Mormon Settler Colonialism: Inventing the Lamanite (Volume 25)

by Elise Boxer

230 pages, Hardcover

Published October 28, 2025

Reviews

[Jason Palmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is as "unsettling" as its author's presence at Mormon Studies conferences and as her people's presence on the land. It is so unsettling that settlers will not give it five stars (except me because I'm more woke than you). Settlers will not give this 5 stars because not only is its content not for our White gaze, and not only does its content burst the bubble of liberalism that protects us from our deep complicity in the ongoing genocide of Indigenous Peoples in relationships with Turtle Island, Palestine, and many other of Earth's communities, but its form is not what we settlers will categorize as a "history" or even a "book."
As a former settler scholar, let me explain to you settlers what I mean, but first, I must engage in some good old settler scholar navel gazing (which Boxer thankfully does not do, nor does she need to. Why? She is not a settler. Settlers are individuals. This makes them, at best, introspective—at worst narcissistic—which is why they cannot deal with guilt, so they drown their “Indian burial ground” demons with land acknowledgements, Ken Burns documentaries, Steven King pulp, and pronouncements of certain orange things as being a “threat to our democracy” as if “we” ever had anything but a government by the settlers and for the settlers). I wish I could say that my use of "former" at the beginning of the previous non-parenthetical sentence applied to "settler," but, alas, it applies to “scholar.” I still have not killed the settler in my mind, but I have at least killed the scholar (as you probably guessed by my venue of publication for this book review).
However, back when I was a scholar (anthropologist, the most anti-indigenous sort of scholar you can get) I learned how to catch glimpses through tiny holes in the aforementioned bubble. What I saw there no longer allows me to stomach White liberal flag waving patriotism like the stuff that foams from the mouths of Stephen Colbert and Rachel Maddow. Don't get me wrong. They are funny, adroit people. But they consider heinous things that happened to "other Americans” (by which they mean non-White, non-men, estadounidences) to be mere "stains on our democracy." If you've read enough histories like Boxer's, then you must either be willfully ignorant (Colbert, Maddow, Obama) or maliciously genocidal (Lincoln, Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Hillary Clinton, etc. etc.- notice how I didn't include functionally illiterate settlers like Biden and Hegseth) not to see that the USA IS ITSELF A STAIN! It is a settler state. Ruining is its only feature, not its occasional flaw.
I guess Nick Estes might say I became radicalized. I saw behind the curtain. But if I was radicalized, I was only radicalized in that White-virtue-signaling way of writing about it but doing nothing... yet. This book might push me to actually organize.
Why will settlers (and not just settler Mormons) hate this book other than for the fact that it clearly states (over and over, mind you, so that not a sentence goes by without a reminder) that, if Indigenous Peoples truly count as humans, then the USA (and therefore, its religious henchman: the LDS church) HAS NO JUSTIFICATION FOR ITS EXISTENCE ON THE LAND? Simple: it is not organized like a settler scholar's book.
Not until page 73 does Boxer get specific about exactly why the USA and LDS church have no justification for their existence other than the anti-indigenous, "Enlightenment" doctrines of discovery, possession, and elimination. This lack of specificity will drive settler scholars crazy. But those 73 preparatory pages are as necessary as ablutions before ritual worship. They prepare your mind for a possible decolonization event. Pages 1-73 are invocations of cyclical mantras, almost like the Koran, which isn’t meant to be read but to be sung. The Koran’s revelations are not in chronological order but in order of longest to shortest. Boxer’s book is similar. It is as if it were meant not to be read but to be recited, like a call and response. Never does Boxer use the call signal “Mormons” without following it up with the appropriate response “they who need Indigenous Peoples to be Lamanites in order to justify the colonization of their lands.”
However, instead of responding appropriately, settlers will be muttering, (as the settler in my mind was) “get to the point already! How exactly does the process work whereby Indigenous people becoming Lamanites helps settler Mormons assuage their consciences while continuing to simultaneously possess and eliminate indigeneity?”
But, do you really want the answer to that question, dear ex-Mormon but still-settler? Realize that whatever the process is, it would also apply to settler exMormons just as much, if not more, than it would apply to Mormons. It is my guess that settler exMormons, despite their prowess at what they call “deconstruction,” will feel even more existentially implicated than settler Mormons by this book. Settler exMormons will hate to find out that it is only settler colonialism, not Mormonism that can explain “how Mormon settlers created narratives of belonging to justify their possession of land” (23) and, oops, you, John Dehlin still live on that land? No wonder you consider the “dark parts” of Mormonism to be the theology and not the land theft. It is easy to give the theology back. Landback? A bit more difficult, innit, Rebecca Biblioteca? Your ancestors taught you to do hard things, such as making a checklist: 1. Put in a 20-mile day of trespassing along the Platt River, 2. Churn some butter, 3. Buy me a Paiute “into salvation,” not slavery, she’ll become a part of the family (but never appear in a single family portrait). 4. Make sure all my Paiutes know their place, 5. Blood-atone me a Ute to follow Brother Brigham’s extermination order, 6. Put the sheep out to the salt lick. Yep. Those some hard things, but God bless America, and this land is your land, this land is my land, and you can’t buy happineeeeeess, but (now that my ancestors committed genocide) you can buuuy dirt.
