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A Place to Call Home: Studying the Indian Placement Program

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A Place to Call Home: Studying the Indian Placement Program A Place to Call Home: Studying the Indian Placement Program Tona J. Hangen LATE MORNING HEAT SHIMMERS OFF the hood of my battered Honda. Noth- ing in sight ahead but more parched fields stretching under an opal sky. A box of cassette tapes in the back seat rattles a staccato soundtrack to my solitary driving. I am near the border between the Navajo and Hopi reservations, where boundaries are forever in dispute. Four miles back I whipped by Coal Mine canyon, which drops off steeply into a dry painted ravine a mile behind the rodeo grounds, and turned off the high- way onto an unpaved road. A group of horses shaded by a water tower shies away as my car approaches. I turn off the dirt road toward the trailer I have been told is there. My rear-view mirror reflects two streams of rusty dust kicking up from my tires, lingering in the dry air, marking my progress across a hill that seems to have no road at all. At last the mo- bile home materializes, with an ellipsis of old tires on the roof and a single strand of barbed wire outlining the dirt lot. Three wildly barking dogs announce my arrival as I mount the steps and knock. The woman, dressed in a white shirt and short blue shorts, barefoot, opens the door. Her hair is parted in the middle and falls long and black nearly to her waist. She eyes me with suspicion. I introduce myself as an anthropology student studying the Mormon Indian Placement program and tell her I am interviewing Navajos who were on Placement, like her- self.1 She says she doesn't wa"t to talk to me, but she invites me in any- way to the neatly kept interior. I note the set of encyclopedias, the house 1. The 1991 fieldwork for this study was funded by Leaders for Manufacturing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the MIT Kelly Fund. Thanks to Jean E. Jackson, James Howe, Heather Lechtman, H. Kent Bowen, Arthur Kaledin, Clarence Bishop, Thom and Bunn Ranger, George P. Lee, and especially Don Hangen. I respect the privacy of my in- formants by withholding their names. 54 Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought plants, the bearskin (with claws still attached) hanging on the wall, the small television tuned to MTV. She tells me it was a mistake for the LDS church to take kids so young for Placement, that she doesn't want to talk with me about it. I lis- ten for about fifteen minutes to why she doesn't want to talk about Place- ment, about the rudeness of being thrust into another world as a ten- year-old girl. Finally, when it seems obvious she does want to talk about her experiences, I offer the consent form; we end up talking for three hours. She remembers the loneliness, feelings of rejection from her natu- ral parents, isolation in public school among whites. She tells me it has taken her entire life to make peace with her own past. She estimates that less than 10 percent of Navajos who went on Placement have stayed ac- tive in the church; as for herself, she believes in the Book of Mormon, she says, but hesitates to lose ties to her older Navajo relatives and their tra- ditional religion if she were to commit to "all those meetings." The pro- gram took her when she was too little to understand what was happening, she says, although she doesn't blame the church or her foster parents, whose intentions she's sure were good. Her questions haunt me. "When people graduated and came back to the reservation," she asks me, "what was supposed to happen to the val- ues they learned? What was supposed to happen to them? I know for me, I have more bad feelings than good; and nobody has the answers to those questions, no one knew how it would come out."2 Our conversation winds down. She shows me a small rug she has just finished weaving, which she intends to sell to her coworkers. I snap her picture, the rug flapping out in front of her chest, and watch her gracefully climb back over the barbed wire. Her flip-flops make a little slapping sound. I start my engine and point my car towards the horizon. PLACING PLACEMENT The Indian Student Placement program was a cross-cultural foster care program administered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints which placed Native American Mormon children into white Mor- mon homes during the school year. From informal arrangements be- tween southern Utah beet farmers and the children of Navajo migrant pickers in the late 1940s grew a program that at its peak in the early 1970s placed close to 5,000 students a year.3 Placement recruited children eight 2. Interview with anonymous informant, Coalmine Mesa, Arizona, 10 Aug. 1991. 