Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century

by Farina King

“Navajo Latter-day Saints are Diné dóó Gáamalii,” writes Farina King, in this deeply personal collective biography. “We are Diné who decided to walk a Latter-day Saint pathway, although not always consistently or without reappraising that decision.” Diné dóó Gáamalii is a history of twentieth-century Navajos, including author Farina King and her family, who have converted and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), becoming Diné dóó Gáamalii—both Diné and LDS. Drawing on Diné stories from the LDS Native American Oral History Project, King illuminates the mutual entanglement of Indigenous identity and religious affiliation, showing how their Diné identity made them outsiders to the LDS Church and, conversely, how belonging to the LDS community made them outsiders to their Native community. The story that King tells shows the complex ways that Diné people engaged with church institutions in the context of settler colonial power structures. The lived experiences of Diné in church programs sometimes diverged from the intentions and expectations of those who designed them. In this empathetic and richly researched study, King explores the impacts of Navajo Latter-day Saints who seek to bridge different traditions, peoples, and communities. She sheds light on the challenges and joys they face in following both the Diné teachings of Si’ąh Naagháì Bik’eh Hózhǫ́ —“live to old age in beauty”—and the teachings of the church.

Genres: Mormonism

312 pages, Hardcover

First published October 6, 2023

Reviews

[Jason Palmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scholars like to claim that contradictory things are automatically full-on paradoxes. King doesn’t use the word “paradox” at all in this book, which is refreshing. She also doesn’t consider objectivity to be the gold standard in history writing. Other things can be true, not just “objective” things. She is not dispassionate, yet she writes history. This is a passionate, deeply biased history. That’s what makes it powerful. King is herself part of a Diné Mormon story. All historians are parts of stories. The only difference with King is that she admits it, owns it, and uses it to amplify her colonial power, her Indigenous power, and her Diné Mormon power. As a result of that jarring mixture, this story enraged and horrified me, “but at the end of it, I feel voices present that the world hasn’t heard for a long, long time. Voices telling the antidote to lies” (Miranda, 2024, xxiv).
Why has it taken so long for such a book to appear on the scene? For the answer, I turn to Deborah A. Miranda (Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area), author of Bad Indians who has a similarly contradictory positionality relative to King’s: “The gatekeepers of ‘literature’ have kept us outside by making education and literacy so undesirable and so painful (boarding schools, punishment for the slightest Indianness) and by making our own stories so unacceptable (you had to write like a white man or, conversely, write the way Tonto spoke if you wanted to be published) that it took all that time for us to even approach the door” (2024, xx).
Why was this book so hard for an Anglo Mormon settler scholar like me to read? Well, because it really did involve a paradox. That paradox let me know that my rage against the colonial machine actually confirms my role in that machine. First, allow me to explain what sort of colonial machine I’m a part of. Most people haven’t heard of settler colonialism before. It is the air they breathe, so why would they hear about it? Most fish have never heard of water.
Settler colonialism brought certain things to Turtle Island that didn’t exist here before. Here is a list of a few of those things. I got 1-9 from Candace Linklater (Cree):
1) A sense of urgency (I have this so bad that I can’t even enjoy vacations because I need to urgently make the most of them)
2) Paternalism (decisions cannot be made unless a person in power makes them, which is the most badass definition of paternalism I’ve ever heard! Thank you, Candace.)
3) Individualism (you are more valuable as an individual than you are as part of a community. The community should sacrifice so that you can achieve your personal "dreams.")
4) Control (control the narrative of the past, control what other people think about you, stressfully find ways to control outcomes that you cannot currently control, particularly those that you consider to be part of “nature.”)
5) Black and White thinking (categories always come in binaries, like the Book of Mormon says. There is no such thing as a spectrum.)
6) Objectivity (the best possible way to do science is without emotion or personal connection).
7) Politeness (Fear conflict. If something is bothersome, it is better to be polite and ignore it than to be bold and confront it. There is no moment when politeness isn’t appropriate. Impoliteness will create tension in the room, which should be avoided at all costs by simply sweeping things under the rug. As the Book of Mormon says, contention is of the devil, which, in the crucible of justifying Native genocide wherein the Book of Mormon was forged, really meant indigeneity is of the devil).
8) Progress (progress always means more quantity, regardless of quality. More, more, more. Its doctrine of “eternal progress” makes Mormonism the ultimate colonial religion. You cannot just have unexploited land. Seeing land go unexploited makes settler colonists go crazy. Conservation is blocking progress.)
9) Anthropocentrism (Culture is in direct opposition to nature. Humans are not a part of nature. Humans are meant to subdue “nature.”)
10) Biocentrism (There is a stark divide between what is living and what is not, what is sentient and what is not. The people can want their land back, but the land cannot want its people back. The land cannot respect and, therefore, deserves no respect.)
11) Categorical Impermeability (Categories of knowledge cannot bleed into each other despite known histories of them doing exactly that. Religion, science, kinship, race, gender, and politics are all starkly defined, obvious, and “naturally” discoverable categories. They are not created by humans. They are not social constructs. They are universal. Despite recent history proving otherwise, they exist unchanged from everlasting to everlasting and cannot be questioned or perforated. )
