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And now behold, it came to pass that the people of Nephi . . . became an exceeding fair and delightsome people. . . . [N]either were there Lamanites nor any manner of ites, but they were one, the children of Christ
—4 Nephi 1:10, 17[1]

The Book of Mormon’s portrayal of a great peace that followed the climatic appearance of Jesus Christ in ancient America presents a conundrum. The people of Nephi reportedly became especially “white,” a label that is described simultaneously as not an “ite.” On the one hand, the narrator Mormon represented the “people of Nephi” as “fair and delightsome.”[2] Yet, a few verses later he declared that there were no longer “any manner of ites.” The paradox in this portrayal is that Nephites, even if they absorbed whitened Lamanites and renamed themselves the people of Nephi, remained rather literally (wh)ites. Put more bluntly, the label “white”—just like “Lamanite” and “Nephite”—remains an ite.

In his 2017 book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, historian Max Perry Mueller confronts the same troubling passage from Fourth Nephi, noting that “Lamanites and Nephites unified to become one raceless (white) Christian people.” Mueller recognizes an unseemly paradox: “whiteness is the racial category that is, ironically, empty of race.” White is presented as “the original and universal racial category” as well as a mutable one: “within the Book of Mormon hermeneutic of restoration whiteness becomes an aspirational identity, which even those cursed with blackness can achieve.”[3] In his 2024 book, The Testimony of Two Nations, Michael Austin, provost of Snow College, applauds the mutability of curses and races in the Book of Mormon. Austin asserts that in contrast to curses in biblical texts, “The curse in the Book of Mormon is reversible and tied clearly to continuing behavior.” He suggests that despite “the overt racism in some of its passages concerning race and skin color, it [the Book of Mormon] injected something genuinely new in to the divine-curse-as-racial-etiology genre of scripture.”[4] I seek to unsettle this applause by highlighting Indigenous readings of the Book of Mormon that expose its broader colonial implications. Is the narrator Mormon’s suggestion of racial mutability actually something novel to be praised or might it be, instead, a rather common but disguised instrument of settler colonial erasure?

Overview

I offer an approach to answering this question that draws from critical Indigenous studies methodology to center Indigenous perspectives. I begin with an overview of recent Indigenous scholarship on whiteness and Mormon settler colonialism, including a discussion of how the recognition of my own settler positionality informs this analysis. I then step back in time to the mid-twentieth century to illustrate with a concrete example the harmful deployment of the Book of Mormon’s great peace narrative in the formulation of a federal Indian policy of termination by Latter-day Saint politicians. This effort to deploy the power of the federal government to turn American Indians white sparked a backlash from Indigenous activists who defended their sovereignty, in part, by alleging that Joseph Smith misappropriated an oral version of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Great Law of Peace[5] in his construction of the Book of Mormon. I then take this allegation seriously by reviewing circumstantial evidence from the early nineteenth century supporting a possible oral transmission of Haudenosaunee narratives followed by an examination of written sources that were also available in the late 1820s prior to the dictation of the extant Book of Mormon. I then conclude with a juxtaposition of the narrator Mormon’s portrayal of a great peace with that of the results of a similar Peacemaker in Iroquois accounts to reveal the settler colonial erasure of Indigenous sovereignty undergirding the racial politics of the Book of Mormon.

Throughout this essay, I feature Indigenous interpretations not simply for the historical claims that they make. More importantly, these narratives—regardless of whether or not they can be substantiated by the historical record—do very important cultural work. These narratives contest the silencing implicit in the assumed settler privilege of telling stories about Native origins by countering with stories of their own about how Mormons came to be. Intriguingly, Mormon narratives about how American Indians came to be and Indigenous etiologies of Book of Mormon origins share in the assumption that there is a kinship between their differing accounts of an ancient great peace. Indigenous stories embrace this kinship, not by erasing Mormon stories but by supplementing them with alternatives that feature living Indigenous neophytes rather than dead white Nephites.

Juxtaposing these related traditions by giving voice to unsettling Indigenous stories leads to the troubling realization that white, too, is an ite. The narrator Mormon’s portrait of a seemingly raceless society looks a little too much like a settler colonial body politic that manufactures peace by erasing Indigenous cultures and identities. Hallmarks of settler colonialism embedded within Mormon’s narrative include the production of alternative histories favoring settler perspectives alongside the elimination, displacement, and/or absorption of Indigenous peoples into a homogenous polity stripped of Indigenous sovereignty. The Book of Mormon functions in this respect as a settler colonial document that seeks to replace Indigenous stories of their own origins and histories with one that subordinates ancestors of Indigenous peoples within narratives of an origin outside of Turtle Island (North America). The false political narrative that one can be white (or pure) and raceless has done considerable harm to Indigenous communities, particularly when Latter-day Saint politicians in the mid-twentieth century drew from these same teachings in the Book of Mormon to construct a settler colonial state policy of termination, directed toward eliminating Indigenous sovereignty in the United States.

Indigenous activists who led a counteroffensive opposing the termination policies advocated by Latter-day Saint politicians recognized and took strategic aim at the roots of termination in Book of Mormon theology. In defense of their imperiled sovereignty, Indigenous knowledge keepers identified this Book of Mormon story as an overly Christianized variant of a larger body of Haudenosaunee oral history of the arrival of a Peacemaker who helped found a confederacy uniting Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and (later) Tuscaroras under a Great Law of Peace prior to the arrival of colonists from Europe.[6] They attributed the presence of the Great Peace and other allusions to Iroquois narratives in the Book of Mormon to an oral transmission of these stories to Joseph Smith prior to his dictation of the Book of Mormon. This etiology ought to be taken more seriously by scholars. In fact, I identify several Haudenosaunee individuals from the historical record who would have potentially had the opportunity to share these stories with Joseph Smith as well as some written sources he may have encountered. More importantly, I consider how we might read Third and Fourth Nephi differently when viewed within the larger body of Six Nations literature on the Great Law of Peace.

