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A preliminary thought on “Mormon Settler Colonialism”

A preliminary thought on “Mormon Settler Colonialism”

Last updated on: July 21, 2026 at 11:28 pm by Dan Peterson

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A preliminary thought on “Mormon Settler Colonialism” 2026-07-21T23:28:45-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Mount Carmel, not too far from Haifa and the Mediterranean Sea. It’s less a peak than a long ridge. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

But Elijah went up to the top of Mount Carmel. He bowed down to the ground and put his face between his knees. 43 He said to his assistant, “Please get up and look toward the sea.”

So the assistant did so. He said, “I don’t see anything.”

Seven times Elijah said, “Do it again.”

44 The seventh time the assistant said, “I see a small cloud the size of a human hand coming up from the sea.”

Elijah said, “Go and tell Ahab, ‘Pull yourself together, go down the mountain, and don’t let the rain hold you back.’” 45 After a little while, the sky became dark with clouds, and a wind came up with a huge rainstorm.

Then it came to pass the seventh time*,* that he said, “There is a cloud, as small as a man’s hand, rising out of the sea!” So he said, “Go up, say to Ahab, ‘Prepare your chariot*,* and go down before the rain stops you.’” (1 Kings 18:42-45, Common English Bible)

This is a shop on Tanzania’s Mafia Island. Unfortunately, the island wasn’t named in honor of the notorious “Mormon Mafia,” but Mafia Island is nevertheless its real name. It’s part of the Zanzibar Archipelago on the eastern coast of Africa.

Like me, you may be tempted to dismiss Candace Owens as an obnoxious but largely irrelevant wart on American political discourse. Like me, you may regard her as an execrable loon or, perhaps even more likely, as a cynical, unprincipled, and demagogic grifter. And maybe you’ve even thought that way about Ms. Owens without hearing any of her, umm, thinking about Utah and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But not so fast! Her initial source on the subject, Courtney Love, is, it scarcely needs to be said, a completely dependable font of insight and information on all things related to the Latter-day Saints and their church. So, with that in mind, if you’re able to access this brief item, you won’t be able to lightly brush aside the results of Ms. Owens’s important and shocking investigative journalism.

Please recall that Candace Owens reaches a global digital network of over 35 million followers across her various social media platforms. Her primary platform, of course, is YouTube, where she has more than six million subscribers. There, she regularly draws millions of views per episode — totaling approximately 1.4 billion views, thus far, over the lifetime of her YouTube activity — with her independent Candace show ranking among the top podcasts in the United States of America. I’ve not yet listened to this thirty-minute-long response to Ms. Owens, but I’m inclined to speculate that it doesn’t have quite the same reach as her unhinged (and very likely insincere) speculations: “Candace Owens Tries to Expose Mormonism (again).”

Young women dressed in pioneer clothing participate in a reenactment of the Latter-day Saint handcart experience of the 1850s. Such reenactments are, of course, celebrations of white supremacy, not to mention heteronormativity and patriarchy. (The young men were presumably watching television and downing dirty sodas while the young women shown above were slaving to pull the young men’s stuff.) (LDS Media Library)

It’s a matter, really of quantity versus, umm, well, quality, but, although its direct audience will be far smaller than Ms. Owens enjoys on an exceptionally bad day, I’m actually more concerned about the possible impact of a new book by an academic (and former Latter-day Saint) named Elise Boxer that is entitled Mormon Settler Colonialism: Inventing the Lamanite. (See “Pioneer Day is just one example of the LDS Church’s anti-Indigenous racism, new book argues: “Indigenous peoples,” a Native scholar writes, “have been uniquely othered within the LDS Church,”” by Tamarra Kemsley in the Salt Lake Tribune.)

I will admit that I had a pretty strong reaction to the Tribune article itself — as I have had and still do have to such phenomena as “The 1619 Project” and Ibram X. Kendi’s 2019 book How to Be an Antiracist. But I haven’t read Elise Boxer’s book at this point, nor even seen it, so I’ll hold back until I’ve examined it, if I ever do.

Of course, I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge historic injustices and misconceptions and prejudices on the part of my country and on the part of Latter-day Saints, but my knowledge of world history is just a little too extensive to permit me to buy into the notion — which Elise Boxer may or may not be peddling — that dead White European males or Latter-day Saints are uniquely or especially prone to such prejudices and the perpetration of such injustices. I know few specifics, but I know enough to know about the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Amhara and Tigray in Ethiopia and Somalia, the nomadic Arab groups and the non-Arab sedentary farmers in Darfur (Sudan), and similar instances.

Image of a Mesoamerican battle from the sixteenth-century Tovar Codex
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

More to the point in this specific case, I know that the Sioux were often at war, long before the arrival of the White man, with the Cheyenne and the Crow, and that the Iroquois Confederacy fought lengthy wars against the Hurons and the Cherokees. I’m also aware that the Utes of the Great Basin and the Tlinkits of what is today southeastern Alaska and northern coastal British Columbia were major slave traders (and entered that trade without needing any start-up help from European settler-colonialists). And then, of course, there were the Aztecs, who, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and well into the sixteenth — which is to say, mostly before the arrival of Christopher Columbus and his uniquely evil European associates — sacrificed prisoners of war on a virtually industrial scale, along with other individuals who had been sent as tribute from conquered vassal states.

This is, simply, and sadly, the history of fallen humankind. And I suspect, to use the fashionable modern term, that there was quite a bit of “othering” going on in the cases that I’ve mentioned here — and in innumerable additional cases that I might equally well have cited.

Posted from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

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