Now, to understand the paradox that true settlers like myself might find at the core of this book, take a look at number 5: Black and White thinking. Settlers think about colonialism and indigeneity in black and white ways, meaning that the divide between them must be stark. Being anticolonial in that you demonize coloniality and glorify indigeneity is actually a colonial way of thinking. This is a paradox because in order to decolonize within this mindset you have to recognize what is colonial versus what is Indigenous, eliminate that which is colonial, and keep that which is Indigenous. This necessitates placing everything you do and are onto the coloniality versus indigeneity binary, which is a binary that settler colonists foist upon Native Peoples. Therefore, you have to participate in colonial thinking in order to decolonize, which only takes you further away from decolonizing.
The reality in which King and many of her study participants exist involves no such binary between coloniality and indigeneity. This book excels to the extent that it helps readers understand such a nonbinary reality, sit within it, and allow it to change their own realities. Moments that make this reality live for readers include Ernesteen Lynch’s dilemma with a medicine man telling her to settle on one side of the cultural fence or the other. They include the story of Lillie Pooley who buried her son’s umbilical chord on LDS temple grounds. Really, such moments include all the stories that King tells from the perspective of diverse Native Peoples who have made Mormonism or Ex-Mormonism their own. Those stories are the focus of this book, and they are what make it important.
However, there is a subtext to the book that, for me, detracted from the Diné dóó Gáamalii reality. It is a pendulum-swinging subtext that might be necessary given King’s experience with the hypocrisy of academia. Still, this subtext made it difficult for me, a regular contributor to such hypocrisy, to remain planted in the nonbinary thoughtworld that King otherwise skillfully maintained.
I’m talking about the subtext of colonial apologetics. There were times in the book when King (in arguing against historians who bolster black and white thinking by claiming that Diné Peoples collude in their own oppression when they become Mormons) comes close to saying that colonialism can be a good thing.
Here's why I don’t think it is necessary to ever imply that colonialism can be a good thing: starvation and frybread. In other words, the analogy of starvation’s relationship with frybread explains how you can unequivocally and unapologetically denounce colonialism and all its offshoots (such as the LDS church and BYU) as pure, life-negating evil without throwing Indigenous people who proudly belong to those offshoots under the bus.
If you don’t know the story of how frybread came to be, you likely know a similar story of how a food you’d love to be able to afford to eat more often was originally a product of starvation. Societies all over the world have such stories. These are stories that flip the Book of Mormon trope: “by their fruits ye shall know them.” The moral of these stories is, “life sucked, but we made its shitty fruits into something tasty.”
The basic premise of such stories is that there was a time of great hunger and starvation. In their utter extremity, humans were forced to eat things that they normally wouldn’t consider food. The children raised on those foods felt nostalgia for them. As they became adults, they infused those items, once considered vile, into their new, more prosperous society’s haute cuisine.
In other words, out of something that everyone can agree is pure evil, namely starvation, humans are able to create something that almost everyone in that specific society can agree is delicious, be it frybread, snails, fish eggs, viscera (aka mondongo, carnitas, cau cau), rotten eggs, old cans of sweetened condensed milk mixed with limes (aka key lime pie), or sea cockroaches (aka lobsters). The list of starvation-born delicacies goes on. Yet, this does not mean that anyone would argue for perpetuating starvation in order to generate new and exciting platters for future generations. More to the point, nobody would argue that the starvation event itself included features that were life affirming. Everyone would automatically recognize that if anything good came from starvation, it was due to human ingenuity and resilience, not to the “program” of starvation having aspects designed to “benefit” humans.
It is not at all complicated, nuanced, or controversial to state that starvation is pure evil while frybread is pure deliciousness. We can all agree that starvation is pure evil, and even though we don’t all agree that frybread is delicious, people who hate frybread aren’t going to be offended if I’m open about the fact that I like it. People who are anti-starvation activists don’t boycott frybread vendors just because frybread was born of starvation conditions. We have a common sense understanding that such a boycott would be ridiculous even though frybread, unlike lobster and key lime pie, was born of a particularly deliberate starvation event that was in fact a colonial tactic to manufacture dependency on, gratefulness for, and emotional attachment to the US, its dry goods, and its “education.”
Therefore, if “starvation bad, frybread good” is so uncomplicated, why does it have to be so complicated, nuanced, or “paradoxical” to state that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is pure evil while the Tribe of Many Feathers, for example, is empowering? The Tribe of Many Feathers was a tool of Indigenous empowerment at BYU that Native members forged from the colonial weapons of “education” designed to erase their ancestral “ways of knowing.” Thinking that the resulting empowerment of Native Peoples was part of BYUs plan all along is like thinking that just because a weapon manufacturer made bullets out of metal, he obviously meant for them to be melted down and reforged into gardening implements. King would never think that, yet she seems to imply that maybe the settler church leaders’ aims toward Native Peoples were somehow less than completely nefarious. Admitting that Anglo Mormonism’s aims were completely and utterly nefarious would not throw Diné dóó Gáamalii under the bus. In fact, fully exposing Anglo Mormonism’s driving logic of Native elimination would actually honor her faithful LDS study participants even more than hiding that logic. It would demonstrate the level of evil that Diné pioneers were up against. It would show how incredibly determined they had to be in order to become agents of their own spiritual destinies in the very jaws of death. It would show how creative they had to be in order to forge something so incredibly good from something so utterly irredeemable.
