Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century

In the introduction to her evocative autoethnography, Farina King notes, “In Diné bizaad, the Navajo language, we introduce ourselves by our clans that we inherit” (1). She then goes on to introduce her family lineage: her mother, who is White, and her father, who is Diné (the preferred term for the tribe commonly called “Navajo”), as well as his clans. But she extends her introduction to add that she is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as are her parents, and refers to herself as “Dine dóó Gáamalii,” which is roughly translated to “Diné and Mormon.” This is as much a signifier of who the author is as it is the thesis of her book. There are Diné that are Mormon, and they can be Mormon on their own terms, with their own identities, and understand their religious affiliation with the LDS Church in their own ways.King combines traditional archival scholarship with rich familial and oral histories she has collected over the years. The book's main through line is the personal history of her father's Mormonism, how it has shaped his religious and personal understanding of himself as Diné, and how the contours of his life have framed the questions King asks as a scholar. She notes in her introduction that she explicitly shaped her work as a decolonizing work in the field of Native studies and wishes to center the voices of those who are both Diné and Mormon. In this way, she is following a recent parallel trend in religious studies that acknowledges that Native peoples can be both Christian and Native, both historically and in the present. This is particularly salient in scholarship on Pentecostal Natives, whose numbers have grown tremendously in the past century.King's work is organized thematically and covers a great deal of ground. Her first chapter highlights some basic beliefs and cultural traditions of the Diné, as well as of Latter-day Saints, and then pivots into a fascinating discussion of the use of the term Lamanite among Indigenous Mormons broadly. The term, of course, comes from the Book of Mormon and is often associated with negative views of the Native peoples of North and South America. King discusses how many Diné Mormons reject the term, preferring to understand themselves as their tribal affiliation and Mormon. Yet she also points out that the usage of the term has changed over the twentieth century and that some Native Mormons do use the term in a way that reflects a sort of pan-Indigenous identity to also include Pacific Islanders. Throughout the book, the term pops up repeatedly in various contexts, reflecting its complexity in usage and within the history of missionary work to Native peoples.A hallmark of King's book is how nuanced she is in discussing Native Mormon experiences. In her two chapters on the missionaries and “Mormon School,” she carefully emphasizes the good and the bad that Diné Mormons experienced within the LDS Church itself. This is particularly true in her chapter about the church-led Indian Student Placement Program (ISPP), which was an educational system set up by the LDS Church that urged assimilation among Indigenous Mormons through education. Indigenous children would live with White Mormon families, attend a White school, and be taught church doctrines. Unlike the federal boarding school system, this program operated more as a foster care situation where children lived in a home and actually went to a school that emphasized academics (versus the manual labor of the boarding school system). Well aware of the parallels with the federal boarding school system, King carefully teases out the different dynamics of how Native students experienced the ISPP. Much like with the boarding schools, there are documented incidences of physical and sexual abuse within the ISPP. Still, some Native students felt that their experiences were positive, and that the ISPP strengthened their faith. There are also those who felt that while the education they received may have been better than their other options, the ISPP wasn't worth it due to the cultural dislocation they experienced by being separated from their Diné families. King's organization around the complexities of the oral histories of ISPP participants allows the reader to see all the different ways Diné Mormons felt about the ISPP and the breadth of students’ experiences in the program and to draw their own conclusions about the ISPP. Balancing the positive and negative oral histories around this kind of history is difficult, especially when discussing children and the ravages of colonization.In the second half of the book, King discusses how Diné Mormons navigate the church's ward systems both on and off the reservation, the Red Power movement at Brigham Young University in the 1970s, modern Diné Mormon identities, and the issues that Diné believers navigate. Her chapter on Red Power at BYU is perhaps the most intriguing because the history of this political movement on campus has been largely unacknowledged until now. Once again, King uses her father's experience at the university as the connecting thread and leans heavily on his experience and that of his classmates to sketch out what happened in this era. What emerges is a story of Native students trying to find ways to fit into a traditionally White, settler institution during a period of political and social radicalization. King basically argues that the Native students’ navigation of their Mormon and Native identities eventually forced BYU's hand in acknowledging the needs of Native Mormons in some ways, but that institutional change remains sorely needed to make BYU a genuinely multicultural university.The book ends with a reflection on modern Diné Mormons, the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the author's personal relationship with her Mormon identity. She speaks of returning to her Diné homeland, seeking to see Cheii (which can mean “grandfather” and/or a horned toad, which are seen as bearers of good luck) again. King writes, “I started to sense how Cheii represents family who have passed on” (196), including her beloved aunt and uncle who had taught her some of the traditional Diné ways. She finds Cheii (an actual horned toad) with the help of her cousins and reflects further on how a horned toad is far more than a lucky animal for her. “Cheii symbolizes divinity to me—a hope that we will be with our families forever and see our loved ones again who have passed on,” she explains (197). The horned toad-grandfather symbolizes a melding of Diné and Mormon teachings. It is a Diné way of understanding the world infused with King's own Mormon understanding of the afterlife, where her family will be together again.The strength of King's book is her ability to sit with ambiguity, and to make space for the very Diné belief that each person has their own road to walk, and that some of those roads may look very different from the others. What she asks of the reader here is to approach this subject of Diné Mormonism with an open mind and understand that Diné Mormons get to decide how they navigate their religious identity. While the book is written for both a general and scholarly audience, it can, at times, assume more insider knowledge than a non–Latter-day Saint reader may have, using terminology with which outsiders might be unfamiliar without providing explanations or definitions. Yet overall, King's book is an ambitious, thoughtful, personal, and much-needed work on how Diné have interacted with and embraced Mormonism and the complicated ways they navigate their own paths as Diné dóó Gáamallii.