None of the Haudenosaunee versions depict the Peacemaker as white, portray an ancient white civilization on Turtle Island, or imagine a white society as the ultimate goal of peacemaking endeavors. Some Indigenous variants identify the Peacemaker with Jesus, but they insist on his autochthonous origin on Turtle Island. Haudenosaunee narratives depict the league initiated by the Peacemaker as a shared matrilocal longhouse where each matrilineal nation maintains its own sovereignty and clan mothers manage the communal ownership of land. Only a couple of secondhand settler colonial versions of the Great Law of Peace from the twentieth century associate the Peacemaker or the Six Nations with whiteness.[7] These, much like the Book of Mormon, are settler accounts with questionable connections back to Indigenous communities.

Critical Indigenous Studies

I grew up in white settler Latter-day Saint communities of southern Idaho in the 1970s and ’80s hearing stories of an Iroquois “princess” in our family tree. We were taught as children that our family had become “white and delightsome” through adoption of the Christian gospel as represented by the Book of Mormon. These stories propelled a scholarly interest in anthropology of the Book of Mormon and, eventually, critical Indigenous studies. As I learned to recognize my own implication within the structures of settler colonialism, I began to question the hidden presumptions in our genealogical narratives and Latter-day Saint scripture. I realized that as citizens of a settler state we were deploying stories of Indigenous ancestors in a manner that sought to legitimate our participation in the displacement of our Native neighbors. In living the Book of Mormon ideal of whiteness, we erased the stories of our Indigenous ancestors. Over the past decade, I have sought to recover those stories and found myself stunned and surprised by an unanticipated entanglement of Haudenosaunee narratives with those in the Book of Mormon.[8] I have also found that our familial readings of the Book of Mormon privileging whiteness did not resonate in the same manner for many Indigenous readers of the sacred text. For these readers, whiteness was neither desirable nor beneficial. Even if imagined as raceless, absorption into a “white” settler colonial state included a loss of indigeneity and a forfeit of sovereignty.

The Pawnee Latter-day Saint Larry J. Echo Hawk, writing in 1975—decades before he served as a General Authority Seventy (2012–2018) in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—objected to the expectation that Christianized Indigenous bodies must change. The Book of Mormon “says we will be white and delightsome people someday. I like the color I am. In fact, I don’t know any Indian who wants to change.”[9] In the 2008 film In Laman’s Terms directed by the Diné and Hopi anthropologist Angelo Baca, Forrest Cuch (Ute), then director of the Utah Division of Indian Affairs, bluntly stated “certainly, certainly we are not going to turn white someday. Because there are a few of us who don’t care to do that. Frankly, I am perfectly happy being the color of the earth.” Diné actress and writer Monika Crowfoot’s mother learned as a participant in the Indian Student Placement Program run by the LDS Church “that Mormon Jesus would turn her cursed brown skin white if she was a righteous Mormon.” In a 2020 blog for Exponent II, Crowfoot described a childhood “hoping to turn white. But through the years the language changed and it became: ‘Oops! We’re sorry, did you think it meant literally? No, silly. It was *metaphorical*, duh.’”[10] Can whiteness, whether taken literally or metaphorically, actually function as a raceless category for Indigenous peoples in a settler colonial society?

Māori scholar Gina Colvin, writing in Dialogue in 2017, recognized that the concept of a universal “gospel culture” silences Indigenous identities by its mere “impossibility.” Colvin illustrated the problem with this and several similar examples: “An existential violence is inflicted upon Māori, and therefore upon the body of Christ . . . when Māori women are asked to surrender their mana to white, male US church authorities, US curriculum, and systems that cause Māori people to culturally disappear.” “The gospel culture,” Colvin continues, “will not make Māori white, nor will it teach them to be proud of the color of their skin.” This “injunction to live a gospel culture” is not deployed equally within the global church; rather, it “is more often than not directed at the Other.”[11] Who, one might note, is expected to become something different, something white?

Māori scholar Hemopereki Simon has issued a formidable challenge to research paradigms in Mormon studies. In a series of articles appearing in academic journals such as New Sociology, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, Anthropological Forum, Culture & Religion, and Genealogy, Simon has “described the need for an intervention in Mormon Studies as an academic discipline.”[12] Simon represents the role of Indigenous researchers to be that of “change agents for our communities. We are the key to explaining our point of view to the religious and scholars of religion.” Simon invites intercultural dialogue with settler scholars. He encourages them to pay more attention to the “relationship of Mormonism and other restorative traditions to settler colonialism.” He questions “the position of whiteness within Mormon culture,” prescriptions of Lamanite identities onto Indigenous peoples, and the “destruction of Indigenous cultural heritage” in pursuit of validation for historical claims of the Book of Mormon.[13]

Simon’s intervention contributes to a growing body of literature adopting decolonizing methodologies and seeking to bridge the cultural chasms between critical Indigenous and Mormon studies. Dialogue has played an important role in these efforts with the publication of special issues in 1985 and 2021 that included pathbreaking articles by the Ute author Lacee A. Harris, Taos Pueblo scholar P. Jane Hafen, Diné writer Monika Brown Crowfoot, and several more Indigenous people challenging derogatory portrayals of Lamanites, American Indians, and Native Americans in Latter-day Saint discourse. Two anthologies from the University of Utah Press, Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion and Essays on American Indian and Mormon History, bring together Indigenous and settler editors and authors in a series of essays that resist hegemony by centering Indigenous perspectives on Mormonism and the Book of Mormon.[14] Dakota historian Elise Boxer’s Mormon Settler Colonialism: Inventing the Lamanite is the first book-length monograph to examine the Book of Mormon through the lens of settler colonialism and to interrogate cultural genocide in the separation of Indigenous children from their families in a Church-sponsored foster program.[15] This essay builds upon and responds to this growing body of postcolonial scholarship.

