Guest Post by Jason Palmer

Mormon Settler Colonialism: Inventing the Lamanite is as unsettling to us settlers as its author’s presence at Mormon Studies conferences. It is as unsettling to us settlers as her people’s presence on the land. Settler scholars will not give this book rave reviews because not only is its content not for our White gaze, and not only does its content burst the bubble of liberalism that protects us from our deep complicity in the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples embedded in relationships with Abya Yala (the so-called “Americas”), Palestine, and many other of Earth’s communities, but its form is not what we settlers will categorize as a “history” or even a “book.” We might go so far as to categorize it as an invasion of our space.

When we settlers violently invade someone else’s space, we renarrativize ourselves as victims of invasion. We position ourselves such that, when the inevitable “atrocities” are committed, they can honestly seem to be done “on both sides” and in the passive voice. One of the spaces that we settler Mormons continually remake into a place of innocence in order to obfuscate the ways in which we benefit daily from Indigenous exploitation is This is the Place Heritage Park in my home state of Utah. I am glad Boxer perceived that the park’s contemporary goings-on happen because of what went on before. I am glad she wrote a whole chapter in her history about that place in the present. Such perceptiveness made me trust her as a narrator of stories. She understands that the archive of the past is out in community with the land and the future ancestors of the present. History is not in the holy granite vaults.

Germinated within this grounded archive, Boxer’s book details the multiple levels of irony through which Mormon settler coloniality makes itself almost comically visible in the park and in other spaces. The form of her book matches this function. In fact, the park is a space much like her book because both the book and The Place speak the quiet parts of settler coloniality out loud. They make settler coloniality—the air most of her readers breathe but never see—explicit.
Of course, there is a major difference between the park and the book. Settler coloniality is out and proud in the park. It is inevitable and unquestionable. In the book, settler coloniality is laid bare. It is fragile and doomed.

During my study of Anglo Mormonism as contrasted with Peruvian Mormonism, I too noticed the microcosmic importance of This is the Place Heritage Park and was hoping someone would write about its full historical and material context. As part of my anthropological research, I attended a classic settler colonial move to innocence on July 22, 2022: the unveiling of bronze statues commemorating Green Flake, Hark Wales, Oscar Smith, and Jane Manning James. The art emblematized them as “Black Mormon pioneers.” Allowing their presence at the park elevated them closer to the status of the racially unmarked “Mormon pioneers” but fell short of granting them equal status on the architectural hierarchy, also made of bronze, that Boxer so aptly describes. A White apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, M. Russell Ballard, spoke at the media event. He used the phrase “you people” to refer to the few dozen Black people present in the VIP seating. Judging from the ensuing laughter in that section, Ballard might have meant his othering phraseology to be a satire of racism, an inside joke between the Black descendants of Green Flake who orchestrated the statues and the White church leaders who approved them. Yet, to me, “you people” recalled the language that another White apostle, Gordon B. Hinkley, had used repeatedly in the 1980’s to refer to Peruvian Mormons. In my brain, Ballard was saying, “I hope this inclusion of Blackness in a White space is finally enough for ‘you people’ who are fundamentally different from ‘we, the people.’”

I wondered who counted as “people” in Ballard’s ontology. However, before I had time to consider that question, Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox spoke. Cox mentioned his Mormon pioneer ancestry. He said that his Anglo great-great grandfather was “the first baby born in the Salt Lake Valley.” He did not say, “the first Mormon baby.” He certainly did not say, “the first settler baby.” Did he honestly mean to say that a White settler Mormon was the first human baby born
in the Salt Lake Valley? I have no way of knowing what was on Cox’s mind when he uttered those words, but I am fairly certain that I know what was not on his mind: Indigenous peoples. If he were thinking of Indigenous peoples, he might have considered that a human would have a rather high probability of being born in the Salt Lake Valley at some moment between time immemorial and 1847. In my mind, Cox’s failure to grammatically mark “baby” with “Anglo Mormon,” revealed his deepest ontological schema. His omission, especially if unintentional, revealed whom settlers are allowed to count as human even as it erased thousands of years of human civilization, innovation, diplomacy, and technological advancement in the Salt Lake Valley. There was no hint of irony in the governor’s voice during his “first baby” declaration. Did he really believe that his ancestors came to a place that was uninhabited, or did he merely believe that the Salt Lake Valley was uninhabited by those whom he considered human? How exactly did Cox’s ontology come to exist regarding who is and is not human? Precisely how and why did Anglo settlers come to fancy themselves the first people of a land that already had a people? How did such an anachronism remain unquestioned even at an event supposedly aimed at being one people? How does the fundamental anti-Indigeneity of Cox’s “first baby” anachronism structure the everyday lives of contemporary settler colonists in the so-called United States who benefit from a particularly “Mormon” sort of colonization?

