This Is My Body
April 17, 2018A deacon offers the broken bread.
Aware of awkward wait as bishop
Receives the bread of ritual first,
I take it up, thoughtless of blessing,
DiaBLOGue
Hozhoogoo Nanina Doo
April 17, 2018Max Hansen dipped his brush into the can and reached to the ceiling, spreading paint thickly and smoothly across the plyboard surface. He paused a moment, listening to a faint tapping sound. Rain? No. A…
To Be Native American — and Mormon
April 17, 2018“Lamanite! I am not a Lamanite. They are a wicked people. I am not a wicked person.” I can well remember my father, Albert H. Harris, saying this, both in church and to anyone else…
“Great Spirit Listen”: The American Indian in Mormon Music
April 17, 2018Misconceptions of native Americans began with the misnomer “Indian” based on a navigational error. Mainstream Mormon art, literature, and music, which grants the American Indians a Book of Mormon history and destiny as Lamanites, embraces…
My People, the Indians
April 17, 2018Was it only yesterday that men first sailed around the moon? You and I § marvel that men should travel so far and so fast. Yet if they have traveled far, then I have traveled…
Helen John: The Beginnings of Indian Placement
April 17, 2018Perhaps others than Helen John, Amy Avery, Golden and Thelma Buchanan, and Spencer W. Kimball might have compounded an equally powerful scheme for blessing the lives of Indians, but to these individuals fell that lot.
Captain Dan Jones and the Welch Indians
April 17, 2018The first group of Welsh converts to Mormonism arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on 26 October 1849 after a voyage of more than eight months. They had buried more than one-fifth of their number…
The Mormons and the Ghost Dance
April 17, 2018Late in the nineteenth century, thousands of Indians resentful of reservation life gathered in groups to chant and dance themselves into hypnotic trances until they collapsed from exhaustion. Some Plains Indians, while shuffling steps to…
The Captivity Narrative on Mormon Trails, 1846-65
April 17, 2018The captivity narrative is one of the oldest literary genres of the New World: some 1,000 examples survive from the sixteenth century. It is also one of the earliest forms of popular literature in the…
Joseph Smith and the Clash of Sacred Cultures
April 17, 2018Dialogue 18.4 (Winter 1984): 65–80
Shortly after the church was organized, one of Joseph Smith’s main priorities during his lifetime was preaching to the Native Americans, who he believed to be the descendants of the Lamanites.