ethnic
identity tied to your orientation to Mormons studies?
Melissa: My sense of Mormon identity is very strong, so that
if there is any Other in my life, it’s not Mormons who are not
white or Mormons who are not Asian, but people who are not
Mormon. That identity is very strong. I believe it’s my primary
identity. So for me, I see the importance of telling these global
278
stories as a way of more truly telling the story of who Mormons
are. I agree that there is a lot of pushing involved, whether it’s
pushing back against these dominant narratives or pushing forward these alternative ways of narrating history. I’ve always felt
that I was a part of the Mormon enterprise in terms of doing
work that complicates and enriches this story.
Maybe I’m too establishment [laughing]. For example, as an
Asian American I have experienced racism and discrimination,
but in a really different way that can be very different from how
my black and Latino/a friends experienced it. The only really annoying thing that happens with me regularly is that Mormons,
usually from Utah, tell me in a really nice, enthusiastic Churchvoice that they’re impressed that I speak English so well. It
annoys me that they assume that, because I’m not white, I’m
from another country. Beyond that I think my experience of being Asian American is different. Asian Americans have always
worked so hard to assimilate. They have always worked with hierarchies. Working with hierarchies is something that we are
culturally proud of so it’s a different set of issues. But in terms of
my identity I have always wanted to work with the enterprise—
to make it better.
Gina: So your position would be one of inclusivity rather
than disrupting narratives?
Melissa: I think we can disrupt narratives. I think that’s part
of what you do as someone who wants to make things better or
tell the true story. Inclusivity can be disruptive.
Elise: Mormon history and experiences are complicated,
and it is definitely about disrupting the narrative. When we
talk about the Mormon experience, it’s about diversifying a very
American religion. When you look at the LDS Church hierarchy, it is predominantly white despite the fact that the majority
of members live outside the United States. This demographic
is not reflected in the hierarchy of the Church. At the October
2014 general conference, for the first time, speakers could deliver their addresses using their native language. I think that says
something. There seems to be a movement toward being more
279
inclusive of individuals who have not always felt welcomed into
the LDS Church or culture or in its leadership.
Another need I see in Mormon studies is to become more
interdisciplinary. In my own fields, native studies stand separate
from Mormon studies. For example, in native studies we talk
about religious colonialism but we never really discuss Mormon
religious colonialism. Until we are able to bring other fields of
study into the field of Mormon studies, our scholarship will be
very limited.
I don’t consider my work to be trail-blazing, but a lot of Native American Mormons with whom I work have had experiences which I describe in my work but lack the language to articulate. Why is it that we don’t talk about micro-aggressions and
the differences between racism and prejudice? Why is it that we
have these experiences but can’t articulate it or discuss them? I
met a young native woman who was relieved to find me because
it had been so difficult for her to find a safe space—one where
she wasn’t belittled or needed to defend herself or being accused
of not having faith. Now she really sees herself as native first and
foremost. It’s a hard question: Am I Mormon who happens to be
Native American, or am I a Native American who happens to be
Mormon? What identity do I privilege? Can I retain both? How
do individuals see and make sense of their own identity?
I’m interested in having those conversations, and we need to
have these conversations. That’s part of decolonization. First, it
gives us intellectual liberation. Then comes the question of how
to apply that liberation in a real and meaningful way. For me
it’s about empowering other people to have confidence to speak
about their lived experiences and to discuss these issues in places
where they can be comfortable. If that means that I’ll be uncomfortable in academic spaces as part of paving the way for others,
then I’m ready to use my voice and work to do so.
Gina: So, Elise, what’s your primary identity? Are you Native
American, then Mormon, or Mormon then Native American?
Elise: That’s always an ongoing negotiation. My dad is Dakota, and my mom’s Chicana. My parents met at Brigham Young
280
University. After their marriage, they returned to my father’s reservation in Montana. Because I grew up on the reservation, I
privilege my Dakota identity. While my mom is Chicana, she
raised us knowing that our roots are indigenous. My maternal
great-grandmother spoke the Nahuatl language. My mother encouraged us children to identify as Indian because it acknowledges our indigenous roots on both sides of our family. In terms
of my identity, I always see myself as Dakota first and foremost.
That’s my identity; that’s how I see the world around me.
Mormonism on the reservation is very different from how I
have experienced it in predominantly white communities. They
are two very different things, and I’m sure that there’s another conversation there—and that conversation is how Mormonism looks different when you are the majority. It’s interesting to
note how culture and worldviews are respected in my tribal community. You don’t see that respect in the predominantly white
Mormon communities where I have lived or attended church.
