in sally in three worlds, anthropologist Virginia Kerns has written a detailed and engaging account of the life of a young Pahvant Ute woman who was kidnapped by Indigenous captors (possibly the Ute leader Wakara and his brother) and sold to Latter-day Saint settlers when she was in her late teens. Sally, as the Latter-day Saint community came to call the captive, then lived most of her life as a domestic laborer, working for members of Brigham Young's extended family. She eventually became the cook at the Lion House for Young and his large plural family. In total, she labored for the Latter-day Saint leader and his family for over thirty years until she was in her early fifties. In return, she received food and shelter but no pay.After Sally had served in Young's household for most of her adult life, Young informed her that she would marry Chief Kanosh, leader of the Pahvant Utes, as part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint's larger “civilizing mission” to “the Indians.” Sally died a short time after that unhappy marriage. Thus, the three worlds of the title describe the different phases of Sally's life: her life before, during, and shortly after her kidnapping; the time she spent in service to Young's family; and finally, the time she spent on her “mission” to live with Chief Kanosh and other Pahvant people. Overall, Sally's story is an important one, and Kern does it justice with her beautifully crafted book.Kern lays out the scope and terms in the book in a very helpful introduction. She begins with the powerful statement that she strives to illustrate over the course of the project: “A single life can illuminate an entire cultural and social world, or reveal an unremarked but vital part of the human story” (1). Much of Sally's story, as Kern rightly notes, has been told in ways that “left no space for the realities of her experience” (1). Thus, Kern has two main objectives. First, she wants to show readers what we can learn about the processes of settler colonialism and dispossession by piecing together as much about Sally's life as possible. Next, she also seeks to detail the realities and day-to-day experiences and larger social context that gave shape to the broad contours of Sally's life. Given that Sally never learned to read or write and left no documents regarding her life, Kerns covers a lot of ground by mining records related to the worlds that Sally inhabited and has therefore provided us with a book that is both deeply researched and broad in scope.Part 1, “Mountain and Sky,” starts with the “trade” that brought a captive Sally to live among the Latter-day Saint settlers who sought to remake the region according to their own values and beliefs. The trauma of the interaction comes through in Kern's retelling of the incident. John Young, son of Brigham Young's brother Lorenzo, witnessed his father step forward to exchange his rifle for an “Indian” girl “gaunt with hunger” and covered in blood (17) to save her “from certain death” (19). This section of the book then moves backward and forward in time as Kern describes who the girl was and what had potentially happened to her and her people to bring her to this moment, and details who Lorenzo was and how he came to be in the region. She also explains how Sally came to live with Lorenzo's step-daughter, Clara Decker.Several populations collide in this section: Utes, Shoshones, Paiutes, Navajos, fur trappers, political figures (Thomas Jefferson), US military personnel, early ethnographers (such as Schoolcraft and Powell), and early Latter-day Saint figures all make appearances here. Kern also provides some important context on captivity narratives in this section that will be helpful for nonacademic, though familiar to academic, readers. Additionally, she exposes the starkly racist ideas that drove—and were used to justify—Indigenous dispossession. And finally, she explains some of the cultural underpinnings related to the practice of Indigenous slavery and captivity in the region. Historians may wish that she had included a few more references to the existing scholarly literature in the text and that she provided some critical engagement with that literature, but Kern has provided more academically inclined readers with useful footnotes.Kern then charts Sally's transition from an abused captive (and commodity) who was traded for the benefit of her Ute captors to a servant who was held within the confines of the Latter-day Saint community. Clara Decker taught Sally to speak English, cook, sew, clean, sleep on a bed, and live every other part of her life as part of a larger “civilizing” agenda that Young endorsed. There is, however, no evidence that Sally was ever baptized. Nor does it appear she was allowed to leave. Kern notes, however, that even if Sally could have left, she had nowhere to go. Given the limited choices available to her, Sally came to accept her fate as an unpaid domestic laborer. Based on Sally's acceptance of her role as a domestic laborer, Kern speculates that Sally eventually felt safe in a world that had previously been very unsafe for her. One wonders what Sally did feel, given that she left no documents or oral histories from this period. Still, Kern is able to discern through her sources that Sally longed to see her sister and mother again. Despite constructing her early life with Latter-day Saint settlers though the documents that were produced by them, Kern admirably keeps the focus on Sally throughout this section.There are only a few times in book that Kern details specific Latter-day Saint religious views about Indigenous people as separate from those harbored by other White Americans. Throughout this section, I wished that the author had provided a bit more context on Latter-day Saint beliefs regarding Indigenous people. I think it could have helped provide some additional context to Sally's experiences—if only in speculative ways. Was there anything in Sally's behavior that led the author to think Sally believed in the Latter-day Saint faith? Did Latter-day Saint views regarding Lamanites inform her life in any way, or that of Decker? It seems Kern made a conscious choice to avoid that topic. Given the book's overall scope, however, and all that she accomplishes, this is a minor critique.In other parts of the book Kern does readers a service by framing Sally's adjustment to her new life not through the lens of educating an “uncivilized Indian”—as have so many other accounts—but rather as one of cultural adjustment. By