Pedro and Pita Built Peter Priesthood's Mansion and Now They Work the Grounds: Whose Masc Does “the Lamanite” Wear?
2022; Volume: 9; Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/21568030.9.1.01
ISSN2156-8030
Autores Tópico(s)American Political and Social Dynamics
ResumoThe 2001 film The Other Side of Heaven is a dramatization based on John H. Groberg's book In the Eye of the Storm, featuring his time as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS Church) in the Kingdom of Tonga, where he was renamed Kolipoki.1 Kolipoki is a White missionary from the United States who is initially assigned to work together with a Brown Indigenous companion Feki Pōuha. Feki cares for and protects his pālangi (foreign) companion by teaching him the language as well as serving as his guide into local culture and customs. Once Kolipoki becomes fluent enough in the language and culture, he is called to be a district president, instructed to call counselors to assist him, and assigned to build a school. Meanwhile, Feki is given a different assignment, as a laborer, who is to continue serving through construction work. In the film, Feki, in humility, says to Kolipoki in his farewell, "I will build all your chapels, and you will fill them."I was a teenager when this film was released, and even though I am not Tongan, this particular line felt personal because of how it represented a familiar experience with the color-coded division of labor. As Diné/Bilagáana (Navajo/European) historian and Indigenous studies scholar Farina King has stated, "Indigenous Mormons have created and fostered their own communities, which remain as church networks spanning vast distances and generations."2 Likewise, "we" also broadly share experiences as non-White Indigenous "men" in the church. This film depicted the service role with which people who share the same skin color as me are often associated: cast as cleaners, guides, cooks, servers, tailors, construction workers, and so forth. When we are seen, it is most often in service to White church members and leadership, or as their antagonists—be it in church films, meetings, activities, camps, or in unofficial Latter-day Saint popular culture. Feki represented to me the material labor and inequity of being a "poor" and Brown Mormon.According to Māori scholar and theologian Gina Colvin, the LDS Church is shaped by White US patriarchal leadership. She explains, the "mission[s] and international operations continue to operate on a colonial model with an elaborate male hierarchy."3 Colvin states further that there is a need for an Indigenous feminist hermeneutic in order to identify the most vulnerable positions in the church, which would challenge the interests of the prevailing White patriarchal religious polity.4 Where then do non-White Mormon men find themselves in relation to this White religious patriarchy?As long as I obeyed, not challenging the White heteropatriarchy that I could only follow yet never embody, it seemed that as a "Lamanite" man, I could nonetheless claim a "chosen" lineage and its privileges.5 In this article I use Lamanite to refer to Indigenous peoples of the "Americas" and "Polynesia" and their descendants who are also members of the LDS Church, who are believed by Latter-day Saints to be descendants of Book of Mormon peoples.6 I ask, How do Lamanite masculinities in particular form themselves out of a White male supremacist image of god in the church? Pedro is Spanish for Peter. I use it as a metaphor for Brown Mormon masculinity that is non-Anglo/White. This is also symbolic of "Latin American" members of the church who are also Lamanites. Pita is Tongan for Peter. I use it as a metaphor, like Pedro, but to represent Polynesian members of the church who are also Lamanites. Peter Priesthood, likewise, is a metaphor based on the Latter-day Saint popular cultural concept that often refers to zealously devout members of the church. However, here I extend Peter Priesthood's metaphorical use to include White Mormon masculinity and its tie to White supremacist patriarchy. In this sense I use Pedro and Pita as metaphors to explore a Lamanite masculinity that serves White masculinity and patriarchy, which depends upon the exploitation of non-White knowledge, people, belief, and labor. I extend this metaphor to the ontological level as well, where Pita and Pedro's otherness to Peter Priesthood gives him his meaning and power to be. I explore how this originates and extends beyond the church itself at the meta level of coloniality (Western modernity), so I can point to nuanced expressions and manifestations of larger structures of power within the church.I am awkwardly positioned in a manner requiring that I utilize large generalizations at times in order to make my case. I do so in order to gesture to more broadly shared "other" experiences, attempting to avoid being restrained by the existing gaps of what has yet to be documented in academic literature, so that I can engage in some way with an already existent reality. I do not intend to close off work that has yet to be done, to avoid facing limitations by such an approach, nor to propose any universal interpretation, but do so out of necessity in response to generations of Lamanites being contradictorily and messily conflated, flattened, and homogenized together. This is why I state in the title that both Pedro and Pita have built Peter Priesthood's mansion and continue to work his grounds, while also asking, Whose masc(ulinity) does the Lamanite wear? This statement and question gesture to larger power structures and how I see them animated within Latter-day Saint paradigms. I will begin with my positionality, then introduce some ideas that I use in my approach to Mormon studies, and finally explore how coloniality is expressed through formations of Lamanite masculinities.Professor of religion Katherine Ewing observed that the "atheist anthropologist" is tempted to believe when doing religious