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I wrote “Latter-day Confederacy of Nations,” and I got paid! Exciting when first it happens. This may only be $25, but it’s $25 more than zero. The short story collection, States of Deseret, will be out this spring.
My first payment for fiction. Nice.
What happens when Eliza Sky, a young historian from the Latter-day Confederacy of Many Nations, leaves Salt Lake City for a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in the United States and finds a document that sheds new light on the Mormon mission to indigenous peoples in 1830? In this alternate timeline, that mission in the most intense year of nineteenth-century Indian removals wasn’t “The First Mission to the Indians,” as it is in our timeline. In her timeline this week-long meeting brought together Haudenosaunee and Mormons who fomented resistance across the continent and led the establishment of a Confederacy indigenous nations from the western desert to the Mississippi River, dividing the United States to the west and east. The new document shakes up the young historian. If this first long meeting between Mormon missionaries and Tonawanda chiefs wasn’t a meeting of equals, what was it?
My first short story will be published in the States of Deseret anthology. I’m so excited to see the table of contents. I look forward to reading all of the stories by the other seven authors.
And, now I can’t let go of my own story. I have to write more. More stories? Novella? Novel? Not sure. I have to explore how this Confederacy formed and what this means for Eliza. Even the first paragraph above tells more about that timeline than is included in the story. Even if it’s fiction, I’m still do research like a plow.
As a long-term project, I am making my articles available. As I find copies of published articles and as I transfer old formats from conference papers (Jaz disk, anyone?), I will add these.
The latest—actually, the first—is “Elder Nigeajasha and Other Mormon Indians.”
This excerpt from my doctoral dissertation (Telling Stories about Mormons and Indians) was given as a paper at the John Whitmer Historical Association meetings in Independence, Missouri, fall 2000. I remember it well because I brought my 5-month old son and my mother with me. My (now 6′ tall) baby was 5 days old when we walked through my graduation together.
My fellow historians of the Community of Christ (then still RLDS) were welcoming and generous. I received an award for my dissertation, defended earlier that year. Paul M. Edwards, a historian of the restoration movement, had been one of my readers. After hostility from a well-known LDS historian who had also been a reader, I was surprised others received the dissertation positively. Paul said my work gave him “hope for Mormon history.” So, of course I took my baby to Missouri to say thank you.
The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal published the paper several years later.
Within the past few months, a colleague told me she could not find this article either on JSTOR or online. It’s there, in several places, but perhaps some algorithm has hidden it all. So, this article rose to top priority. Now, “Elder Nigeajasha” is easier to find—along with its 73 footnotes.