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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
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Taylor, Lori Elaine. "Telling Stories about Mormons and Indians," American Studies, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, May 2000.
Mormons claim to know some intimate truths about the spiritual destinies of American Indians. The claims or the knowledge have led Mormons throughout their history to tell particular kinds of stories about Indians in early Mormon history (1820s-50s). In these stories history and doctrine intertwine to make sacred history. This work considers the stories told in scripture as well as in popular and scholarly histories, the silences left in and around those stories, and other stories that might be told in other ways. In separate chapters that move from early representations to contemporary oral traditions and connections, the author considers questions relating to stories of Mormons and Indians. How does sacred history relate to authority and control, a priori disbelief in Western enquiry, and memory and forgetting? How have stories told popular Mormon histories been constructed and developed over time? How extensive were contacts between Mormons and Indians from New York to Missouri and Illinois, before many Mormons followed Brigham Young across the Plains to become Latter-day Saints? What meanings can be made of alternate stories of Mormons and Indian contacts, such as a story that claims Joseph Smith learned from followers of Seneca prophet Handsome Lake some of the ideas he incorporated into his new religion? What kinds of fictions and forgeries can be created to tell stories of Mormons Indians in ways different to conventional history? How do people outside of large Mormon institutions (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) continue to reinterpret and create anew connections between Mormons and Indians through collections of archaeology and anthropology and through doctrines of new religious groups?
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