ethnographic research.7 As a Rose Park (Utah) raised, working class, returned missionary, seminary and institute graduate, temple sealed, believing-yet-questioning Latter-day Saint, I was tempted instead by my ethnographic research experience not to believe. This resulted in a greater embrace of several Indigenous worldviews I had been raised in relation to, including my own ancestral one, which transformed my Mormon worldview. Consequently, as a member who is currently still in "good standing," I have an intimately complex relationship with the church, gospel, and both member and non-member family, friends, colleagues, and comrades. I think of myself not necessarily as a Mormon studies scholar, at least maybe not yet, but rather as a Brown husband, father, son, brother, relative, homie, indebted student, educator, and anthropologist with research relationships that emerged out of being a Latter-day Saint. A person of mixed ancestry who is also Wīnak (diasporic Mayan person from the US), and Mormon. I traverse and embody antagonistic, contradictory, complementary, and shared relations, ideas, and practices. It is from these positions that I inquire and explore Lamanite masculinities by interrogating larger systems of power and how they work through Mormonism's local and global settings, both materially and ontologically. I contend that because the church is a complicit subject within larger systems of power within coloniality, how coloniality appears in the church requires identification in order to be accounted for and investigated.I listened to comments growing up that we, the Lamanites, had not yet fulfilled the prophecy that although we descended from a "fallen lineage," we would one day "blossom as a rose."8 I regularly heard that dark skin was not the "curse" but only the "mark of the curse." This was supposed to somehow make me feel better about reading out loud in a Sunday school or seminary class from the Book of Mormon, that, "he [the Lord] had caused the cursing to come upon [us] . . . because of [our] iniquity . . . as [we] were [once] white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that [we] might not be enticing unto [his] people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon [us]" (2 Nephi 5:21). White historian W. Paul Reeve reveals that Mormons were once racialized as non-White and had to become White, to the point of almost being too White.9 Similarly, White religious studies scholar Max P. Mueller explains that the church is quintessentially an American religion with a distinct yet familiar story of race.10 While Mormons were racialized externally, they too also created different racial formations within themselves. We Lamanites were written into the Latter-day Saint canon, but as descendants of the rebellious, disobedient, lazy, and bloodthirsty sons of Lehi, marked as such with dark skin.11Yet Lamanite men always had potential access to the male-only priesthood, as long as one did not look too closely into our mixed ancestry, particularly those of us racially coded as Brown rather than Black, who nonetheless descend from Lamanite regions with larger Indigenous diasporic African presence. Many of us from such regions also have African ancestors, who were denied priesthood access until 1978.12 As a fallen people, we were constructed as having once been human, yet also conflated with Blackness to indicate our non-human fallen status within an anti-Black logic. However, we are also distinguished from our Afro-Black relatives and ancestors by having had a greater temporal access to priesthood. The dominant scriptural interpretation meant that as a Lamanite man, I was liminally placed in a structurally inferior position, on one hand, but in certain circumstances having some potential authority or spiritual privilege over other others—Afro-Black folks, women, children, and queer people—on the other hand.Chinese-Japanese American historian and global Mormon studies scholar Melissa Inouye points to the significance of borrowing helpful ideas from minority studies and meaningfully engaging in dialogue with world Christianity.13 I would add the necessity to also engage with Black and Africana studies, Native and Indigenous studies, coloniality and decoloniality, and more. As Black feminist scholar bell hooks reminds us, theory and scholarship "is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfils this function only when we ask it to do so."14I did not initially seek out Mormon studies despite my identity, because it did not seem relevant enough for me, so here I am now, advocating for a more purposeful politics of social transformation by learning from these critical intellectual traditions and struggles, in hopes that it might be. My impression with Mormon studies so far is that while the importance of diversity may be acknowledged, the gaping absence of non-White narratives, ideas, and scholars, makes it difficult to offer more meaningful engagement with, responses to, or even criticism of, various important issues. This is because the issues and people I speak of are not equitably positioned in scholarship nor in our larger societies, even if they exist in some way in academic literature. We must confront what already exists beyond a documented academic reality. As Tongan American writer and poet Moana 'Ulu'ave-Hafoka has stated: "Before mainstream Mormonism started noticing young white millennials were no longer in the pews, we were already playing in the streets. We were brought here but not wanted here. Our numbers reflected in semi-annual reporting, our quarters and dimes counted towards the building of Zion . . . but our presence void."15 The void she speaks of is not limited to official church governance; it also extends into scholarship and society. She later shared with me further, "We are here to serve, not as full members or humans, be it in the church, or in the world."16 The invisible, forgotten, ignored, oppressed, and vulnerable