Viewed through a lens of critical Indigenous studies, the expression of Mormon’s version of the Iroquois Great Peace as raceless whiteness exemplifies what Hemopereki Simon calls a “religious environment” that “reproduces the hidden racial ontology” that operates as a “discourse of silencing.” These silencing strategies function by “mediating ignorance about the structuring force of colonization.”[16] Kanaka ‘Ōiwi scholar Hōkūlani K. Aikau describes the persistence of whiteness, whether metaphorical or literal, within Mormonism “as a privileged state of being and the sign of salvation” that is “part and parcel of a settler colonial project intent on territorial expropriation of native land.”[17] Diné scholar Moroni Benally concurs, observing that the Book of Mormon often functions as “a tool of erasure for Indigenous people’s rightful claim to land, politics, economies, and power.” “This erasure,” Benally emphasizes, “is one facet of settler colonialism.”[18] In her essay “The Book of Mormon as Mormon Settler Colonialism,” Boxer also explains that gathering Indigenous peoples into a singular nation of either Lamanites or a settler nation without ites “denies and ignores tribal diversity and sovereignty.”[19] Anthropologist Patrick Wolfe describes settler colonialism as a persistent invasive structure that “strives for the dissolution of native societies” through, among other strategies, “renaming” and “religious conversion.” Proclaiming that there are no longer any ites but whites is, rather frankly, a settler colonial “elimination of the native.”[20] Furthermore, framing whiteness as a utopian Christian racelessness obscures the settler colonial violence that gave rise to white possession of Turtle Island and made it possible for Joseph Smith to disturb what he perceived to be Indigenous graves in the pursuit of a golden treasure containing a new Christian gospel in an American setting.[21]

Termination

In the mid-twentieth century, American Indians in the United States faced an existential threat to their sovereignty when a group of powerful Latter-day Saint politicians and bureaucrats, led by Utah senator Arthur Watkins, began to turn Fourth Nephi’s ideal of a settler nation with no more ites into a new federal Indian policy that would be called by the ominous name of “termination.” Watkins framed his policies that would terminate the sovereignty of Indigenous nations, redistribute communal land and resources severally, and absorb Indigenous peoples into the settler body politic as an “Indian freedom program.” The implicit “freedom” in this policy would benefit outsiders seeking to profit from Indigenous peoples, lands, and resources much more so than those who lost representative governments that could protect their interests.[22]

In a 1954 letter to LDS leadership, Watkins linked his proposed reformation of what he believed to be mistaken federal Indian policies to Book of Mormon prophecies. “It seems to me that the time has come for us to correct some of these mistakes and help American Indians stand on their own feet and become a white and delightsome people as the Book of Mormon prophecied [sic] they would become.”[23] Fortified by his faith, “Watkins truly believed that he knew best for the Indian, whether they offered consent or not.”[24] That same year, Watkins targeted Utes and Paiutes in Utah for termination and five years later the predominantly LDS Catawbas in South Carolina. Elder Spencer W. Kimball, then a member of the Quorum of Twelve and later president of the Church, offered his complementary vision of the future in 1962: “I firmly believe that tomorrow there will be no reservations,” and “I believe that [American Indian] integration into our economy and community life is essential and I look forward to the day.”[25]

These efforts to turn American Indians white by dissolving Indigenous sovereignty disguised baser motivations as Watkins and LDS attorneys Ernest L. Wilkinson (later president of Brigham Young University) and John S. Boyden “circumvented genuine consultations, manufactured the appearance of consent when it did not exist, coercively withheld funds, concealed conflicts of interest, amassed millions in profits, and drew the ire of Native activists whose protests would lead to the reversal of these policies under subsequent administrations.” [26] While Latter-day Saint settlers profited from termination, Indigenous communities experienced devastating economic and cultural impacts. Congress would eventually recognize the failure of these policies and reverse the termination of Southern Paiutes in 1980 and Catawbas in 1993. Some Utes and their descendants, though, remain terminated to this day.[27]

McKay Pikyavit was a member of the Kanosh band of Southern Paiutes who protested termination policies. Pikyavit remembered, “Me and my dad wrote a letter saying we didn’t want termination, but they booted us anyway.” Denied credit and burdened with new taxes after termination, the band lost the reservation and what had previously been a profitable nine-thousand-acre farm. Pikyavit recalled, “We were supposed to be equal to our white neighbors. That didn’t work out.” Senator Watkins had told him it would “be good for you, be just like a white man. I told him I ain’t no white man, never will be.” Exasperated with the loss, Pikyavit lamented, “There’s something there that just ain’t right. We ain’t Lamanites. Another thing, the Book of Mormon is Indian religion. When Joseph Smith was back east he met with an Indian guy back there, asked about Indian religion, and he wrote it down. Then he made the Book of Mormon up. There was an Indian from back in Wisconsin told me.”[28]

As Indigenous activists traveled and rallied around Turtle Island to protest termination, they recognized the roots of the United States federal policy of eliminating Indigenous sovereignty in the outsize influence of Latter-day Saint politicians and linked termination to the Book of Mormon’s misappropriation of the Great Law of Peace. Long-standing oral traditions had told of encounters between Joseph Smith and Senecas, members of the largest Iroquois nation whose traditional lands included villages of Gä’nǎgweh and Ganondagan, near Palmyra and Manchester, New York. As early as August of 1830, Phineas Young (brother of future Church president Brigham Young) recognized similarities between the Book of Mormon and Haudenosaunee traditions.[29] During an 1840 visit with Mohawks on an island in Ontario’s Lake Simcoe, missionary Benjamin Johnson also found parallels and noted “their hopes of the future were almost identical to our own.”[30] The earliest literary reference to the by then well-established oral history about Joseph Smith’s appropriation of Iroquois narratives appeared in Texas in 1945.[31] Historian Lori Taylor credits the proliferation of stories of Seneca influence on Joseph Smith in the mid-twentieth century to the widely traveled Tuscarora activist Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson, who helped lead the North American Indian Caravan across Turtle Island rallying grassroots opposition to termination policies. Nicholas Vrooman, who recorded a version of the story he had heard from Mad Bear in 1994 for the historian Taylor, noted that the Iroquois teachings in the Book of Mormon “got watered down and changed.” The Book of Mormon’s great peace, Vrooman noted, has “too much emphasis on the Christian thing, more than there used to be, more than the way that we passed it on, the Iroquois passed it on, the Seneca there to Joseph Smith.”[32]

