Inhoudsopgave:
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Shrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no âIndianâ legend graced the mount until Mormon settlers conjured itâonce they had displaced the local Indians, the Utes, from their actual landmark, Utah Lake. On Zionâs Mount tells the story of this curious shift. It is a quintessentially American story about the fraught process of making oneself ânativeâ in a strange land. But it is also a complex tale of how cultures confer meaning on the environmentâhow they create homelands. Only in Utah did Euro-American settlers conceive of having a homeland in the Native American senseâan endemic spiritual geography. They called it âZion.â Mormonism, a religion indigenous to the United States, originally embraced Indians as âLamanites,â or spiritual kin. On Zionâs Mount shows how, paradoxically, the Mormons created their homeland at the expense of the local Indiansâand how they expressed their sense of belonging by investing Timpanogos with âIndianâ meaning. This same pattern was repeated across the United States. Jared Farmer reveals how settlers and their descendants (the new natives) bestowed âIndianâ place names and recited pseudo-Indian legends about those placesâcultural acts that still affect the way we think about American Indians and American landscapes. |
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