Item Detail
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11989
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17
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0
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English
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Telling Stories about Mormons and Indians
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State University of New York at Buffalo
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Ph.D. diss.
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Mormons claim to know some intimate truths about the spiritual destinies of American Indians. The claims or the knowledge have led Mormons throughout their history to tell particular kinds of stories about Indians in early Mormon history (1820s to 1850s). In these stories history and doctrine intertwine to make sacred history. This work considers the stories told in scripture as well as in popular and scholarly histories, the silences left in and around those stories, and other stories that might be told in other ways. In separate chapters that move from early representations to contemporary oral traditions and connections, the author considers questions relating to stories of Mormons and Indians. How does sacred history relate to authority and control, a priori disbelief in Western enquiry, and memory and forgetting? How have stories told in popular Mormon histories been constructed and developed over time? How extensive were contacts between Mormons and Indians from New York to Missouri and Illinois, before many Mormons followed Brigham Young across the Plains to become Latter-day Saints? What meanings can be made of alternate stories of Mormon and Indian contacts, such as a story that claims Joseph Smith learned from followers of Seneca prophet Handsome Lake some of the ideas he incorporated into the new religion he established? What kinds of fictions and forgeries can be created to tell stories of Mormons and Indians in ways different to conventional history? How do people outside of large Mormon institutions (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) continue to reinterpret and create anew connections between Mormons and Indians through collections of archaeology and anthropology and through doctrines of new religious groups? Multiple interpretations of the relationships of Mormons and Indians lead to multiple stories, all situated within their own knowable contexts. Having looked at some among these stories, the author explores their meaning and significance for Mormons and for Indians in their current relationships.
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Documents, Volume 6: February 1838-August 1839
Envisioning Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Revelations in Their Early American Contexts
Essays on American Indian and Mormon History
Indigenizing Mormonisms
In Heaven as It Is on Earth : Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death
In the Literature of the Lamanites : (Un)settling Mormonism in the Literary Record of Native North America, 1830–1930
Joseph Smith in Iroquois Country : A Mormon Creation Story
Mormon Conquest : Whites and Natives in the Intermountain West
"O Stop and Tell me Red Man" : Indian Removal and the Lamanite Mission of 1830–31
Other Scriptures : Restoring Voices of Gantowisas to an Open Canon
Terrible Revolution : Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse
The Book of Mormon as Amerindian Apocalypse
The Joseph Smith Papers : Documents, Volume 6 : February 1838–August 1839
The Translator and the Ghostwriter : Joseph Smith and W. W. Phelps
The Triangle and the Sovereign : Logics, Histories, and an Open Canon
Vernacular Mormonism : The Development of Latter-Day Saint Apocalyptic (1830-1930)
Views from Turtle Island : Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Mormon Entanglements