Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific. By Amanda Hendrix-Komoto

Abstract

Imperial Zions portrays the complex human landscape of the nineteenth-century Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) as racially and ethnically diverse, with porous geographic and cultural boundaries. The Church’s history has been frequently framed around an early Anglo-American core of converts and leaders whose migration to Utah and surrounding territories was fortified by later waves of Euro-American immigrants. In contrast, Hendrix-Komoto is especially interested in Indigenous North American and Pacific peoples who joined themselves to the faith. Her story builds outward from White families’ experiences in the LDS community of 1840s Nauvoo, Illinois, an era of theological creativity and social reorganization for the church. Female converts often experienced financial precarity and sexual vulnerability, developing alternative kinship networks and new socialities when men in their families departed on long overseas missions. Church teachings about Native Americans being the surviving remnants of an ancient Israelite migration—and thus key to the collective salvation of humankind and the nation—deeply informed Mormon missions to convert and “civilize” Indian communities on the American frontier and in the Pacific. Such efforts were largely unsuccessful in the 1830s and 1840s, though the few Native American converts who did join in those years, like Lewis Dale (Oneida), “became important symbols” within the faith (p. 77).