Elise Boxer unflinchingly explores those questions. Of course, my fellow settlers will not like the answers. This is partly because she does not allow a sentence to go by without a reminder that if Indigenous peoples truly count as human groups, then the United States of America and the LDS church have no justification for their existence on the land. However, the main reason settler scholars will not like this book is that it is not organized like a settler scholar’s book. Not until page 73 does Boxer get specific about exactly why the USA and the LDS have no moral justification for their existence. While this lack of specificity will annoy settler scholars, those 73 preparatory pages are as necessary as ablutions before worship. They prepare the settler mind for a possible decolonization event. Pages 1-73 are invocations of cyclical mantras. They reminded me of the Koran, which is not meant to be read but to be sung. It is as if Boxer’s book were meant not to be read but to be recited in a call-and-response ritual. Never does Boxer use the call signal “Mormons” without following it up with the appropriate response, “they who need Indigenous peoples to be Lamanites in order to justify severing Indigenous relations to land.”

It is my guess that settler exMormons, despite their prowess at what they call “deconstruction,” will feel even more existentially implicated than settler Mormons by this book. Settler exMormons will hate to discover that it is only settler colonialism, not Mormonism, that can explain “how Mormon settlers created narratives of belonging to justify their possession of land” (23). Settler exMormons may have eschewed those narratives, but they still live upon that land along with the narratives’ adherents. It is no wonder that many Anglo exMormons consider the evil part of Mormonism to be the theology and not the land subduction. It is easy to give the theology back. Boxer’s book implies a more fundamental challenge: Give the land back.

Boxer reveals a truth that is inconvenient for settlers all over the Great Basin who want to continue celebrating pioneers and days of ’47 parades: “The dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the making of Mormon place went hand in hand” (89). When Anglo Mormons and Anglo exMormons are proud of the sacrifices that their pioneer ancestors made in settling the Great Basin, they are ultimately proud of genocide. Boxer’s book offers no redemption for those of us who continue to benefit from that genocide. This does not mean that she is nihilistic or cynical. In fact, her vision offers immense hope. Wanting the annihilation of a violent occupation is not nihilistic. It is liberatory. The future of the Great Basin and of this planet depends on it.

Settler exMormons will discard this book offhand with the guilt-assuaging, individualistic, conversation-stopping questions that they always ask, “What do you expect me to do, Dr. Boxer? Split myself three ways genealogically and go back to Denmark, England, and Sweden so that I can live guilt-free and finally be Indigenous? Do I give my McMansion in Saint George on Geronimo Avenue in the Apache Rocks Vista gated community to the Navajo Nation? In other words, what do ‘you people’ want from ‘us’?”

Instead of answering those handwashing questions, Boxer delves into the “you people” and the “us” at their genesis. However, she does so cyclically. This will grate on settler ears as repetitive. There is essentially one message, which is repeated at least once per page in a hundred different ways in the hope that one of those ways will make it past the hermetic bulwarks of emotional attachments to the settler state and into at least one thick, settler skull. The message is
this:

The Mormon settler fantasy reimagines Indigenous peoples as Lamanites using religious ideologies and texts that mark them as the racialized Other. Indigenous peoples do not exist on their own terms but instead exist within the Mormon infrastructure as Lamanites. Mormon settlers became invested in converting American Indians because this gave meaning to their settler subject position and connection to land. Mormon settlers needed Indigenous peoples to become Lamanites because this justified their racialized views of Indigenous peoples and LDS Church policies and infrastructures designed to save them from their fallen state. (55)

