May 07, 2010

Indians inspired Mormonism

In Mormon Action Figures, I discussed the traditional Mormon theory of pre-Columbian American history. You can read more about this theory in places such as these:

Archaeology and the Book of Mormon
Lamanites
Nephite
Golden plates

Let's consider what we know about the origin of Mormonism.

In Joseph Smith's time, Americans were beginning to discover Indian mounds and other remnants of past civilizations. They couldn't believe the "savages" they met could do anything worthwhile, so they postulated the existence of "lost races":In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes.

Andrew Jackson, First Annual Message to Congress, December 8, 1830


It was an era of scientific exploration: Lewis and Clark, Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, the search for the Northwest Passage. Natives were involved in many of these quests.

It also was the time of the Second Great Awakening, an era of religious fervor and experimentation. People were looking for scientific and spiritual answers--trying to make sense of everything from prehistoric fossils to the Pyramids to Noah's flood.

Indian mounds explained

This was the environment Joseph Smith was operating in. Now let's see how it may have affected him.

A previous posting noted how Mormonism was built on Indians mounds. This posting implied that Joseph Smith was something of a treasure-hunter who sought the secrets of the Indian burial mounds near his home. Also, we learned Smith probably was familiar with View of the Hebrews, a book that claimed a lost tribe of Israel was responsible for the mounds.

It seems likely to me that Joseph Smith was inspired directly or indirectly by Indians. He may have written the Book of Mormon to explain how a lost tribe came to America, established a mound-building civilization, and then degenerated into a bunch of "savage" tribes. The cognitive dissonance--how could these Indians have built those mounds?--may have been too much for him to let pass.



Could God have created a whole hemisphere of people with no knowledge of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus? That would've been hard for a good Christian to swallow. So Smith concocted a theory of how the Old World seeded the New World with its knowledge and experience. He decided Indian "civilizations" were a product of the superior Judeo-Christian civilization across the Atlantic.

In short, Indians may have been the scientific and religious problem Smith wanted to solve. The rest of the Book of Mormon may have been window-dressing around this central mystery.

On the religious frontier

If that wasn't Smith's specific motivation, perhaps he was inspired in general by the mysteries around him. Mounds...buried treasure...lost races...ghosts and spirits...prophecies...gods. This stew of scientific and religious fervor may have inspired his von Däniken-style blend of myth and history. Indians were a big part of these mysteries even if Smith didn't intend to explain them.

As I said in America's Cultural Roots, the frontier that faced Americans was a frontier of Indians. From the War of 1812 to the Trail of Tears, clearing the east of Indians was America's biggest problem. Accomplishing this removal meant demonizing the Indians--transforming them from noble savages into savages, period. Smith's Book of Mormon helped accomplish this.

I don't know if anyone else has suggested an Indian influence on the birth of Mormonism. If not, let me be the first. Whether it has any validity or not, it's fun to think about.

Below:  "The Israelites were here first, so this so-called Indian land really belongs to you."

13 comments:

dmarks said...

"They couldn't believe the "savages" they met could do anything worthwhile, so they postulated the existence of "lost races":"

This idea persists now in different forms. Shirley MacLaine (who is left-wing, politically) has said pretty much the same thing about the Inca ruins.

Seth R. said...

Woah, wait a sec here.

Joseph didn't posit that "this is Jewish land, not Indian land."

He posited that Indians WERE heirs to God's promises to Israel. He felt this was their land, and that the Indians would experience an spiritual and cultural awakening - outshining the European gentiles.

You can call that fantastic, or naive, or whatever you want, but the fact remains that Joseph Smith had a very positive view of the Indians.

Everyone focuses on a single isolated passage in the Book of Mormon suggesting that skin color is linked to a curse of some sort.

What everyone ignores is how often the Lamanites (the supposed ancestors of at least some Native Americans) are portrayed in a very positive light.

It was this imagery that informed early Mormon interactions with Native Americans - which were usually positive.

Far more positive than the history of other white American settlers. Brigham Young's policies towards the Indians in early Utah were largely benign - operating under the premise of "I'd rather feed them than fight them." He was actually one of the most progressive white American leaders in US history when it came to Indians.

At a time when most other Americans were having the local Indians massacred or rounded up, or driven out, the Mormon settlers - by contrast - had fairly cordial relations with their own Indian neighbors.

Look, we ain't been saints on this issue. But we've been a hell of a lot better than any other white Americans in the rather ugly US history of Native American policy.

dmarks said...

Seth said: "Look, we ain't been saints on this issue. But we've been a hell of a lot better than any other white Americans in the rather ugly US history of Native American policy."

And now for some of the real history, read of the Mormon-perpetrated Bear River massacre, considered to be the worst single massacre of Indians in American history.