Moor’s Men

While the idea that Joseph Smith may have misappropriated Iroquois oral histories may seem far-fetched to some readers, it is not outside the range of plausibility. There are several candidates and multiple locations where these transmissions may have occurred.[33] Ample opportunities for intercultural exchange flourished between 1811 and 1816 at Moor’s Indian Charity School in Hanover, New Hampshire, attended by Joseph Smith’s older brother Hyrum Smith and his cousin Stephen Mack Jr. Their Iroquois classmates who would likely have been familiar with the Great Law of Peace included Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Louis Langford, Ahkwesáhsne Mohawk (or possibly Stockbridge) John Weal, and three Senecas: Jacob Jameson, James Stevenson, and John Whalebone. In the mid-1820s Stephen Mack Jr. joined “a government expedition around the [Great] lakes from Detroit to Green Bay” that had been “tasked with exploring the prospects for relocating the Iroquois” to what is now Wisconsin. Mack married a Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) woman named Hononegah during the winter of 1828–1829, and the Ho-Chunk responded by adopting Mack into the tribe.[34] Did Hyrum or Stephen introduce Joseph to any of their classmates or convey some of their stories to him secondhand?

All three of Hyrum’s and Stephen’s Seneca classmates would likely have returned to western New York after their schooling at Moor’s. Jacob Jameson certainly did. He returned to Buffalo Creek in 1817, about the same time that the Smith family moved to Palmyra, New York. Jameson studied medicine in Buffalo and traveled throughout the area as an interpreter over the next two decades. Jameson and other Senecas often returned to hunt and fish at Ganargua (Mud) Creek, a favorite fishing spot for the young Joseph Smith Jr. The famous Seneca orator Red Jacket, accompanied by Blue Sky, William Sky, Peter Smoke, and Twenty Canoes, even delivered a speech to much acclaim at Palmyra Academy in July of 1822, a few months before Joseph began having visions of a spirit and buried treasure. Newspaper reports do not name Red Jacket’s interpreter, but Jacob served in that capacity on many similar occasions.[35] Did Hyrum’s relationship with his classmate Jacob continue over the next decade and could he, or those who accompanied him while traveling, have been the reported protagonists of Haudenosaunee oral histories?

Joseph Smith attributed his knowledge not to the living but to the dead seen in visions. According to his mother, Lucy Mack Smith, he shared the “most amusing recitals” long before he ever dictated the text of the Book of Mormon. She found the details about “the ancient inhabitants of this continent” so remarkable and flowing with such ease from Joseph’s lips that it seemed to her “as if he had spent his whole life among them.”[36] While living Senecas may be absent from the stories early Mormons shared about how American Indians came to be, they were not absent, in fact. Living Iroquois figure prominently in the stories Indigenous peoples have remembered about how Mormons came to be. It seemed, even to Joseph’s mother, as if his interlocutors were actually alive rather than dead.

Great Peace

The literary record of Haudenosaunee oral histories corroborates the claims of activist critics of termination (Pikyavit and Vrooman) who allege that the Book of Mormon contains elements of Indigenous religion, or more specifically an overly Christianized variant of the Great Law of Peace. Haudenosaunee narratives, which have varied somewhat over time and place, recount how a Peacemaker unified the Five Nations into the League of the Haudenosaunee, the people of the longhouse, and initiated a long era of peace and equality called the “Great Peace.”[37] This Peacemaker, identified variously as Teharonhiawá:kon (Holder of the Heavens), Aionwá:tha, or Tekanawí:ta (both of whom are sometimes identified as human incarnations of Teharonhiawá:kon), traveled across the salt water and spoke of another people who had rejected his message of peace and murdered him. In some variants, a disillusioned Peacemaker even displayed his wounds for all to see. Some knowledge keepers explicitly teach that the Peacemaker, although originally from Turtle Island (thereby, not white), is the same person spoken of in the Bible as Jesus.[38] When and where does the Book of Mormon fit within the written records of this oral history?

The founding of the League of the Haudenosaunee that gave rise to the Great Peace occurred prior to the arrival of European colonists to Iroquoia, although it was likely more of a process than an event. Ahkwesáhsne Mohawk author Darren Bonaparte has approached the variability of the accounts as evidence of a thriving culture, evolving over time in dialogue with neighbors. In a 2006 survey of the literary record of the creation and confederation of the League, Bonaparte reflected: “When viewed as a manifestation of the living culture, which evolves with a people, we can see that the confederation epic was probably based on real events, but over time has accumulated a number of supernatural elements borrowed from the Iroquoian cultural world (especially our creation story) and the traditions of other nations.” Scholars have devoted much attention to the timing of the League’s formation. Most accept a date around 1450–1550 CE, with some advocates arguing for earlier dates including a rather precise date of August 31, 1142 tied to a solar eclipse, and a few knowledge keepers even suggesting that the founding of the League preceded Christ’s appearance in the New Testament. Many variants of the Great Law of Peace, notably, refer to multiple manifestations of peacemakers rather a singular appearance.[39]

While the Book of Mormon’s account of a “great peace” lacks much of the cultural detail available in other versions, it most closely resembles the written variants proximate in time and place to Joseph Smith’s reported acquisition of gold plates in 1827 in Manchester, New York. In fact, it fits neatly between the version published by the Tuscarora author and artist David Cusick in that same and following year as Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations at Lewiston, New York, and an 1845 version attributed to Onondaga Chiefs De-hat-ka-tons or Abraham La Fort and Captain Frost from Buffalo Creek, New York. The latter version first appeared in print in 1847 in Henry Schoolcraft’s Notes on the Iroquois published in Albany, New York, and two years later as part of Onondaga, or, Reminiscences of Earlier and Later Times, published by historian Joshua Clark at Syracuse, New York. These accounts, along with an unpublished 1816 version from the adopted Mohawk John Norton on the Grand River Reserve in Ontario, Canada, differ from all earlier versions, which were much more secular in tone and contained much less of the marvelous.[40]