After page 73, Boxer introduces ideas understandable only to those who have allowed the previous pages to prepare their hearts. She details precisely how Mormon settlers put in the hard work of colonizing the Menominee people, of converting the trees around them into timber, and of siphoning off the wealth of that timber. Since the United States did not immediately reward settler Mormons with land for doing the dirty work of genocide necessary to make the Menominee homeland part of the US empire, the Mormons sought a new space devoid of people whom they considered human. The Council of Fifty revealed in 1844 that the official church understood the civilizations of the Shoshone, Paiute, Ute, Goshute, and Diné to be subhuman when it spoke of Utah as including “lands thus unknown, unowned, or unoccupied, and are among some of the richest and most fertile of the continent” (80). We progressive, woke settler scholars might criticize these great White Elders for not considering Shoshone habitation to count as human occupation until we ponder the implications of thinking otherwise. If we do not agree with the Council of Fifty, then we must contend with the question: What unravels when Indigenous lives actually matter? Eventually, we must answer ourselves: What unravels is the whole justification for the United States of America, along with all of the oaths we take in our academic appointments to support and defend its constitution. With few exceptions, one being Elise Boxer, we Mormon Studies scholars cannot deal with the repercussions of taking nonmetaphorical decolonization to its logical endpoint, and so we collectively write hundreds of Mormon Studies books about the church’s antiblackness but only two or three about its anti-Indigeneity.

The United States and the churches that prop it up will still exist and even thrive without antiblackness. On the other hand, if anti-Indigeneity were ever eliminated from the United States, the relationship between land and Indigenous peoples would be restored, and where would the US government fit onto that new map? Would it float above it? Of course, the United States would have to start by ending its occupation of Hawaii because that occupation is illegal even by the settler state’s own laws, but where would this terribly nonmetaphorical decolonization stop? Is there a single square centimeter of land in all of Abya Yala that the United States acquired by any logic other than the fundamentally anti-Indigenous doctrine of terra nullius?

If a settler state decolonizes, it ceases to exist because, unlike the brutal empires of England, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, a settler state’s empire—by definition—has no motherland to shrink back to.

Fortunately, since that kind of decolonization is not practical, we do not have to think about it. We do not have to read Boxer’s book. Instead, we get to bury our heads in the sand and ask stupid questions, revealing that our fear of White genocide outweighs our awe of Indigenous restoration. We settler scholars are not creative enough to think of anything other than “them” doing to “us” what “we” did to “them,” so let us just drop the whole thing. Instead of choosing to study one of hundreds of massacres of Indigenous peoples that happened in Utah territory alone from 1847 to 1857 at the hands of settler Mormons, let us write about one of the only settler-on-settler massacres in US history, and let us write about it again, and again, and again. Then, let us cry about being descendants of the Utahan perpetrators and hug the descendants of the Missourian victims in a swirl of White tears.

Boxer invites an end to these settler shenanigans. Understanding her book gives us a moral imperative to stop letting the massacre at Mountain Meadows distract us from the truth: We cannot think in decolonial ways if we do not read books written in decolonial ways. Boxer’s book is an example of what decolonial writing can look like. Her book makes it completely obvious why Mormonism, of all the other mid-nineteenth century utopian movements, has survived as long as it has. Mormonism plugged itself directly into the US-powered manifest destiny of settler fantasies. Mormon interests did not just happen to coincide with settler interests. Rather, Joseph Smith created The Book of Mormon for the sole purpose of justifying US manifest destiny and making settlers like himself feel good about Indigenous enclosure. There was no other purpose. In other words, Mormonism remains popular among settlers today for the same reason that the film genre known as the Western remains popular among settlers today in its new serial iterations, such as American Primeval: It transforms settler suffering and grit into land rights that trump Indigenous humanity.

In sum, go watch a Ken Burns documentary, read The Book of Mormon, or sit in the “authentic Shoshone teepee” advertised at This is the Place Memorial Park if you want to feel good about settler ways of being and knowing. If, however, you seek to understand the parasitic relations reproduced through violence that settler ways of life require, read Boxer’s book. It contains the true record of Indigenous displacement, dispossession, and, as Boxer ingeniously outlines, the most insidious of all: Indigenous possession.