Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific

In Imperial Zions, Amanda Hendrix-Komoto has written a concise and readable history of nineteenth-century missionary work by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints among Native Americans and Polynesians. She argues that Latter-day Saint theology laid a complex racial and gendered groundwork for the church’s interactions with Indigenous peoples. This is not a footnote to American history; rather, the author has successfully woven Native history into the larger Latter-day Saint narrative.Hendrix-Komoto begins with the church's theology of an embodied white and male God and its belief in a physical afterlife, which “influenced racial and gendered ideologies” (14). She intends to examine “the contradictions within restoration theology surrounding race, sexuality, and the body,” especially as those tensions affected Mormon-Native relations (12). As revealed to Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon gave Latter-day Saints a history of God's interactions with “Lamanites,” or the ancestors of Native Americans and Polynesians as chosen members of the House of Israel who had fallen into a savage state but were now redeemable. The desire to save these “Lamanites” drove Latter-day Saint missionary work “to the American West, Latin America, and the Pacific” (31).Indian missions were founded even as church leaders started practicing polygamy, considered a necessary sexual practice to bring more spirit children into earthly bodies. But polygamy brought increased derision to church members and made others question their “respectability and whiteness” (28). Descriptions of nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints “explicitly racialized” them as non-white, and outsiders suggested that polygamy led to racial degradation (34). The church’s perceived alliance with Native peoples only added to suspicion by other Americans, but ultimately Latter-day Saints’ own racial biases negatively affected relations with their own neophytes.Hendrix-Komoto then shifts to a discussion of women in the church. Rather than offering an entirely liberating theology for women, the author suggests “the restoration at once created and foreclosed opportunities for women” (50). Women created marriages and families and tried to form institutional and personal female kinships, but polygamy complicated these relationships. The instability and persecution experienced by the early church made women even more vulnerable to poverty, expulsion, and sexual assault. In discussing this topic, Hendrix-Komoto lays important groundwork for understanding Latter-day Saints’ personal, domestic, and sexual interactions with Native converts.Chapter 3 emphasizes missionary work. Widespread conversion failed to take hold among Native Americans, and missionaries found more success among Polynesian converts. For those who did convert “the religion became a way for some Native people to resist colonialism even as white Latter-Day Saints saw it as a civilizing force” (16). But the racial divides between missionaries and their Native converts persisted. Chapter 4 shows how Latter-day Saint understanding of the family responded to Native communities’ cultural and familial practices. Hendrix-Komoto argues that Latter-day Saints were “constantly pulled between justifying their own sexual practices and transforming those of Indigenous people” (23), believing that Latter-day Saint polygamy “was more virtuous than that practiced by native communities” (17). While some missionaries encouraged intermarriage between white men and Indian women, she finds that Latter-day Saints’ “discomfort . . . towards these marriages” was rooted in their own racial biases (41). Thus, a widespread polygamous structure never really took hold among Native converts to the church, either mixed-race or contained within their communities. Why was this? I hoped Hendrix-Komoto might explore this further.The practice of adopting Native children became much more widespread, as a way of redeeming Lamanites, because adoption “expanded the restoration's notions of kinship” (53). However, failures in the practice “made it difficult for Indian adoptees to fully assimilate into white society.” These tensions highlighted “the conflict between the Saints’ elevation of Indigenous people as Israelites and the racism present in Mormon culture” (18). The author shows “how Native Mormons created meaning out of their faith despite white Mormon racism” (18). In three cases of what she terms “Native Zions,” some converts created their own sacred communities where their Indigenous cultures and faithful practices could coexist. Hendrix-Komoto argues these Native communities represented a “political act” supporting their sovereignty against other forms of imperialism, while also upholding Latter-day Saint goals of Lamanite redemption (162). White church members believed that industry and domesticity would civilize Indigenous converts. For students and scholars of agricultural history, it is notable that all three communities—Laie, Hawai‘i; Washakie, Utah; and Iosepa, Utah—were largely agricultural projects. Hendrix-Komoto reminds readers of the complexity of this religious community-building, because Hawaiian settlers became “participants in settler colonialism” (158) against other Indigenous peoples. Although Iosepa and Washakie no longer exist, Laie has persisted, but all three religious communities stood as a record of Indigenous survival against the idea that Natives “would disappear” (171). Amanda Hendrix-Komoto has succeeded in “plac[ing] the development of restoration theology in conversation with [its] missionary work” (5). I recommend Imperial Zions for students of religious history, Latter-day Saint history, Native American, Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander histories, and agricultural history, especially in conversation with settler colonialism and Native assimilation in the Americas.