Sorry, settler ExMormons, but Boxer is not out to stomp on the church that stole millions from you until your shelf finally broke in 2015 because “The Policy” harmed settler people like you whom you considered fully human. Nope. She is out to stomp on the very fountain of your way of life, a way of life that you cannot afford to fully “deconstruct:” settler colonialism is social reproduction through violence. SETTLER COLONIALISM REQUIRES THE DEHUMANIZATION AT SOME LEVEL OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES. If you actually felt like Indigenous lives were valuable, you would not, in good conscience, be able to pledge allegiance to ANY settler-state’s flag. I’m talking to you Canada, USA, Israel, (oh wait, that’s redundant), New Zealand, Australia, etc.
For the same reason they love Land Man and Yellowstone, ExMormons will discard this book offhand with the guilt-assuaging, individualistic, conversation-stopping question they always ask, “what do you expect me to do Dr. Boxer? Split myself three ways genealogically and go back to Denmark, England, and Sweden so that I can live guilt free and finally be Indigenous? Do I give my Saint George, Utah McMansion on Geronimo Avenue in the Apache Rocks Vista gated community to old John Redcorn from down the street? In other words, what do ‘you people’ want from ‘us’?”
Well, you have to be patient in order to receive the answers to those truly revealing questions. But you’re not going to like the answers even if by some miracle you have the attention span and emotional capacity to receive them. After page 73, Boxer will continue to unsettle you. Instead of answering those handwashing, copout questions, she will delve into the “you people” and the “us” at their genesis. But she will do it cyclically. This will grate on your settler ears as repetitive, redundant, and unnecessary. There is essentially one message, which is repeated at least once per page in a hundred different ways in the hope that one of those ways will make it past the hermetic bulwarks of your emotional attachment to the settler state and into your thick settler skull.
The message is this: “The Mormon settler fantasy reimagines Indigenous peoples as Lamanites using religious ideologies and texts that mark them as the racialized Other. Indigenous peoples do not exist on their terms but instead exist within the Mormon infrastructures as Lamanites. Mormon settlers became invested in converting American Indians because this gave meaning to their settler subject position and connection to land. Mormon settlers needed Indigenous peoples to become Lamanites, because this justified their racialized views of Indigenous peoples and LDS Church policies and infrastructures designed to save them from their fallen state” (55).
The problem is that Boxer has to contend with what 12-18 years of settler schooling has done to your mind (and the more schooling you’ve had, the more difficult it will be for her. If you have a PhD, pert near impossible.) Your schooling has taught you that because the USA brought the magic of a bicameral legislature to these lands, the legislative ends justified the genocidal means. This great experiment must be allowed to stand (on the graves of Indigenous Peoples) if only because we (White, landowning, settler males) say it must! Thank you Ken Burns for bolstering our emotional attachment to the settler state just when Boxer’s book was released. We secular settlers needed a more historical antidote to truth than the religious ones we despise. The blood washes off your hands real smooth after you learn about the misnamed “Revolutionary War,” real smooth.
By focusing on what happens after pg. 73 (without ever mentioning what does happen) I do not mean that everything before that page is merely an intellectual primer meant to chip away at your settler glasses that make you see the US settler projects as “ideals” that are somehow redeemable. She includes a few Easter eggs (primary sources) for patriotic settler historians of all things American and Zion, such as the astounding quotation on page 59 from the Council of Fifty’s petition to the US Congress. Though I can’t understand how anyone who considers Indigenous Peoples to be human could read that quotation and still remain loyal to either the USA or the LDS, I’m sure you, dear settler reader, will find a way. I am confident in your mental gymnastic ability.
And so is Boxer, which is why she knows her placement of truth obstacles in your path will not stop you from finding mental pathways around them. So, she has to be just as relentless as you are, dear settler. If you don’t want her to be so repetitive, stop! Finally see the full implication of what she is saying. Here is a metaphor that maybe you will understand because it uses violence: Boxer has an uphill battle to fight. Is she going to fire one shot and call it good? No, she is going to bring a repeating rifle, or better yet, a machine gun. When someone is fighting on your side with a machine gun, do you shout at them, “stop being so repetitive!”? No, and she is on your side because decolonization is necessary for the survival of this planet upon which even we settlers (no matter how many of the LDS Church's 12-week Self Reliance courses we've taken) depend. Boxer fearlessly fires her Howitzer off and “punches up,” even striking at the most insidious apologists for Mormon settler coloniality like Paul Reeve and Patrick Mason.