placing Sally in the center of the story and telling us how her life with the Pahvant might have informed her perspective, Kern then tells us what Sally likely witnessed as both a captive and experienced as a domestic laborer. Kern explains, for instance, that Sally's Indigenous community knew (and knows) the environment well. She details what Utes hunted, planted, collected, cooked, ate, and, to a lesser extent, what they believed. She details how kinship ties and cosmologies functioned as cornerstones of Pahvant culture.In exploring Ute culture in such detail, the book demonstrates that the Latter-day Saint idea that Indigenous people were “uncivilized” was a cultural construct. Thus, Kern frames Sally's experience as one shaped by the dominant culture, but not wholly so. Kern also informs us that Sally's experiences in captivity and servitude were both traumatic and destabilizing. Such captivity experiences were also relatively common. Kern makes clear that Sally's kidnapping was only one of many that occurred during the 1840s and 1850s and notes that her legal status “remained ambiguous” (106–7) long after an indenture contract would have expired and slavery in the US had been abolished.As this part of Sally's story unfolds, Kern demonstrates how the colonization of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau significantly altered the lives of Indigenous peoples: they were removed from homelands or, in some instances, killed. Some, like Sally's captors, resisted and fought for their lands. All watched as local Indigenous lands were taken, lifeways were destroyed or altered, and disease wreaked havoc on their communities. Settler colonists, as Kern notes, came to replace Indigenous communities with their own. Yet, Indigenous people remained and sought to navigate the changing social and physical environment.In the next section, “The Heart of Civilization,” Kern illustrates how Sally became part of a community of Latter-day Saint women under Clara's tutelage. She details some of the ways that community of women functioned, established relationships, and created a complex social network in a deeply patriarchal society. Kern also makes clear that while Sally became a valued worker in this society, she remained an outsider. Thus, Kern shows that casting Sally's story as one of assimilation is overly simplistic. By referencing Pahvant kinship networks, Kern attempts to help us understand how Sally might have understood her place in the Latter-day Saint community. Kern has crafted a portrait of Sally alongside one of a growing Latter-day Saint community. As the women around Sally got married and had children, Sally remained unmarried and childless. Instead, she cooked and a cared for Young's growing household. Young's many children fondly remembered her for her delicious desserts and her everyday acts of kindness.Her access to the Latter-day Saint leadership also meant that Sally likely overheard stories of what was happening to the Indigenous peoples of Utah, including the Pahvant. Sally, by this point, had not been in regular contact with Utes for three decades (152). Much of this is speculative on Kern's part, but it is logical and informative. Chief Kanosh, of the Pahvant Utes, appealed to both Young and government agents to make good on their promises and help feed his people. According to John W. Powell, Chief Kanosh had come to understand the “‘hopelessness’ of resisting the ‘tide of civilization,’” and he eventually sought help from Young (186–87).In the third section, “Exiles,” Kern covers Sally's arranged marriage to Chief Kanosh. She presents this as a marriage of convenience for Young and the Pahvant leader: it solved a number of problems for both men. First, it removed an aging Sally from Young's household. Next, Young presented Sally's marriage to Chief Kanosh and her removal from his house as “an act of service” to the larger Latter-day Saint community (191). She was tasked with converting the Pahvant Utes “to civilization” (191), and Young saw her as an ideal model. In turn, it provided Chief Kanosh with a strong connection to the Latter-day Saint community.Sally, however, did not benefit from the arrangement. She did not wish to leave the community of women she had been part of for the past thirty years. In the end, she had no choice in the matter. She was exiled from her room at the Lion House and was sent to live among another group, her former people, who had been pushed to the margins of Latter-day Saint society. By the time she left Young's household, Sally was, by all accounts, a refined woman. The Pahvants did not recognize her and “laughed at her squeamishness” when she was confronted with Pahvant living conditions (210). Sally eventually left the Pahvant community and found a short-lived friendship in a nearby Latter-day Saint village. Her appeals to Clara to return to Salt Lake after Brigham Young died went unanswered. Sally passed away a short time afterward.Overall, as a cultural biography, the book is a compelling read. Since the story is complex, it can be difficult to keep track of all the different historical actors and key historical events. Luckily, the author has provided an appendix noting all the main actors in the book, which readers will want to consult. As a historian, I would have liked the author to use more dates and reference the academic literature she was building on a bit more so we could chart Sally's experiences across time and place and ground her story within the existing scholarship. This also would have helped give a little more shape to one of the key ideas in the book: settler colonialism. Yet, since many lay readers may not be familiar with it, Kerns provides a useful general definition and overview of the concept and in the end, these are minor criticisms of an important book.Ultimately, Kern succeeds in what she set out to do. She demonstrates that one life can tell more than an individual story. As she notes near the end of the book, Sally's story hides as much as it reveals, for within it is the larger story of settler colonialism and the “grievous damage” (252) that those who sought to replace Indigenous people inflicted on both the land and its original inhabitants. Despite such attacks on their land and culture, as she notes throughout the text, the Pahvant and other Indigenous peoples survived. Sally inhabited three rapidly changing worlds. Kern has provided us with a detailed glimpse into them and leaves us pondering the legacies of settler colonialism.