Item Detail
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32093
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3
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12
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English
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Amerindian Identity, the Book of Mormon, and the American Dream
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Journal of American Studies of Turkey
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2004
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19
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21-33
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"In 1829 William Apess (1798-1839) published his autobiography, Son of the Forest, in which he foresaw Native Americans flocking to accept Christianity and 'occupy[ing] seats in the kingdom' before his white readers would (O’Connell 51). The following year—but without any knowledge of Apess’ work — Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805-44) published the Book of Mormon, in which he foresaw the same, and indeed went further. As well as anticipating their conversion, Smith envisioned Native Americans both building an American New Jerusalem and acting as God’s scourge, executing divine judgment on an apostate United States (Stott “New Jerusalem” 75-76). Unlike those of his generation whose valuation of Indianness 'went hand in hand with the dispossession and conquest of actual Indian people' (Deloria 182), Smith foresaw the dispossession and conquest of the whites. The work’s radicalism should not be exaggerated : it would mix eighteenth-century environmentalism with the covenant theology of the Old Testament, and Smith would have no qualms in reporting that the dark coloration of Native Americans was evidence of a curse. Nevertheless, that he made no attempt in his early thought to follow precedent and appropriate the Abrahamic myth for European Americans, but instead saw God working through the American Indian, is remarkable. It is fully understandable that Apess, a Pequot brought up by white families and converted to Methodism, would talk of Christianity as a means to the redemption of his people; less so that Smith would argue that the future of white America depended on the continent’s native population. In what follows I begin with the curse and move to the eschatology in order to explain Smith’s reasons for thinking so, and for believing — only fifty years after the Revolution — that the American Dream was morally bankrupt." [Author]
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All Abraham's Children : Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage
Book of Mormon Usage in Early LDS Theology
Early Mormonism and the Magic World View
From Racist Stereotype to Ethnic Identity : Instrumental Uses of Mormon Racial Doctrine
History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Period I : History of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, by Himself
Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism
Laban's Ghost : On Writing and Transgression
Mormonism Unveiled : Zion's Watchman Unmasked
New Jerusalem Abandoned : The Failure to Carry Mormonism to the Delaware
Saints or Sinners? The Evolving Perceptions of Mormon-Indian Relations in Utah Historiography
The Joseph Smith Revelations : Text and Commentary
The Refiner's Fire : The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844