Essays on American Indian and Mormon History ed. by P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink (review)

Since 2015, the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies has hosted an annual summer seminar that brings together established and emerging scholars from across the country to workshop essays dealing with the American West. The seminar typically attempts to bring two separate topics into conversation with each other or to approach the field of western history from a new angle. The ultimate goal is to develop and publish an edited collection of these papers that makes a substantial contribution to western historiography while serving as a platform from which historians can take their scholarship in new and exciting directions. The 2016 seminar focused on the intersection of American Indian and Mormon history, and the resultant collection—edited by P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink—is an important volume that any historian of the American West will want to investigate.

The relationship between Indigenous communities and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon) has a long and complicated history. The church’s foundational text, the Book of Mormon, claims to be a chronicle of several Amerindian societies, and it prophesies that Indigenous peoples will convert to Christianity before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. As such, early Mormon church leaders put a special emphasis on missionizing among Native communities and establishing positive relationships with them. Their intentions were always paternalistic, however, and as church members moved west to be free of their own persecutors, they increasingly encroached on Native land, and they justified Indian displacement with doctrines that were equally based on their conceptions of the Millennium and their support of Manifest Destiny. What resulted, as Hafen and Rensink point out in their introduction to this volume, was a specific brand of settler colonialism that “compromise[d] the race and agency of a people,” even as it attempted to ennoble them (p. xvii). Those who rejected Mormonism were often met with racial discrimination and sometimes violence, while those who joined the church often found themselves members of two seemingly contradictory communities. The purpose of Essays on American Indian and Mormon History, the editors explain, is to reconsider this colonized history by privileging Native perspectives and methodologies while addressing the difficult questions of faith and analytical history.

The essays of this collection are split into three major parts. The prefatory material consists of a traditional introduction by the editors, but also includes several personal reflections that foreground the nuances that come from being both Native and Mormon and showcasing different methodologies by which that relationship can be explored. Part One then explores Native experiences in the early church, giving particular attention to Native voices and the text of the Book of Mormon. Michael P. Taylor writes in his chapter that Indigenous experiences with and within Mormonism have too often been told from the perspective of white church members, which shoehorns their stories into a narrative of Restoration (p. 88). But, as Elise Boxer points out, “listening to Natives tell their own stories about their origins is a decolonizing act” that gives space for Indigenous experiences to be considered in their own terms (p. 5). That is precisely what this entire collection attempts to do, and what Part One tackles directly. It challenges traditional Mormon viewpoints of Indigeneity and disrupts familiar stories while inviting readers to take Native stories seriously.

Part Two then shifts to essays on the experience of Native church members in the twentieth century, including their experiences with missionary work, at church schools, and in assimilationist programs like the Indian Student Placement Program. These essays focus on lived experiences rather than conceptual ideas like settler colonialism and archival power, and they explore the complex balance of dual identity that so many Indigenous Mormons have experienced. As Rensink points out in his conclusion, these essays reveal “remarkable examples of syncretic identities, where Native Peoples have consciously and subconsciously...