New Book: On Zion's Mount

KELLY BAKER

Jared Farmer, an assistant professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has a new book of interest for our blog from Harvard University Press. On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians and the American Landscape explores the encounter between Mormons and the Utes in Utah, both the "legend" and the reality of this relationship. Here's the book description from Harvard:

Shrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no “Indian” legend graced the mount until Mormon settlers conjured it—once they had displaced the local Indians, the Utes, from their actual landmark, Utah Lake. On Zion’s Mount tells the story of this curious shift. It is a quintessentially American story about the fraught process of making oneself “native” in a strange land. But it is also a complex tale of how cultures confer meaning on the environment—how they create homelands.

Only in Utah did Euro-American settlers conceive of having a homeland in the Native American sense—an endemic spiritual geography. They called it “Zion.” Mormonism, a religion indigenous to the United States, originally embraced Indians as “Lamanites,” or spiritual kin. On Zion’s Mount shows how, paradoxically, the Mormons created their homeland at the expense of the local Indians—and how they expressed their sense of belonging by investing Timpanogos with “Indian” meaning.

This same pattern was repeated across the United States. Jared Farmer reveals how settlers and their descendants (the new natives) bestowed “Indian” place names and recited pseudo-Indian legends about those places—cultural acts that still affect the way we think about American Indians and American landscapes.

The Harvard site also contains an excerpt of this new title (located here).

Comments

Anonymous said…
As a heads up, Jordan Farmer posted excerpts from this volume to facilitate discussion on some of the issues he presents over at the Juvenile Instructor blog.
Anonymous said…
er ... Jared Farmer.

Popular Posts