The Cusick account, the closest in time and place to Joseph Smith, is the first published version in the historical record to associate the founding of the League with a deity, Teharonhiawá:kon (Holder of the Heavens).[41] Historian Dale Morgan has even suggested that an 1827 announcement of Cusick’s book in a Canandaigua newspaper may have been “the catalytic agent” inspiring Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon.[42] Cusick’s Sketches contains the first written account of a Jesus-like old man who spoke of people across the great water murdering their maker. The close-knit timing and proximity suggest that Smith could have consulted Cusick’s publication rather than or in addition to engaging in dialogue with Seneca or other Iroquois collaborators. Yet, the Book of Mormon’s version does have a little more of the “rapturous ecstasy” characteristic of the later 1845 Onondaga version than does Cusick’s version. Some of the many similarities, though, might also be explained by independent adoption of biblical allusions.[43]

Some Latter-day Saints might read Cusick ethnocentrically as a distant memory of an older account of the great peace more accurately recorded in the Book of Mormon.[44] Yet, historical evidence suggests that the Book of Mormon’s version looks like an early nineteenth-century variant of an Iroquois original stripped of much of its historical resistance to removal. The founders Aionwá:tha, Tekanawí:ta, and Thatotarho appear as ordinary human beings in all the earliest versions of the Great Law of Peace found in the historical record and none of them prior to Cusick allude to a Jesus-like character crossing the salt water. Founders of the Great Peace only begin to take on characteristics of deity with Christian allusions during the Second Great Awakening that gave rise to both the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake and the Mormon seer Joseph Smith.[45] Ahkwesáhsne Mohawk scholar Darren Bonaparte noted, “We would not be wise to assume that when we hear the story of Tekanawí:ta, we are simply hearing an Iroquois version of the New Testament. Instead, we are witnessing a people paying homage to their most ancient beliefs by giving them new life, new meaning. We are witnessing the workings of a living culture and a living history.”[46] In the 1820s, Iroquois nations faced an existential threat of removal. Novel biblical allusions helped advance the argument that the Six Nations needed neither civilization nor Christianity from the settlers. Literary scholar Susan Kalter summarized the implicit argument in Cusick’s rendition of the Great Law of Peace: “if God can visit Israel in human form, teach love, prophesy, die, be buried and rise again, nothing prevents him from visiting North America.” Missionaries who assumed “that Christ’s teachings could reach the Iroquois and other Indians only through their own work” were mistaken.[47]

The dilution of the Haudenosaunee cultural context present in other accounts of the Great Peace is what makes it possible for Joseph Smith’s narrator Mormon to imagine that the Peacemaker would envision a society with no manner of ites except whites. In most Iroquois versions of the Great Law of Peace, the Peacemaker, with assistance from Aionwá:tha and in some cases Tsakonsasé (Mother of Nations), brings the five nations together around a central fire at Onondaga. Mohawks, Oneidas, Cayugas, and Senecas do not forfeit their national identities to Onondagas but operate through a system of consensus that essentially grants the matrilineal clan mothers of each nation and the male representatives they select veto power over decisions of the confederacy. Citizenship in the League comes through the clan mothers, who not only represent their consanguineal kin but may adopt children and adults of any nationality. The maintenance of national sovereignty amid confederated unity, resting ultimately in the hands of women who hold the lands of their matrilineages in common, makes the Iroquois Great Peace significantly different in structure from the settler colonial version represented by Mormon. The Book of Mormon’s version erases national identities and mentions neither matrilineal kinship nor the sovereign political power maintained by the clan mothers. It also lends itself to abuse by settler politicians seeking to displace sovereignty, lands, and resources from Indigenous communities. Common ownership of lands in matrilineal clans and national sovereignty are integral elements of the Haudenosaunee recipe for peace that are absent from the culturally misappropriated variant in the Book of Mormon. Furthermore, whiteness, whether imagined ethnically or racially, plays no role in the attainment of peace in any of the authentic Haudenosaunee renditions of the Great Law of Peace.[48]

Joseph Smith may have been the first but certainly was not the last settler colonialist who deployed representations of the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace for their own purposes. William Canfield’s 1902 The Legends of the Iroquois, Told by “the Cornplanter” and L. Taylor Hansen’s “Pale Hea-wah-sah” from her 1963 book, He Walked the Americas, subsequently misappropriated and whitewashed Haudenosaunee narratives in ways that also privileged settler belonging over Indigenous sovereignty. Both accounts, much like the Book of Mormon itself, proposed much older origins for their narratives than the historical record supports and lacked verifiable manuscripts in support of their claims for Indigenous sources. Anachronisms, confusion of Algonquian and Iroquoian cultural traits, taking stories out of their cultural context, and a fetishized focus on racialized features of protagonists accompany the dubious circumstances surrounding the acquisition of these narratives by settler colonial authors.[49]

Conclusion

A Christian utopia in which there are no ites except whites is a classic example of a settler colonial illusion. Historian Lorenzo Veracini “argues that all settler projects are foundationally premised on fantasies of ultimately ‘cleansing’ the settler body politic of its (indigenous and exogenous) alterities.”[50] The Book of Mormon portrayal is not “a proto-postmodern view of race as a historical construct.” While the scripture does present a mutable concept of race, this malleable racial body is better described as a common nineteenth-century settler colonial construct rather than something akin to a novel postmodern perspective. The presumption that whiteness is nonracial is a dangerous interpretation that has done, is doing, and will continue to do significant harm to Indigenous communities in settler colonial societies. The extent to which the Book of Mormon might teach that “race was not real,” that “race was not a permanent part of God’s vision for humanity,” or that readers “were charged with spreading Christ’s gospel of (potential) racial reunification” masks a deeper, hidden logic of extermination. The presentation of whiteness as “raceless” fails to consider the settler colonial setting of the Book of Mormon’s production. The scripture’s “white universalism” is more accurately recognized as a settler colonial erasure of indigeneity.[51]

Coming to terms with the Book of Mormon as a flawed and incomplete scripture has surprisingly opened my eyes to new ways of reading this problematic text. Joseph Smith must have recognized at some level the injustice at the heart of the settler colonial United States of America and sought theological means for making what was so wrong appear right. He appears to have, as the activists against termination claimed, encountered Iroquois narratives of the Great Law of Peace in person or maybe in print. Lamentably, in the stories he told, he displaced these living Iroquois neophytes with dead white Nephites.