And remember how Mormonism was based on a condescending lie about America's ancient Indians. The settlers thought that the Indians were too degenerate to have even made burial mounds, so they made up things about "superior" races having done it.

It's also the height of arrogance for outsiders to attach a religious origin to Indians.

Whether or not I believe in, say, the origin myths of the Navajo or Creek or other tribes, they have a right to these and they are far more legitimate than some fictions made up about these tribes by a someone who made up fictions burial mounds.

"He posited that Indians WERE heirs to God's promises to Israel..."

Lets ask the Indians and scientists about this. They will laugh in your face about the connection between Indians and ancient Israelites.

Seth R. said...

Please clarify what you mean by the Mormons "perpetrating" the Bear River Massacre.

Anonymous said...

What Dmarks fails to mention is the infamous massacre of White settlers who were not of Mormon faith, but were part of the growing California gold rush hype of that time. Brigham Young had ordered the slaughter of non-Mormon White settlers.

Seth R. its not unusual for Rob for to practice "micoaggression racism" in here. Albiet, he does a good job stating facts most of the time. While doing so, admonishing Natives. Don't forget that Rob is White himself. So that is to be expected. I'm just glad this site isn't mainstream, because otherwise he's a part of larger problem in terms of "microaggression racism" or conscious racism, you know the soft(but lethal) form of racism.

~GENO~

dmarks said...

Seth: Read about the massacre.

Geno: You are right. I read about that somewhere too, but did not mention it as it has no bearing on how Mormons treated Natives.

Seth R. said...

I did read about the massacre. Read the Wikipedia entry on it right after your remarks, and then read a few other sources on it.

The massacre was done by a group of US soldiers called the California Volunteers. Not Mormons.

Now, the tensions that led up to the fight involved Mormons. Mormon settlers were taking up farming land, and the Shoshone were being crowded out as a result. This led to loss of hunting ground, and the Shoshone started stealing from the settlers to get by. This resulted in a number of confrontations of increasing seriousness between white settlers and Shoshone.

There was then a massacre of a group of travelers on the Oregon Trail credited to the local Shoshone resulting in a US army base in Boise Idaho, after that eight miners were also killed. After some additional small hostility, the US army moved against the Shoshone. Colonel Edward Connor led the California Volunteers against the Shoshone resulting in 21 deaths and 42 wounded on the US army side, and differing accounts of anywhere from around 200 to 400 Shoshone killed.

I won't pretend the local Mormons were all that busted up about the massacre. They'd been having enough problems with the Shoshone for long enough, that they viewed the incident with a mixture of approval and relief. But they didn't really like Connor much and claimed he was hostile to the Mormons. Many of the Shoshone were freely baptized Mormon in the years following the massacre and integrated into LDS society. They founded the Utah town of Washakie and most of the northern Shoshone built farmsteads under LDS sponsorship. Shoshone who didn't do this left for the reservation at Fort Hall.

Anyway, Mormons were a part of the problems leading up to the massacre. But it's entirely misleading to say they "perpetrated" it. The US Army was the perpetrator here.

The only other notable outright hostilities between white Mormon settlers and local Indians that I found was the "Walker War" which resulted in about 12 white settlers killed and an equally modest number of Indians. Other than that, the history of Chief Walker's tribe and the Mormon settlers was largely peaceful with the Mormons providing trade and even medical supplies during a measles epidemic.

Among the causes of the Walker War were Mormon interference in the profitable Native American slave trade (Indians selling other Indians as slaves), and an increase in non-Mormon presence in Utah with the non-Mormon white settlers killing a few local Indians. This led to the general tensions that caused the "Walker War." After the conflict, Walker's tribe converted to Mormonism - presumably they integrated in.

Seth R. said...

As for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, people don't usually bother to put the event in context.

Mormons were in Utah because they had been looted, beaten, raped, and murdered in Missouri and then Illinois. The worst incident in Missouri was the Haun's Mill Massacre after governor Lilburn Boggs issued his "Extermination Order" that Mormons were to be driven out of Missouri or killed. This led to the massacre were enraged Missourians cornered a group of Mormons in Haun's Mill killing 18 (including men and young boys) and injuring 13. After that, the Mormons gathered in Far West and were forced to leave the state under truce by Missouri militia.

Things didn't go much better in Illinois with the Mormons being violently robbed and driven out of that state as well.

They went to Utah because they hoped to settle in a place no one else wanted where they could be finally left alone.

Not good enough. Alarmed at Mormon refusal to accept Federal judges, and whipped up by ugly rumoring and bigotry about polygamy, President James Buchanan sent out half the Federal Army to Utah to put down the so-called Mormon resistance.

For the local Mormons, it was going to be Missouri all over again. They were terrified.

