Mormon Settler Colonialism : Inventing the Lamanite

According to the Book of Mormon, dissent wracked the Hebrew prophet Lehi’s family after they traveled to the Americas around 600 BC. A son, Laman, led rebellious followers who became “Lamanites,” cursed by God with a “skin of blackness.” In the nineteenth century, Joseph Smith, the first prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and his followers believed Indigenous peoples to be Lamanite descendants, living in a degraded state because they no longer followed God’s commandments. In Mormon Settler Colonialism, Elise Boxer investigates the racializing ideologies perpetuated about Indigenous peoples as a result of their categorization by Mormon doctrine as Lamanites.

Boxer uses a theoretical framework of settler colonialism—in which settlers dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands and identity—to explore how the Mormon church has used religious doctrine to define and construct Indigeneity. She examines the development of these ideas beginning with the early-nineteenth-century establishment of the LDS Church and the publication of religious texts like the Book of Mormon, which introduced the Lamanite. Boxer explores Mormon settler colonialism beginning in the mid-1800s and investigates the Indian Student Placement Program, a foster care program that placed Indigenous children in Mormon homes during the second half of the twentieth century. Boxer argues that Mormon settler colonialism persists today, evident in the recent publication of an LDS Church manual using racialized language and contestations over the proposal to remove a mural depicting Mormon settler life in a sacred, religious structure. Boxer demonstrates how Indigenous peoples have been objects of erasure by Mormon doctrine and practices as Mormon settlers, wielding their whiteness, signaling their innocence, justifying their actions, and securing their belonging through the production of Lamanite discourse.

Although the idea of the Lamanite is foundational to Mormon discourse, the formation and dissemination of this constructed identity has not been examined in broader terms of colonialism and the cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples. This provocative book deepens the intersection of Mormonism, race (Indigeneity), and colonialism in a critical and necessary direction.
 

Elise Boxer (Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakota, citizen of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes) is Associate Professor of History and Native American Studies at the University of South Dakota. She is co-editor of From the Skin: Defending Indigenous Nations Using Theory and Praxis.