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^[1] Royal Skousen, ed., The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 643–44. A special thank you to Kerrie Sumner Murphy, Hemopereki Simon, Manuel Padro, Max Mueller, and Angelo Baca for responding constructively to draft forms of this essay, which synthesizes ideas presented more fully in Thomas W Murphy, Unsettling Scripture: Iroquois and the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2026).

^[2] The term “fair,” as used here, appears to be a synonym for the label “white”—especially given its pairing with “and delightsome,” as in “white and delightsome”—a phrase used earlier in the original text to describe anticipated changes following Lamanite “knowledge of Christ” (2 Ne. 30:5–6). Skousen, Earliest Text, 148. Likewise, the term “people of Nephi” appears to be a synonym for the ethnonym “Nephite” commonly used throughout the text.

^[3] Max P. Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 42–43.

^[4] Michael Austin, The Testimony of Two Nations: How the Book of Mormon Reads, and Rereads the Bible (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2024), 67. Narratives of racial mutability were neither novel nor unique in 1820s New York and New England. They can be found in the writings of Protestant missionaries, ceremonial magicians, novelists, proto-ethnographers, and Revolutionary War veterans. See Matthew W. Dougherty, Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalisms in Early America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021), 176, n27; Thomas W Murphy, “Imagining Lamanites: Native Americans and the Book of Mormon” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2003), 18–24, 75–76, https://www.academia.edu/10367006/; D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, Revised and Enlarged (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998), 153–55; Scott Michaelsen, The Limits of Multiculturalism: Interrogating the Origins of American Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 59–76; Thomas W Murphy, Unsettling Scripture: Iroquois and the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2026).

^[5] Throughout this article, I refer to a “great peace” in the Book of Mormon, the Great Law of Peace (an oral narrative and wampum text), and the Great Peace (the political event heralded by the Great Law of Peace).

^[6] In 1722, closely related Tuscaroras from the eastern seaboard would relocate and join these Five Nations to become the League of Six Nations. Today, traditional Haudenosaunee lands, dotted with several reservations, span like a longhouse across western New York and into parts of Pennsylvania, Ontario, and Quebec. In the nineteenth century, under political pressure from settlers, some Oneidas, Cayugas, and Senecas removed from their traditional lands to what are now Wisconsin, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

^[7] See examples cited below. A broader and deeper analysis of these materials is available in Murphy, Unsettling Scripture.

^[8] Murphy, “Imagining Lamanites”; Thomas W Murphy, “Decolonization on the Salish Sea: A Tribal Journey back to Mormon Studies,” in Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Post-Colonial Zion, edited by Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018); Thomas W Murphy, “Grave Consequences: On Revelation and Repatriation,” in Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild, edited by Karin Anderson and Danielle Beazer Dubrasky (Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press, 2021); Thomas W Murphy, Kerrie Sumner Murphy, and Jessyca Brigette Murphy, “An Indian Princess and a Mormon Sacagawea? Decolonizing Memories of our Grandmothers,” Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association 1, no. 1 (2022): 93–121; Thomas W Murphy, “From Patriarchy to Matriachy: A Marital and Spiritual Journey,” in Revising Eternity: 27 Latter-day Saint Men Reflect on Modern Relationships, edited by Holly Welker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022).

^[9] Larry Echo Hawk, “Someone’s Concerned About Me,” Ensign, Dec. 1975, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1975/12/meet-father-lehis-children/larry-echohawk-someones-concerned-about-me?lang=eng/.

^[10] Monika Crowfoot, “My Apology for My Complicity,” Exponent II (blog), July 5, 2020, https://www.the-exponent.com/guest-post-my-apology-for-my-complicity/. In 1981 the LDS Church did change the phrase “white and delightsome” in 2 Nephi 30:6 to “pure and delightsome.” See Douglas Campbell, “‘White’ or ‘Pure’: Five Vignettes,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 119–35; Murphy, “Imagining Lamanites,” 92–94.

^[11] Gina Colvin, “There’s No Such Thing as a Gospel Culture,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 50, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 57–61.

^[12] Hemopereki Simon, “Hoea Te Waka ki Uta: Critical Kaupapa Māori Research and Mormon Studies Moving Forward,” New Sociology: Journal of Critical Praxis 3, no. 1 (2022): 1; Hemopereki Simon, “Mormonism and the White Possessive: Moving Critical Indigenous Studies Theory into the Religious Realm,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 21, no. 3 (2022): 331–62; Hemopereki Simon, “A Kauapapa Māori Intervention on Apology for LDS Church’s Racism, Zombie Concepts, and Moving Forward,” Anthropological Forum 33, no. 2 (2023): 118–45; Hemopereki Simon, “Rolling Our Eyes Toward God: An Intervention Arising from Mormon Missionary YouTube Activity and the Cultural (Mis)Appropriation of Haka,” Culture & Religion 23, no. 1 (2023): 46–80; Hemopereki Simon, “Genealogical Violence: Mormon (Mis)Appropriation of Māori Cultural Memory through Falsification of Whakapapa,” Genealogy 8, no. 12 (2024).

^[13] Simon, “Hoea Te Waka ki Uta,” 1–2, 6–7.