Utah Mormon settlers were gearing up for an all-out war. Mormon leaders engaged in the usual fiery pre-war rhetoric common to that time period.

In this context, a wagon train of Missouri settlers bound for California passed through Salt Lake unopposed and unharmed. As they headed south through Utah, there were grazing conflicts between their cattle and the Mormons, accusations of well-poisoning, some Mormons saw them as being in league with the approaching army. Rumors that some of prophet Joseph Smith's killers were in the wagon train flew.

Finally, local Mormon leadership in Cedar City, Utah decided independently to do something about it. When Brigham Young caught wind of the trouble, he sent a message ordering the wagon train not be harmed, but the messenger arrived too late to stop it. 120 men women and children killed with 17 young children taken into custody by local Mormons.

Historian Will Bagley is of the opinion that Brigham Young secretly ordered the massacre. But his sources for this are pretty sketchy, and other historians of the event outright disagree with him. There is pretty solid evidence that Brigham Young ordered the wagon train be left alone.

My opinion is that this was an isolated incident of violence by local Mormon settlers in a climate of pre-war fear and paranoia.

Certainly, it was not repeated.

Rob said...

Whatever Smith posited about Indians, he did so because he thought they were a lost tribe of Israel. Hence my hypothesis that Indians inspired Mormonism.

Mormons have established a lot of churches to help and convert Indians. Whether that's good or bad is debatable.

For more on the Bear River Massacre, see:

Remembering Bear River

First, worst, and forgotten massacre

493 Shoshones killed at Bear River

Which massacre was worse?

As for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, here's some info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_massacre

The Mountain Meadows massacre was a mass slaughter of the Fancher-Baker emigrant wagon train at Mountain Meadows, Utah Territory, by a local Mormon militia and members of the Paiute Indian tribe on September 11, 1857.

Initially intending to orchestrate an Indian massacre, local militia leaders including Isaac C. Haight and John D. Lee conspired to lead militiamen disguised as Native Americans along with a contingent of Paiute tribesmen in an attack.

Historians attribute the massacre to a combination of factors including war hysteria fueled by millennialism and strident Mormon teachings by senior LDS leaders including Brigham Young.

m. said...

"He felt this was their land,"
It is? (Then again, there are so many immigrants who refuse to admit this, that I guess that kind of is 'progressive' in a bizarre way. I'll give you that one.)

"...and that the Indians would experience an spiritual and cultural awakening - outshining the European gentiles."
Newsflash: we had our cultural and spiritual 'awakening' long before the first Euro invaders arrived...so it's safe to say that Mormon settlers had no hand in it/are slow-on-the-draw.

"You can call that fantastic, or naive, or whatever you want, but the fact remains that Joseph Smith had a very positive view of the Indians."
If by 'positive' you mean condescending, patronizing, demoralizing, dehumanizing...

"Everyone focuses on a single isolated passage in the Book of Mormon suggesting that skin color is linked to a curse of some sort."
Flippant. Perhaps people tend to focus on this because it's hideous enough to begin with when non-Native people link our skin to sin, but for them to also spread lies about those converts getting paler because they've joined the church _rather than just acknowledge basic concepts of melanin production_ and realize that those in placement programs had to adjust to a white way of living (which meant being indoors more and going about the day in a way that is less productive than our traditional way of life is) once they went to stay with a host family...well, it's ridiculous. I'd call this condition more 'jaundiced and miserable' than 'white and delightsome'.

"What everyone ignores is how often the Lamanites (the supposed ancestors of at least some Native Americans) are portrayed in a very positive light."
Should we be grateful for this lack of forthright behavior? It's like expecting us to be happy when we're portrayed as noble savages rather than just subhuman. Hawaiians to be thrilled to have their culture prosituted for tourists because it's "flattering" when an outsider "takes interest" (however fleeting/damaging the results) in their culture. Lamanites are not our ancestors, our ancestors are our ancestors.

"I'd rather feed them than fight them."
Thank you for having the courtesy to at least not back up and run over the other foot.

"He was actually one of the most progressive white American leaders in US history when it came to Indians."
You are proselytizing.

"Look, we ain't been saints on this issue. But we've been a hell of a lot better than any other white Americans in the rather ugly US history of Native American policy."
As a non-Native, you are not one to quantify these things.


So, basically, Mormonism is just like other coercive, follower-centric religions. In other words, it is no better than Judeo-Christian-Islamic doctrines have been and could be for any Indigenous people. ('Could be' in the case of Islam/Judaism, because there's no doubt in my mind that their crimes would be just as horrific as others if they'd rolled up on our shores earlier.)

Seth R. said...

Look, I don't care if you want to point out historical facts. But I'd like it done accurately, and in context with what everyone else was doing.