Dear fellow Latter-day Saint, if it is offensive to you for me to say that an organization can be life-negating at the same time as its members are reforging its genocidal weapons into life-affirming tools, you may lack one or more of the following abilities. 1) The ability to recognize basic human ingenuity and resilience. 2) The ability to recognize the human ability to change absolutely anything into something good. 3) The ability to recognize that ability number two implies that the thing that humans changed wasn’t good in the first place (hence, their need to change it into something good).
In other words, if BYUs foundationally colonial programs are somehow strengthening Native Peoples, it is because Native Peoples have found ways to reforge BYUs weapons of violence and coloniality into life affirming tools. I see it as my job as an anthropologist of settler spiritualities to find out how that reforging took place so that it can be replicated and put toward dismantling the settler states of the world and all of their religious arms. It is not my job to gaslight readers into thinking that the colonial swords were really proto plowshares all along. Some of BYUs programs are now life-affirming to Native Peoples, but that is certainly not because those programs were originally meant to strengthen Indigenous identity. In every such case, Native Peoples thwarted the original colonial purpose of their church’s programs, making something evil into something good. If colonialism ever seems to be doing something liberatory, it is because Indigenous people and their allies are behind the scenes deliberately or inadvertently rewiring it in real time so that it eventually destroys itself.
King knows this, and such knowledge simultaneously heals and tears her apart. She helps us enter that torn apart world of healing. The coloniality/indigeneity binary that she upends is more complicated for her since, when seen through coloniality, her very genetics, body, mind, and spirit seem to straddle that binary. Still, her very existence proves my point. She is the impossibly decolonial human who came from her communities’ creative flipping of an irredeemably colonial script. King’s book is delicious frybread born of evil starvation.
There are many fascinating comparisons and contrasts to be made between King’s book and Miranda’s book, and I believe both should be read in conjunction. They both start by asking a similar, deeply personal question about their own identities as the daughters of settler mothers and Native fathers. As Miranda put it, “by force, by choice, or by love, mixed-race unions were a tradition for those who survived the California missions. Those who will not change do not survive; but who are we when we have survived” (xviii)?
Each author has her own equally valid reasons for pulling punches or letting them fly freely against the settler colonial aspect of their nonbinary realities. One of the most obvious parallels between the books regarding punch-pulling is Miranda’s portrayal of Junipero Serra versus King’s portrayal of Spencer Kimball. Both men are paternal figures whom thousands of Indigenous people consider beloved saints. However, both men subscribed fully to the logic of Indigenous erasure that defines colonialism. Kimball wanted Indigenous people to get what King calls an “education,” which she uses as an unmarked term in every case to mean “Anglo education.” When King speaks of the sort of education that Diné people receive athwart of Anglo Mormonism, she calls it “ways of knowing” rather than “education.” Indeed, most of her study participants seemed to think that “education” was not possible within purely Diné “ways of knowing.” Education, for them, was not available in Diné Bikeyah at all. One had to “go” and “get an education” elsewhere as the famous song encouraged. Though she never used the word “education” in reference to what her Diné ancestors had prior to European conquest, King would probably agree with Miranda that “our ancestors had everything they needed, including Indian religions, leaders, music, languages, jobs, and education” (24). However, had King made such a forceful statement and had she used the term “education” more critically, she would have ironically implied in a book about Diné Mormonism that the Diné people did not need Mormonism. This would have invalidated her own identity and that of her study participants. In other words, despite my frybread and starvation analogy demonstrating that it is never necessary to pull punches against colonialism, King had to pull punches against colonialism and its principal agents. Or, perhaps she didn’t have to, but simply felt that she should since her study participants were loyal followers of those agents. Miranda, on the other hand, landed all the punches she possibly could.
Still, whether punched or spared, both Kimball and Serra emerged from these books as coloniality personified. In fact, Miranda uses Serra to define colonization: “Father Serra, for instance, wrote in his letters about how much he loved the Indians, and how badly he felt when the Spanish soldiers hurt or killed Indians. But as kind as he seemed, Father Serra never questioned whether the missions should be built or maintained. He never thought to ask what Indians thought of the missions or the priests. He believed that the Spaniard’s way of living was the ONLY way of living. So, in his view, Indians who lived differently had to be made to change—even if it meant killing them, or spreading disease, or denying them human rights. This way of thinking is called ‘colonization.’” In other words, colonization is kind, loving, and, ultimately evil. No wonder it is so hard to write about. Any author who tries deserves 5 stars.

