Dr Lori Taylor

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mormons and indians

An Abstract Tailored for Western New York

Join me for a roundtable discussion of Essays on American Indian and Mormon History at the 2020 Mormon History Association conference in Rochester, New York, June 4-7, 2020.

This abstract describes my likely contribution.

Joseph Smith in Iroquois Country: A Mormon Creation Story.

When a colleague told me a story claiming a connection in western New York between Joseph Smith and followers of Haudenosaunee prophet Handsome Lake (Sganyodaiyo), I dug in to find that the story had been told since the 1960s. Joseph Smith, the story claims, got the idea to blend Christianity with the Gaiwiio, the Word of Handsome Lake. As history, the story is plausible, even if no one can prove it true (or untrue). As a story, though, I find myself most interested in how the idea travels and gains momentum. Stories fulfill the wishes and needs of the tellers and of the listeners and readers. They sound true. They fit. We as historians and our subjects in the past all tell stories that we want to be true. We tidy up the edges and reshape our memories, knowingly or not, until our stories become our truth. And yet, the evidence still tells me that all tellings of this particular story lead back to a trickster storyteller in the mid-twentieth century,

Who am I now?

I have an article coming out soon in an anthology. Rather than starting from an old academic bio for the requisite author biography, I started from a helpful “how to grad school” outline. When I was in grad school and the Wild West internet was new, I had no such outline. I love doing all of this over again. 

This is who I am now. 

Lori Elaine Taylor is an independent scholar with a specialization in propaganda, persuasion, and the slippery stories people tell themselves about their collective pasts. Her work includes religion and racism, music and music communities, and labor history. Lori completed her Ph.D. at the University at Buffalo and her M.A. at The George Washington University. The John Whitmer Historical Association awarded her “Best Dissertation” for “Telling Stories about Mormons and Indians.” She recently published flash fiction, “Latter-day Confederacy of Many Nations,” in the alternate history anthology, States of Deseret. Her superpowers are writing Python and speaking Finnish.

States of Deseret

States of Deseret coverAfter a year of editing and organizing by William Morris of A Motley Vision and publication by Peculiar Pages, States of Deseret is now available. Eight authors contributed to this short anthology of Mormon alternate history.

What if the territory of Deseret had never joined the Union and instead became its own nation? What if Leo Tolstoy or Nikola Tesla had converted to the LDS Church? What if Brigham Young had gone all the way to California instead of stopping in Utah? The genre of alternate history invites us to imagine how the past (and thus our present and future) would be different if different choices had been made. These eight stories provide glimpses at alternate historical trajectories for Mormons and Mormonism—of other states of Deseret.

My contribution, “The Latter-day Confederacy of Many Nations,” is a flash fiction, super short story consisting of one character, Eliza Sky, publishing a research note for her colleagues. I give you one page, then you, the reader, tell yourself the story in the jarring spaces.

Alternate history diverges from our world. I found that starting with a set of documents helped me see the other world more clearly. I chose to take as (mostly) history Martin Cruz Smith’s The Indians Won. He published this first novel in 1970. He wrote half of it in a weekend as his deadline crept up to slap him, so the execution tends to be sloppy. I read this as part of my doctoral work on Mormon fantasies about American Indians. In this case, Mormons joined with the native people who won the great war for the continent, and they formed a nation together in the hart of North America. I let this, together with the map for the opening sequence of the television version of Philip K. Dick’s alternate history The Man in the High Castle (in which the desert and mountains are a neutral zone between the Japanese Pacific States and the Great Nazi Reich), shape some of my assumptions about the shape of this alternate world.

My spending a decade in the early nineteenth-century with Mormons and Indians gave me a lot of background for the world of Eliza Sky. I have already written about issues and inaccuracies in published histories of this era, so anyone following both the history and the fiction has a chance—a small chance—of finding which details I know to be historically accurate even when they do not mesh with conventional accounts of the era. Maybe at some point I will make a list for you of the truths and fictions of The Latter-day Confederacy of Many Nations (LDC).

One crumb for now: I gave Eliza Sky a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, because I worked at the Smithsonian myself. The more I keep familiar, the easier it is to focus on the divergent world.

I have not let go of Eliza or the way her world was shaken by her historical research. I continue to tell myself the rest of her story. Maybe I will tell you the rest of the story sometime.

In the meantime, you can buy the anthology, States of Deseret, and read “Latter-day Confederacy of Many Nations” and seven other alternate histories.

Latter-day Confederacy of Many Nations by Lori Taylor

States of Desert table of contents

States of Deseret table of contents

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.