A Chosen People, a Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawai'i
Hokulani K. Aikau
Abstract
Christianity figured prominently in the imperial and colonial exploitation and dispossession of indigenous peoples worldwide, yet many indigenous people embrace Christian faith as part of their cultural and ethnic identities. This book gets to the heart of this contradiction by exploring how Native Hawaiian members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (more commonly known as Mormons) understand and negotiate their place in this quintessentially American religion. Mormon missionaries arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1850, a mere twenty years after Joseph Smith founded the Church. This book t ... More
Christianity figured prominently in the imperial and colonial exploitation and dispossession of indigenous peoples worldwide, yet many indigenous people embrace Christian faith as part of their cultural and ethnic identities. This book gets to the heart of this contradiction by exploring how Native Hawaiian members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (more commonly known as Mormons) understand and negotiate their place in this quintessentially American religion. Mormon missionaries arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1850, a mere twenty years after Joseph Smith founded the Church. This book traces how Native Hawaiians became integrated into the religious doctrine of the Church as a “chosen people”—even at a time when exclusionary racial policies regarding black members of the Church were being codified. The book shows how Hawaiians and other Polynesian saints came to be considered chosen and how they were able to use their venerated status toward their own spiritual, cultural, and pragmatic ends.
Keywords:
Christianity,
indigenous peoples,
Mormons,
American religion,
Hawaiʻi,
Joseph Smith,
Native Hawaiians
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816674619 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816674619.001.0001 |