[Chad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alicia Harris—an Assistant Professor of Native American Art History at the University of Oklahoma—wrote that “If the LDS Church really can work for all peoples, we need to more attentively listen, hear, and be represented by a much greater variety of voices. We must more actively prepare a place for dual identities to be touched and nurtured in the culture of the gospel.” Farina King’s Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century (University Press of Kansas, 2023) provides a great opportunity to do just that by listening to the experiences of the Diné dóó Gáamalii (Navajo Latter-day Saints).


Farina King’s work is a study of intersectional identities and the complex results of colonizing efforts by Euro-American Latter-day Saints among the Diné (Navajo) people. It is written as an autoethnography—a collective biography and scholarly discussion of Diné experience. Topics covered include the Southwest Indian Mission, the Indian Student Placement Program, BYU’s efforts to emphasize education for Native Americans, the creation of congregations and stakes in Dinétah, the establishment of Native American congregations outside of Dinétah, and reflections on how different individuals have navigated the sometimes conflicting dual identity of being both Diné and Latter-day Saint. The book builds on a treasure trove of oral history interviews to present an authentic history of these experiences.

It was interesting to see how much variety there is in how Diné members deal with navigating the path of reconciling their identity. As King shows, some have felt that Diné identity and beliefs were mutually exclusive with being an active member of the Church and that they had to choose one or the other. It also seems that Euro-American Church leaders tend to agree with this assessment and encourage acceptance of the Church being paired with assimilation into Euro-American society. Many Diné members, however, find ways to accept aspects of both their traditional Diné beliefs and ways with their membership in the Church. And while the idea of syncretism is uncomfortable to some members of the Church, it is something that is shown to be helpful for members whose culture is a deeply rooted part of their identity.

One thing I appreciated is how much effort Farina King put into showing how assessments of the topics covered don’t fit neatly into good-bad binaries. The Indian Student Placement Program, for example, generally had both positive and negative impacts on people who went through placement rather than one or the other. E.g., separation from family and the lack of learning traditional ways were generally negative experiences, but the education tended to be useful. Experiences with host families varied widely, with some Diné being respected and even essentially becoming part of the family with whom they were staying and others having the experience of being isolated, rejected, or abused. Reality is often far more complex than we like to think of it.

Farina King’s Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century is an insightful and fascinating study into the lived experiences of Diné Latter-day Saints. It is important as the fullest examination of that history yet published. The fact that the author has Diné heritage and a deep understanding of the culture adds to that value. The book also has bearing on understanding the impact of Church leaders—especially Spencer W. Kimball—investing in the conversion and development of Diné individuals in the mid-twentieth century, for both good and ill. Individual Church members looking to understand a broader range of experience within the Church as well as scholars of Native American history (particularly interactions with Christian religions) or twentieth century Mormonism will find this book to be a valuable addition to their library.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This, I think, Is Farina’s most meaningful contribution to scholarship to date. She interviewed around a hundred Navajos who identify or have identified as Latter-day Saint or Mormon, and she draws conclusions on her findings. How do people identify as Diné (Navajo) and Gaamaalii (Mormon)?