'This is the Place!' : Disrupting Mormon Settler Colonialism
Decolonizing Mormonism : Approaching a Postcolonial Zion
Salt Lake City, UT
University of Utah Press
2018
77-99
Elise Boxer (Dakota) leads us through a deeply personal experience wherein as a teen her peers required her, by virtue of her LDS Church membership, to privilege the Book of Mormon "Lamanite" re-telling of American Indian history at the expense of her Dakota identity even though the Book of Mormon story had no cultural or social resonance with her. She again keenly felt the pressure to behave as a Mormon in ways that agree with withe United States American sensibilities whan as a young woman, she was asked to "play pioneer" during the sesquicentennial celebrations of the Mormon arrival and settlement of Utah. She refused. Some years later, Boxer reflects on her decision to return to the Assiniboine reservation in 2013 during the Days of '47 Pioneer celebrations in Salt Lake City.