Few people seem interested in adding pretty-much any context when it comes to Mormon history. Our history has been no worse than that of the rest of white America, and in many cases, it's been better.

Yet for some reason, Mormons have become the whipping boy for all the sins of white America.

It doesn't bother me that Mormons are criticized legitimately for bad things they did. What bothers me is that people act like we're the only ones who did it.

Steph said...

Seth R. --

You said: "Many of the Shoshone were freely baptized Mormon in the years following the massacre and integrated into LDS society. They founded the Utah town of Washakie and most of the northern Shoshone built farmsteads under LDS sponsorship."

Yes, and in the 1960s we burned their homes down, sold off the Washakie land, and sent them packing anyway. Hardly the best example for showing just how positive Mormons are in their Indian policy. We tried to atone for this betrayal by giving them some 200 acres of that land back a few decades ago, but that was nothing but a pathetic compromise, for the entire nation of the Northwestern Shoshoni cannot be expected to survive on a measly couple hundred of acres. Poor repayment for them giving up almost everything to be like us. There is no question that we are certainly wealthy enough now to have given them much more back.

You said: "Look, we ain't been saints on this issue. But we've been a hell of a lot better than any other white Americans in the rather ugly US history of Native American policy."

I can tell from your comments that you are not that familiar with Utah’s history of Indian relations, which is the case for most Utahns and Mormons. We paint too pretty a picture of ourselves. Try reading more about the February 1850 Fort Utah “battle”, for one. This Church-authorized extermination campaign against the Ute people was perpetrated before the days of Brigham’s “cheaper to feed than to fight” (cheaper, not better) policy, which he first instigated a year later in 1851. In this slaughter the pioneer men were ordered to kill off the Ute men near Provo, and spare the women and children only if they “behaved”. Between thirty to forty Utes were killed compared to only one Mormon. Some of the Ute men were killed only after they had been captured and were prisoners of war. It is believed that these prisoners were forced by the pioneer men to run across the ice of the frozen Utah Lake before they were gunned down.

You will see that a thorough reading of the actual history reveals that our policy towards American Indians could often be just as cruel and violent as other frontier whites. The "progressiveness" of our approach depended less on our own enlightenment, and more on the natives' willingness to convert and assimilate. Most of the American Indians of Utah were highly resistant to becoming Mormon, and only did so en masse after their land and resources had been completely consumed and they were literally starving. It was primarily a move of survival to convert. For more information on real Mormon-Indian relations and not the fairy tale, I suggest you start by reading two Utah Historical Quarterly articles “Open Hand and Mailed Fist” and “Of Pride and Politics”, both in Volume 46, no 3 of UHQ, freely available on the web.

Steph said...

Now as for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, I was also not very convinced by Will Bagley that the massacre was actually ordered by Brigham Young, although Young certainly helped promote the conditions in which it occurred. Bagley weighed a lot of his argument on some journal entries by Church Indian interpreter Dimick B. Huntington, in which Huntington “gave” the Paiutes the cattle of the southern route to steal. Unfortunately these entries, while they may not explicitly prove the Church’s hand in the Massacre, still reveal a pretty damning picture of how Mormon authority really viewed their so-called Lamanite brethren and their own role in “redeeming” them.

During the same time that Huntington offered the cattle of the southern route to the Paiutes, Huntington, along with Bishop Chauncey West of Ogden, also gave the cattle of the northern emigration route to a group of Shoshoni living near Ogden. The Shoshoni refused. It’s important to understand that the leaders of this Shoshoni band were at that time involved in playing the US military and the Mormon Church against each other, transmitting the movements of each back to the other, etc., and therefore were not likely to have taken up Huntington and West’s, erm, *generous* offer. Nevertheless, the cattle from this northern route were still stolen, from a California-bound man named Squires. The Mormons publically blamed the Indians (even though they themselves had ordered the theft), and the Indians blamed Mormons, saying that the Mormons had the animals.

History has proven the Indians more correct on this matter. Shortly after the theft took place, Bishop Chauncey West (the same man who had helped order the theft in the first place) made a deal with the poor emigrant Squires: if West recovered the stolen cattle, Squires would give West half of the 400+ animals as a reward. Squires agreed, and West promptly sent Indian interpreter George Washington Hill into Ogden canyon to recover the animals. Bishop West succeeded in getting his profit from this plunder and split it with George W. Hill (who seemed to be ignorant of the Mormon hand in it all).

So yes, Mormon/Native American relations are far more complex and ugly than Mormon history commonly portrays it. We are often the whipping boy of America, sure, but too often also we are trying to make ourselves out as superior to everyone else, such as with Native relations. In this case at least, it is simply not true, and we would do ourselves and the Native Americans justice by accepting this.