^[14] Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks, eds., Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018); P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink, eds., Essays on American Indian & Mormon History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019).

^[15] Elise Boxer, Mormon Settler Colonialism: Inventing the Lamanite (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2025).

^[16] Simon, “Mormonism and the White Possessive,” 350.

^[17] Hokulani K. Aikau, A Chosen People, a Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawai’i (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 41–43.

^[18] Moroni Benally, “Decolonizing the Blossoming: Indigenous People’s Faith in a Colonizing Church,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 50, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 73.

^[19] Elise Boxer, “The Book of Mormon as Mormon Settler Colonialism,” in Essays on American Indian & Mormon History, edited by P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019), 17.

^[20] Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 388.

^[21] Thomas W Murphy, “Laban’s Ghost: On Writing and Transgression,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 30, no. 3 (1997): 105–26; Thomas W Murphy and Angelo Baca, “Rejecting Racism in Any Form: Latter-day Saint Rhetoric, Religion, and Repatriation,” Open Theology, no. 2 (2016): 700–25; Thomas W Murphy, “Views from Turtle Island: Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Mormon Entanglements,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism, edited by R. Gordon Shepherd, A. Gary Shepherd, and Ryan Cragun (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Thomas W Murphy, Simon G. Southerton, and Angelo Baca, “Science and Fiction: Kennewick Man/Ancient One in Latter-day Saint Discourse,” Journal of Northwest Anthropology 56, no. 2 (2022): 137–61.

^[22] R. Warren Metcalf, Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 235–39; Murphy, “Views from Turtle Island,” 763–65; Charles F. Wilkinson, Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999).

^[23] Quoted in Erika Marie Bsumek, The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023), 136.

^[24] Metcalf, Termination’s Legacy, 239.

^[25] Quoted in Margaret D. Jacobs, “Entangled Histories: The Mormon Church and Indigenous Child Removal from 1850 to 2000,” Journal of Mormon History 42, no. 2 (2016): 41. See also Murphy, “Views from Turtle Island,” 764.

^[26] Murphy, “Views from Turtle Island,” 764.

^[27] Metcalf, Termination’s Legacy, 235–39; Murphy, “Imagining Lamanites,” 127–29; Thomas G. Alexander, “Native Americans in Post War Utah,” https://historytogo.utah.gov/native-americans-post-war-utah/; Stanley J. Thayne, “The Blood of Father Lehi: Indigenous Americans and the Book of Mormon” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016); Forrest S. Cuch, ed., A History of Utah’s American Indians (Salt Lake City: Utah State Division of Indian Affairs and Utah State Division of History, 2000); Wilkinson, Fire on the Plateau; Robert Gottlieb and Peter Booth Wiley, America’s Saints: The Rise of Mormon Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986 [originally published 1984]); Parker M. Nielson, The Dispossessed: Cultural Genocide of the Mixed-blood Utes: An Advocate’s Chronicle (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998); David M. Brugge, The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute: An American Tragedy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994).

^[28] Quoted in William Logan Hebner, Southern Paiute: A Portrait (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2010), 64–66. See also Murphy, “Views from Turtle Island,” 765. For a Pulitzer Prize–winning fictionalized account of a Chippewa community wrestling with termination and Mormons, see Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2020).

^[29] Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents, vol. 3 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2000), 353.

^[30] Benjamin F. Johnson, My Life’s Review: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Johnson (Provo: Grandin Book Company, 1997), 63–64.

^[31] C. Stanley Banks, “The Mormon Migration into Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 49, no. 2 (1945): 238.

^[32] Lori Elaine Taylor, “Telling Stories about Mormons and Indians” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 2000), 309–14; Lori Taylor, “Joseph Smith in Iroquois Country: The Handsome Lake Story,” Juvenile Instructor (blog), June 30, 2010, http://juvenileinstructor.org/joseph-smith-in-iroquois-country-the-handsome-lake-story/; Lori E. Taylor, “Joseph Smith in Iroquois Country: A Mormon Creation Story,” in Essays on American Indian and Mormon History, edited by P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019), 42–45; Murphy, “Views from Turtle Island,” 751–52.

^[33] For more examples and extended analyses see Murphy, Unsettling Scripture.

^[34] Richard K. Behrens, “Dreams, Visions, and Visitations: The Genesis of Mormonism,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 27 (2007): 177; Richard K. Behrens, “Dartmouth Arminianism and its Impact on Hyrum Smith and the Smith Family,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 26 (2006); Colin G. Calloway, The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Lebanon, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 89, 195–96; Dean McMakin, “Hononegah: A New Biography,” Nuggets of History 41, no. 4 (2003); Edson I. Carr, The History of Rockton, Winnebago County, Illinois, 1820–1898 (Rockton, Ill.: Herald Office Print, 1898), 6; Don Bradley, “The ‘Indian Problem’: The Uncertain Place of Native Americans in Anglo-America,” 2018; Dan Blumlo, “Pocahontas, Uleleh, and Hononegah: The Archetype of the American Indian Princess,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 110, no. 2 (2017): 137–39.

^[35] William N. Fenton and Jacob Jameson, “Answers to Governor Cass’s Questions by Jacob Jameson, a Seneca [ca. 1821–1825],” Ethnohistory 16, no. 2 (1969): 33; Timothy Alden, An Account of the Sundry Missions Performed Among the Senecas and Munsees; in a Series of Letters (New York: J. Seymour, 1827), 33; Thompson S. Harris, “Journals of Rev. Thompson S. Harris,” Publications of the Buffalo Historical Society 6 (1903): 281–82, 342–43; Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 3:154; Horace Eaton, A Thanksgiving Sermon, delivered at Palmyra, N.Y., Nov. 26, 1857 (Rochester, N.Y.: A. Strong & Co., 1858); Orasmus Turner, History of the Pioneer Settlement of Phelps and Gorham’s Purchase, and Morris’ Reserve (Rochester, N.Y.: William Alling, 1851), 209, 383–84; James E. Seaver, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (Canandaigua, N.Y.: J.D. Bemis and Co., 1824), 79; Chad L. Anderson, The Storied Landscape of Iroquoia: History, Conquest, and Memory in the Native Northeast (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 55; “Seneca Indians,” Palmyra Herald (Palmyra, NY), July 31, 1822; Taylor, “Telling Stories,” 343; Peter Manseau, One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2015), 297–98; Thomas W Murphy, “Other Scriptures: Restoring the Voices of the Gantowisas to an Open Canon,” in Essays on American Indian and Mormon History, ed. P. Jane Hafen and Brenden W. Rensink (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019), 39.