So, after page 73, she starts to include things that only those who’ve allowed their hearts to be prepared by the previous pages will understand. She starts getting detailed about precisely how Mormon settlers put in the hard work of colonizing Menominee people and syphoning off the wealth of their timber. Since the US didn’t immediately reward Mormons for doing the hard work of land theft for them, the Mormons fled to a place free of people whom they considered human. “I mean sure, there are over 20,000 Shoshone, Paiute, Ute, Goshute, and Dine in the Great Basin right now, but they don’t count as people or nuthin' because we’re talking about ‘lands thus unknown, unowned, or unoccupied, and are among some of the richest and most fertile of the continent’” (80), said the Council of Fifty in 1844. Now, we might criticize these great White Elders for not considering Shoshone habitation to count as human occupation, but think about it. What unravels when you actually consider Indigenous lives to matter? The whole justification for the USA! This is why there are hundreds of Mormon Studies books about the church’s antiblackness and only two or three (I’d like to think mine is one of them, look it up: Forever Familias) about its anti-indigeneity. The United States and the churches that prop it up (not just Mormonism) will still exist and even thrive without antiblackness. But if they are decolonized (not simply meaning "no longer anti-Indigenous" but fully returned to a state of Indigenous being with the land) they will fall. This fall will happen because colonial institutions require 2 things: labor and land. They require an exploitable labor force, but that labor force doesn’t have to be Black. If antiblackness is eliminated from the United States (doubtful), another form of racism or -ism will take its place to make another source of labor exploitable (see the sci-fi series The Expanse for how the elite might create a non-race-based hierarchy of difference to forge an exploitable labor force, and to see how Mormons in a distant future still wear white shirts and ties and are still at the vanguard of the elite group’s colonization strategy while playing its victims). On the other hand, if anti-Indigeneity were ever eliminated from the United States, the relationship between land and Indigenous Peoples would be restored, and where would the United States fit onto that new map? Would it float above it? The United States would have to start by getting out of Hawaii, of course (because that occupation is illegal even by the settlers' own laws) but where would the decolonization stop? Is there a single inch of land in all of Abya Yala that the United States acquired by any logic other than the fundamentally anti-Indigenous doctrine of terra nullius? Name one, and I’ll give you a free Book of Mormon.
If a settler state decolonizes, it ceases to exist because, unlike the brutal empires of England, France, Spain, Germany, and Belgium, a settler state—by definition—has no motherland to shrink back to.
But that kind of decolonization isn’t practical, so let’s not think about it. Let’s instead bury our heads in the sand and ask stupid questions revealing that our fear of White genocide outweighs our awe of Indigenous restoration. We're not creative enough to think of anything other than "them" doing to "us" what "we" did to "them," so let’s just drop the whole thing. Instead of choosing one of hundreds of massacres of Indigenous Peoples that happened in Utah territory alone from 1847 to 1857 at the hands of settler Mormons, let’s write about one of the only settler-on-settler massacres in US history, and let’s write about it again. And again. And again. Then lets cry about being descendants of the perpetrators and hug the descendants of the victims in a swirl of White tears.
Or, if we are so woke that we can see “transparent” scholarship on Mountain Meadows as the move to innocence that it is (we are so clean cut that we can come clean about our history, but only when it comes to violence against people whom we consider human, like Missourians), then let us choose for our books and dissertations the LDS church’s second most low hanging fruit: it’s ridiculous and ridiculously ongoing levels of antiblackness.
Let’s face it. We Mormon Scholars aren’t capable of thinking in decolonial ways because we haven’t read books written in decolonial ways (unless we’ve read Waziyatawin, which we haven’t, and Boxer obviously has).
Until now.
Boxer's book is an example of what decolonial writing can look like. If you didn’t give it 5 stars, what does that say about you? If you think Boxer’s repetition is unnecessary, you might want to check yourself and the history of the land you live on. It repeats itself too. It is up to you to stop colonizing. Once you do, Boxer will stop repeating herself.
One key takeaway from this book is that it makes it completely obvious why Mormonism, of all the other payaso settler colonial utopian movements, has survived as long as it has: It plugged itself directly into the US-powered manifest destiny of settler fantasies. Mormon interests didn’t just happen to coincide with settler interests; the entire Book of Mormon is written for THE SOLE PURPOSE OF JUSTIFYING U.S. MANIFEST DESTINY AND MAKING SETTLERS FEEL GOOD ABOUT INDIGENOUS ENCLOSURE. There is no other purpose. I remember saying as much when I audited one of Patrick Mason’s classes at Claremont Graduate University. He didn’t like it.
In sum, my fellow settlers of the Mormon and exMormon variety, you should not be proud of the sacrifices your ancestors made in cleansing the land of its human civilizations and replacing them with savagery. Instead, you should be circumspect about the lives and stories that Indigenous Peoples lost so that your ancestors could have the narrative privilege of being both the victims and the pioneers. We don’t criticize an S.O.S Morse Code signal for being repeated until somebody heeds the call. Why should we be bothered when Boxer repeats herself over and over until somebody actually understands? If filling all the previous Mormon scholars’ silences with words seems repetitive, what does that tell you about yourself? It tells you that you prefer the silent parts to stay silent. That’s fine. You do you.
Go read Ben Park’s stuff if you want to feel good about upholding and supporting The Constitution of the United States of America and about pretending that Trump is somehow an aberration on a generally benevolent trajectory of progress and development for all. Go read Paul Reeve if you prefer silence to truth about Indigenous displacement, dispossession, and, as Boxer ingeniously posits, the most insidious of all: possession.