Abstract
Imperial Zions is an imaginative and insightful account of how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints contributed to empire-building in the nineteenth century. In doing so, the text explores how the church interacted with Indigenous populations in the American West and the Pacific Islands to fulfill a scriptural injunction to convert them. In this well-researched and lucidly written account, Amanda Hendrix-Komoto contributes to Mormon historiography in two significant ways. First, she connects Mormon empire-building within the larger trajectory of US Western history and second, she probes how Native Americans and Polynesians reacted to the church's racialist theology that deemed their families as bearing a divine curse. The latter supplements a growing body of scholarship that includes Paul Reeve's Religion of a Different Color (2015), Max Perry Mueller's Race and the Making of the Mormon People (2017), Quincy Newell's Your Sister in the Gospel (2019), and my book Second-Class Saints (2024).
Divided into six chapters and a brief epilogue, Hendrix-Komoto writes that the Book of Mormon—the church's most important book of scripture—targeted Indigenous populations for whiteness and conversion. She claims that Mormon church leaders believed that they had a role to play in the salvation of Native American and Polynesian communities both by proselytizing them through aggressive missionary efforts and by assimilating them into Mormon worship services. Like white Latter-day Saints, Mormon scriptures averred that Native Americans (“Lamanites” in Mormon parlance) and Polynesians bore a distinct Israelite lineage that afforded them special privileges in the church. This included the right to be baptized, serve church missions, preside as ministers and priests in Mormon congregations, and marry in the faith's temples. But as Hendrix-Komoto notes, Latter-day Saint leaders “were never fully able to resolve the tension between the Book of Mormon's image of Native Americans and the Native communities they encountered in the Great Basin” (7).
Part of this tension concerns how the church perceived Native Americans and Polynesians as the Book of Mormon proclaimed them cursed. As the direct ancestors of Laman and Lemuel, the principal figures in the Book of Mormon, these Indigenous communities were said to bear a divine curse—a result of their ancestors living a sinful life. At the same time, early Mormon leaders taught that the curse could be reversed through moral probity and righteous living. Native Americans and Polynesians could return them to their pre-cursed state of whiteness if they repented of their sins, at which point they would shed their curse and become “white and delightsome” again. Hendrix-Komoto writes they could be restored “to their place at the center of God's heavenly kingdom as Israelites” (124).
Hendrix-Komoto spends a lot of time discussing how the Latter-day Saints’ redemption theology was fraught with problems, and it here where she breaks new ground. She skillfully traces how Indigenous communities responded to Mormonism's theology of gender and family, as well as race. Latter-day Saints had been practicing polygamy since the 1830s under the leadership of church founder Joseph Smith Jr., and the practice became widely publicized in the 1850s when Brigham Young, the second church president, led the Saints west to the Great Basin. As white Mormon men married predominantly white women in polygamous relationships, church leaders did not determine how that practice would play out in the Pacific Islands and Native American communities where Mormon missionaries aggressively proselytized. Could Polynesian and Native American male converts take white wives in polygamous relationships? Could white men take Polynesian and Native American women as polygamous wives? Church leaders never answered these questions and although it happened occasionally, the church had never fully sanctioned it.
A more pressing problem, however, was endemic racism in the church. Native Americans and Polynesians had a privileged status in Mormon scripture. Mormon theology would “redeem them from their savagery” and yet they encountered all sorts of problems when they worshipped with white Latter-day Saints. Hendrix-Komoto writes that the “idea that a family could assimilate indigenous people seemed misplaced in the nineteenth century” and this was certainly true with Latter-day Saints (124, 126). Although Joseph Smith Jr. envisioned that the entire human family would be bound together in a web of familial relationships through proxy rituals in Mormon temples, successive church presidents could not reconcile that aspiration from how the Book of Mormon depicted them as cursed and degenerate. This tension made it difficult for Native Americans and Polynesians to assimilate in the church, participate in polygamous relationships, marry interracially, or serve in pastoral positions over which they exercised judgment on white members.
Despite these challenges, Hendrix-Komoto tells us how Indigenous communities were attracted to the church because of Mormon teachings that reminded them of their privileged status and their hope for a better life in an afterworld. Indigenous Mormons also found comfort in Mormon communitarianism, which was vital to their survival. With poverty ubiquitous and resources for food scarce, Indigenous populations (much like white nineteenth-century settlers) relied on food and shelter from Latter-day Saints to sustain them.
Native American and Polynesian women also married and had children with white Mormon men, forming interracial families that became the bedrock of Mormon communities in the American West and Pacific Islands. These relationships were marred by racism and judgment, as some Latter-day Saints resented people of color trying to assimilate in their faith communities. They viewed them as interlopers because they were unable to reconcile the Book of Mormon's injunction to convert them from verses that deemed them cursed.
One of the most arresting examples of this tension dealt with a case in Cache Valley Utah with a white Latter-day Saint man named Johnny Garr. He had gotten Susie Wigegee, a Shoshone woman, pregnant, which scandalized the local community. “The women's pregnancy divided local Latter-day Saints,” Hendrix-Komoto avers (147). It raised questions about whether Latter-day Saints could live up to the charge in their own scriptures that required Indigenous communities to be assimilated both culturally and physically into the church, which was difficult for Garr's mixed-race son. Assimilation was the only way that Garr's son—and others like him—could be redeemed from their fallen state, asserts Hendrix-Komoto. In addition, she provides other illuminating case studies to show that it was not just Garr and his son who experienced a shunning because of the church's racist theology. Indeed, her examples and vivid descriptions of mixed-race individuals trying to assimilate is one of the strengths of the book.
Hendrix-Komoto has carefully mined relevant sources to capture the voices of both Indigenous communities and that of white members who struggled to reconcile the Book of Mormon's teachings with their own racist attitudes and beliefs. On the other hand, Hendrix-Komoto pays scant attention to how Mormon leaders understood this theology—how it affected marginalized communities and their ability to whiten them. That is, she pays little attention to how the church's upper leadership interpreted why it was difficult to culturally assimilate Native American and Polynesians because of racism, and she leaves unsaid those who fled Mormonism in protest. This is one of those pursuits that would have enriched her work. Hendrix-Komoto might also have juxtaposed the lived experiences of Indigenous communities with that of individuals of Black African ancestry. They, too, experienced racism and were not fully assimilated in the church.
The book ends with a powerful call to decenter Mormon church history. Hendrix-Komoto contends that women and marginalized voices should be better integrated into these histories, and she admits that her book is an attempt “to reframe” that history, especially with colonization efforts in Utah and the Polynesian Islands (199). In this, she has produced a framework of how it can be done, and she has done so thoughtfully and articulately providing a significant contribution to scholarship of the American West and Mormon Studies.