In these white spaces, my identity was always challenged. I was
complimented on my English or my level of education. Whether
this was intentional or not, it had a negative impact on my identity. I did not fit into the normative Mormon American (white)
experience. I have reclaimed my Dakota identity, learning things
that were important to us as a people that were stripped away
from my ancestors at boarding schools, or the effect of U.S. colonial assimilationist policies. I will always be Dakota.
Gina: I battle with this myself. If my Mormon identity was
taken away from me, I would still have my indigenous identity.
That remains regardless of my institutional alliances. Because I
live in a vulnerable community where our language, our culture,
our political rights, and our land is constantly being invaded over
and over again, it behooves me to be a part of that fight. And
if Mormonism is a site that promises redemption, I feel that it
needs to provide temporal as well as spiritual redemption.
If I’m excluded from my Mormon identity because of my
desire to disrupt white colonial patriarchies, then I would have
to give away my Mormon identity. I would never drop my in-
281
digenous identity. I couldn’t. It’s just not possible. It’s who I am.
My ethnic/“racial” identity is something I have control over because nobody can tell me that I can’t be Maori and that gives me
tremendous comfort and assurance. I feel culturally safer in this
space than I do in Mormonism because of the LDS Church’s
repeated cultural incursions into indigenous contexts and its historical insistence on culturally homogenizing Mormonism. Because my indigenous identity has been challenged in Mormon
spaces, I am repeatedly forced to choose where my cultural and
even my political identity lies.
The fact is that I am safer in my Maori identity than I am
in my Mormon identity simply because my Mormon identity
is something given me by an institution. But my Maori identity is something that I am—that can’t be removed, and that
gives me immense security. So I choose security. It is sad to have
to make that determination. White folk don’t have to think in
those terms, largely because there hasn’t been a sustained assault
on their culture and their identity. If it seems odd to white folk
that I should have had to think through questions of my primary
identity, it’s likely because they’ve never had to. The Church has
never required that choice of them.
But it is important to know that this is not the case for everyone. Not at all. In terms of my work in Mormon studies, my
interest is therefore in pushing boundaries so that indigenous
folk who bring their politics, their concerns, their activism, and
their unique spiritual expressions feel safe and accepted in Mormonism. It’s not the other way round—where Mormon scholarship has been about fitting the institutional narrative into indigenous spaces, all the while taking up that space.
In 2008 I was on the Pima-Maricopa Reservation in Phoenix, Arizona.4 The presence of an LDS chapel there gave me
pause. To me, it didn’t reflect a space for the expression of Native
4
See D. L. Turner, “Akimel Au-Authm, Xalychidom Piipaash, and
the LDS Papago Ward,” Journal of Mormon History 39, no. 1 (Winter
2013):158–80, tracing the history of the oldest LDS Native American
unit in the Church.
282
American political and cultural aspirations. Instead, it reflected
a geographical space that Mormonism took up in a way that demanded that, in that space, indigeneity was silenced and invisibilized. It felt like a blank spot on the reservation’s canvas that
spoke of spiritual emancipation on white America’s terms. It felt
like a colonial fortress occupied by those on a “civilizing mission”
to the heathens.
Some years ago a deputation involving LDS leaders from
Salt Lake City urged us as managers of young people to ensure
that we don’t get caught up in our cultures—they were referring
specifically to Pasifika cultures. It seemed to me that they were
doing this while being wholly unconscious of their own identity—as if it was normal and natural and the place from which
Mormonism ought to be understood. Making white American
cultural identity identifiable and nameable in the work of Mormon studies is crucial. But therein lies the rub. Because white
folk characteristically don’t want to see themselves as socially
constructed, they want to see themselves as normal, immutable,
and beyond interrogation and observation. In so doing, they tend
to position everyone else as problematic. This is why Mormon
scholarship in general needs to actively make room for Other
and Othered voices. This time requires intense self-reflexivity as
we wake up to questions about who we are as we write Mormon
history, to what end, and “how” this work can be done. More importantly our craft as academics needs to be accompanied by a
robust theoretical language and explicitness in the frameworks
and paradigms that we use. To that end, I do believe that we will
move Mormon studies and Mormon history into new and ultimately more rewarding, inclusive, and diverse intellectual spaces.

Journal of Mormon History - Mormon History Association

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