are necessary to understand Lamanite masculinities in the church, as well as its relation to a larger context of power.Although there is important work that has been done, such as, but not limited to, works I reference here, there are still massive gaps in terms of race, class, gender, Indigeneity, empire, and colonization that exist in what might constitute the expanding boundaries of Mormon studies. However, herein lies an opportunity to learn from the shortcomings and reactive recalibrations other academic fields and disciplines are experiencing. Instead of waiting for changes to occur that are "too little and too late," we could learn from and with those who have been in the basement, in the field, and elsewhere already.17 When it comes to the topic of Latter-day Saints and masculinity, I feel like I am always asking: Which members of the church are you actually referring to? Whose masculinity are we talking about? The official Latter-day Saint binary construction of gender and sexuality is proclaimed as premortal yet an eternally essentialist identity that pertains to "all human beings."18 What then constitutes one as human? Whose masc does the Lamanite wear?The category of human or man came into being through the violent process of making the modern world, marked in time by Columbus's devastating arrival in the Caribbean.19 Latter-day Saint canonical texts and official statements have praised Columbus as inspired by the "Spirit of God" and even as "an instrument in God's hands," who "found" a "people [who had] dwindled in unbelief until they reached the degradation in which Columbus found them."20 This interpretation of the violent world-making project of Western modernity as divinely inspired also aligns with its accompanying logic of liberal humanism's abstract and gendered notion of rational progress. The modern category of human or man thus emerged out of an ethno-politico-religious understanding and was made into a race-based secular one, which reified in new forms a teleological idea of a necessary universal progress toward Western man and his civilization.21 Western modernity was formed through global projects, including African and Amerindian enslavement, South and East Asian subjugation of labor, and conquest in the Americas, Africa, and Oceania.22 The Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano referred to this system as coloniality, a global matrix of power that reorganized the world through race, marked by a color-coded hierarchy of labor.23 Additionally, Argentinian feminist scholar María Lugones contended that coloniality did not impose precolonial European gender constructions on colonized peoples but instead imposed a new system of gender altogether. She explained, "It introduced many genders and gender itself as a colonial concept and mode of organization of relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways of knowing."24 The heterosexualist colonial gender system is therefore enmeshed within the coloniality of power, "as heterosexuality permeates racialized patriarchal control over production, including knowledge production, and over collective authority."25Cuban-born Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter identified coloniality's overrepresentation of man as the anti-Black imperial global standard of human, where, in the paradigm of western modernity, there is but this one genre of "the human" or "being human."26 She points to the reinvention of man as exclusively human himself, first as Christian man and then as the White secularized Western rational man. This has been and continues to be a social and political process of making god in the image of man, which is to say a White perisex cisgender heterosexual wealthy Christian/rational imperial man with a socially enabled body and mind. Puerto Rican Caribbean studies scholar Nelson Maldonado-Torres similarly explains that modern Western imperial formations of man are defined in both who he is and what he is not, both Christian and not pagan. This constructs a paradigm where "non-European peoples in general . . . are constitutively inferior and . . . therefore they should assume a position of slavery and serfdom."27 Maldonado-Torres adds that in such a paradigm of conquest, the colonized and enslaved are "commanded" to emulate the imperial man's god, or rather the imperial man as god.This results in a foundational contradiction to the dominant global paradigm of the modern world because non-White men can only imitate this god but can never be lord themselves, certainly not as they are. They must be "annihilated or assimilated" into the modern order of man along racial and gendered lines.28 Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) feminist historian Maile Arvin argues that in the settler-colonial context of Hawai'i, Polynesians were believed to have once been White and became feminized exotic possessions of Whiteness. White invading occupants of Hawai'i justified their gendered and racialized possession of land through the possession of its people in this way. Yet, as possessions of Whiteness, Kānaka Maoli, and by extension Polynesians, cannot lay claim to the privileges of Whiteness or being fully human.29Mormon constructions extend out of such possessions of Whiteness, particularly Book of Mormon descendants of now fallen people, who were once "white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome" (2 Nephi 5:21). Peter Priesthood lays claim to Lamanite identity, lands, and destiny in this manner. Lamanite masculinity is both conflated with Whiteness and Blackness, being fallen into Blackness from an imagined pre-Black Whiteness, yet neither White nor Black either. A Lamanite Brownness is thus absorbed by and also remains outside of both and neither White and/nor Black simultaneously. Needing to be saved, and framed as redeemable in spirit only through Whiteness, yet damned, having to be rescued out of a dark and fallen state.African American gender