^[36] Larry E. Morris, ed., A Documentary History of the Book of Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 107.

^[37] Arthur C. Parker, The Constitution of the Five Nations (Albany, N.Y.: University of the State of New York, 1916).

^[38] Darren Bonaparte, Creation and Confederation: The Living History of the Iroquois (Ahkwesáhsne Mohawk Territory: Wampum Chronicles, 2006); Murphy, “Other Scriptures”; Anthony Wonderley and Martha L. Sempowski, Origins of the Iroquois League: Narratives Symbols, and Archaeology (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2019).

^[39] Bonaparte, Creation and Confederation, 51–52; Murphy, “Other Scriptures,” 36–37; Wonderley and Sempowski, Origins of the Iroquois League; Dean R. Snow, The Iroquois (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996); Barbara A. Mann and Jerry L. Fields, “A Sign in the Sky: Dating the League of the Haudenosaunee,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21, no. 2 (1997): 105–63; David Henige, “Can a Myth be Astronomically Dated?,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23, no. 4 (1999): 127–57.

^[40] David Cusick, Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations, 2nd ed. (Lewiston, N.Y.: Tuscarora Village, 1828; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2006); Henry R. Schoolcraft, Notes on the Iroquois: or, Contributions to American History, Antiquities, and General Ethnology (Albany, N.Y.: E. H. Pease & Co., 1847), 270–83; Joshua V. H. Clark, Onondaga; or Reminiscences of Earlier and Later Times; Being a Series of Historical Sketches Relative to Onondaga; with Notes on the Several Towns in the County, and Oswego (Syracuse, N.Y.: Stoddard and Babcock, 1849); Carl F. Klinck and James J. Talman, eds., The Journal of Major John Norton 1809–1816 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1970).

^[41] Bonaparte, Creation and Confederation; Wonderley and Sempowski, Origins of the Iroquois League.

^[42] John Phillip Walker, ed., Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1986), 310; “Indian Literature,” Ontario Repository (Canandaigua, N.Y.), July 11, 1827, 2.

^[43] Cusick, Sketches of Ancient History; Susan Kalter, “Finding a Place for David Cusick in Native American Literary History,” MELUS 27, no. 3 (2002): 9–42; Daniel M. Radus, “Printing Native History in David Cusick’s Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations,” American Literature 86, no. 2 (2014): 217–43; Clark, Onondaga, 21–30; Klinck and Talman, The Journal of Major John Norton, 98–106; Bonaparte, Creation and Confederation; Wonderley and Sempowski, Origins of the Iroquois League.

^[44] Thomas W Murphy, “An Insufficient Canon: The Popol Wuj, Book of Mormon, and Other Scriptures,” Journal of Mormon History 48, no. 3 (2022): 80.

^[45] John Heckewelder, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States, new and revised edition, edited by William C. Reichel (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1881 [1819]; repr., Echo Library Reprint, 2016), 43; Douglas W. Boyce, “A Glimpse of Iroquois Culture Through the Eyes of Joseph Brant and John Norton,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 117, no. 4 (1973): 288, 93; William Dunlap, A History of New York, for Schools (New York: Collins, Keese, and Co., 1837), 153–54; William M. Beauchamp, “Onondaga Notes,” Journal of American Folk-Lore 8 (1895): 215–16; Mathew Dennis, Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 82; Wonderley and Sempowski, Origins of the Iroquois League, 40–54; William N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 5; Murphy, “Imagining Lamanites.”; Thomas W Murphy, “Lamanite Genesis, Genealogy, and Genetics,” in American Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon, edited by Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002); Thomas W Murphy and Angelo Baca, “DNA and the Book of Mormon: Science, Settlers, and Scripture,” in The LDS Gospel Topics Series: A Scholarly Engagement, edited by Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2020); Murphy, Southerton, and Baca, “Science and Fiction.”

^[46] Bonaparte, Creation and Confederation, 88.

^[47] Kalter, “Finding a Place,” 32–34, 40.

^[48] Lewis Henry Morgan, League of the Iroquois: A Classic Study of an American Indian Tribe With the Original Illustrations (New York: Citadel Press, 1962); Fenton, Great Law; Tom Porter, And Grandma Said . . .: Iroquois Teachings, as Passed Down through the Oral Tradition (Bloomington, Ind.: Xlibris Corporation, 2008); Barbara Alice Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (New York: Peter Lang, 2011); Brian Rice, The Rotinonshonni: A Traditional Iroquoian History through the Eyes of Teharonhia:wako and Sawiskera (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2013); Kayanesenh Paul Williams, Kayanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018); Murphy, “Other Scriptures.”

^[49] William W. Canfield, The Legends of the Iroquois, Told by “the Cornplanter” (New York: A. Wessels Co. , 1902); Wonderley and Sempowski, Origins of the Iroquois League, 83–85; Christopher Vecsey, Imagine Ourselves Richly: Mythic Narratives of North American Indians (New York: Crossroads Publishing Co., 1988), 96; Henige, “Can a Myth be Astronomically Dated?,” 140–42; L. Taylor Hansen, He Walked the Americas (Amherst, Wis.: Amherst Press, 1963); Bonaparte, Creation and Confederation, 48–50, 90–94. For an extended discussion of these and other sources see Murphy, Unsettling Scripture.

^[50] Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 33.

^[51] Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 12, 19–20. See also Murphy, “Laban’s Ghost,” 113.