3. Neil Birch, "Helen John: The Beginnings of Indian Placement," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (Winter 1985): 119-30; Clarence Bishop, "Indian Placement: A History of the Indian Student Placement Program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints," M.S.W. thesis, University of Utah, 1967; Garth Mangum and Bruce Blumell, The Mormons' War on Poverty: A History of LDS Welfare, 1830-1990 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993), 193-95. Hangen: A Place to Call Home 55 years old and older to live with Mormon families, returned them to their reservations for the summers, and was designed to allow Indian children to "have educational, spiritual, social and culture opportunities in non- Indian community life."4 As such, the program embraced dual goals: edu- cative—teaching young Indians knowledge, skills, and language to better their chances for success in school and career, and acculturative—bringing them in contact with the morals, folkways, and cultural practices of an- other ethnic group with the expectation that the Indian children would benefit from adopting (white) LDS values and behaviors. In many ways, the Indian Placement Program replicated other social- welfare institutions aimed at converting Indians to white, Western modes of thought and belief. But one crucial difference is the unique theological relationship the LDS church has claimed with Native Americans. The Book of Mormon itself was intended for the descendants of its writers, or as most Mormons popularly believe, the indigenous people of this hemi- sphere.5 From its inception, then, Mormonism was intended to be a Na- tive American religion—dedicated in part to restoring the gospel to those whose ancestors embraced it anciently. Following this logic, some believe that Lamanites (a Book of Mormon term that has come to refer to all Na- tive American Indians) will play a central role in preparing for the immi- nent second coming of Christ, and that non-Lamanite members are merely assisting Lamanites in this work. This idea was clearly expressed before 1900 by church president Wilford Woodruff, who wrote: "The La- manites will blossom as the rose on the mountains. It will be a day of God's power among them, and a nation will be filled with the power of God and receive the gospel, and they will go forth and build the New Jerusalem, and we shall help them."6 These kinds of interpretations were commonly espoused as recently as twenty years ago, when Placement seemed to fulfill such prophesies about Native Americans in the church.7 4. LDS Social Services, Indian Student Guide (May 1973), 1. 5. "The Book of Mormon is a record of the forefathers of our western tribes of Indians— by it we learn that our western tribes of Indians are descendants from that Joseph who was sold into Egypt, and that the land of America is a promised land unto them." Joseph Smith, Jr., Documentary History of the Church, 1:315, 4 Jan. 1833, quoted in Latter-day Prophets Speak: Selections from the Sermons and Writings of Church Presidents, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (1947; repr. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1988), 347. 6. journal of Discourses 15:272, cited in LDS Reference Encyclopedia, ed. Melvin K. Brooks (Salt Lake: Bookcraft, 1960), 261-62, emphasis added. 7. Thomas J. Fyans, "The Lamanite Must Rise in Majesty and Power," Ensign 6 (May 1976): 12-13; Jerry Jacobs, "The Church has Divine Mandate to Teach Gospel to Indians," Church News, 20 Nov. 1976; Dean L. Larsen, "Mingled Destinies: The Lamanites and the Lat- ter-day Saints," Ensign 5 (Dec. 1975): 8-13; James D. Mathews, "A Study of the Cultural and Religious Behavior of the Navaho Indians which Caused Animosity, Resistance or Indiffer- ence to the Religious Teachings of the Latter-day Saints," M.R.Ed, thesis, Brigham Young Uni- versity, 1968, 73-77. 56 Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought In a 1975 First Presidency message, Spencer W. Kimball reminded La- manite readers, "You are a chosen people; you have a brilliant future. You might possess all the wealth of this earth, but you would be nothing com- pared to what you can be in this Church."8 Dean L. Larsen described ideal Mormon-Indian relations in the church as a reciprocal arrangement: "in gratitude for the Book of Mormon, Gentile Mormons would 'nourish' and restore [Lamanites] to their promised blessings. Neither group would be able to completely fulfill their destiny without the other.' The view that North American Native Americans would play a cen- tral role in the events of the last days may have been easier to sustain when they constituted the primary "other" to nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century white Mormon settlements, but it becomes harder to make these claims today.
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