and Black studies scholar Tiffany Lethabo King explains that Amerindian and African encounters and experiences of genocide and slavery not only informed the making of "conquistador humans," but they were also necessary for "man's self-actualization" as such.30 Whereas the act of sin religiously marked the boundary of god's enemy, human-making marked pagans, slaves, and savages as permanently in sin and outside of humanity. Humanism and humanization are thus simultaneously a race-based dehumanizing process. Human-making expressions in Mormon paradigms engage with the Christian idea of original sin or fault being inherently a human condition. The need for infants to be baptized is overturned in Mormonism however, yet the natural man emerges as "the enemy to god" (Mosiah 3:19). How can one be and the other not? If the natural man is enemy to god, then it is only possible if there is already a fallen state of the world since the fall of Adam, thus requiring salvation and redemption. If a baby is innocent in a Mormon paradigm, then does one learn to be natural? If so, then one could learn not to be natural, which means it is not natural or inherent but rather socially and culturally learned. However, if it is natural, and one continues to combat it, then one is born fallen. These contradictions are strategically mediated, avoided, and obscured through other kinds of men, such as the liminal Lamanite. Lamanite masculinity stands in for Lamanite people, like White man stands in for humanity, thus Pedro and Pita remain inferior to Peter Priesthood yet privileged over gender-diverse Lamanites and women. If Peter Priesthood metaphorically represents (White supremacist capitalist imperial patriarchal) human men in the church who are born innocent, in comparison to Pedro and Pita who represent other men who are fallen, then both conditions can be met. In this way the claim of there being innocent infants and god's enemy (the natural man) is reconciled.Chickasaw gender studies and English scholar Jodi Byrd's concept of "Indianness," which is the formation given to Amerindians through European colonization that marks us as permanent enemy of White land occupation and empire, applies to the "natural man" concept as well.31 The Lamanite fused with the natural man is, in a way, a Mormon equivalent of "Indianness." The Brown Lamanite is ambiguously synonymous with the embodiment of natural man because he must be saved from an inherent condition of being "fallen with false traditions" from "his fathers."32 The White Mormon man, Peter Priesthood, on the other hand, truly descends from a White Adam because he is not judged for his ancestors' transgressions, and he does not require a blossoming redemption as a people. Peter Priesthood also claims plausible deniability as an escape from his accountability because he is not permanently natural. Instead, he is only natural when he temporarily falls. Peter Priesthood restored the required authority of saving and exalting power that he gives to other men when they are worthy, which he measures in terms of assimilation. Thus he governs and administers as one who can sin and be pure simultaneously, while non-White men need to be distinctly administered to, saved, and disciplined in order to become redeemed men.Pita and Pedro, as markers of Lamanite masculinity, serve as the required enemy of god/man, creating a necessary buffer to and distraction from Peter Priesthood, while also giving him meaning and power. They ontologically built his mansion and continue to work his grounds, believing that they need Peter, yet Peter Priesthood's need for them is veiled. While Lamanite masculinities are subjugated, conflated across difference, and narrowly defined, they are still marginally visible as opposed to their wives, sisters, and gender-diverse relations to whom they can then administer to when worthy, under Peter Priesthood's direction and oversight. Pedro and Pita, as Lamanite men, make and give meaning to Peter Priesthood as "man" because they represent the natural in "natural man": the reason one falters, the fallen, the possibility that allows for worthy men to be so.While the LDS Church did not initially or exclusively invent heteropatriarchy, race, or empire, it has been informed by and entangled with them, as both a willing, and apprehensive participant in different contexts and moments. Lamanite masculinities must be explored at the structural level, which I have attempted to signal toward, in order to better understand the networks of Mormon masculinities' complicated cohesion and divergence throughout the globe. Lamanite masculinities serve as both a physical geographic and ontological category of non-men or other kinds of men who are promised redemption through annihilation, which gives meaning to White male supremacy's formations of man within the church. The fallen Lamanite masculinity is a necessary condition for man's existence as the ontological antagonism that gives meaning to Peter Priesthood's self-proclaimed purity and righteousness as master leader, self-imbued with the exclusive authority and privilege of being human. There are surely much more nuanced specific settings and contexts of Mormon masculinities around the world. I am suggesting that those are better understood in relation to not only the White male Mormon masculinity of Peter Priesthood, but also to his subjects, Pedro and Pita's Brown liminal Lamanite masculinity, who alongside other racialized and gendered formations not specifically interrogated here, gives normative Latter-day Saint masculinity its meaning.Mālō 'Aupito and Sib'alaj Maltyox to Heather Louise Hernandez, 'Inoke Hafoka, S. Ata Siulua, Moana 'Ulu'ave-Hafoka, Lavinia 'Ulu'ave, Tino Díaz, Lana Lopesi, and Anisha Sankar for their critical feedback, insights, and intellectual inspirations. Thank you to Quincy D. Newell and Benjamin E. Park for their editorial guidance.
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