“Book of Mormon” Stories Ruth Cuthand Retells To Me

“Book of Mormon stories that my teacher tells to me” is the opening line to a children’s hymn sung by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who are often referred to simply as Mormons. When I was a young member of the LDS Church, this was one of the songs I looked forward to singing, because the lyrics were accompanied by hand choreography. Until 2018 LDS church services were three hours long, so any opportunity for movement was exhilarating.​​¹

We began with our hands palms-up, as if we were reading the Book of Mormon, the foundational text of Mormonism. Book of Mormon stories, we would sing, “Are about the Lamanites from ancient history” and—not understanding the hurtfulness of our actions—we would put one hand over our mouths to mimic a war cry and hold two fingers on top of our heads like feathers with the other. “Long ago their fathers came from far across the sea / Givn’ this land if they lived right-eou-sly.” After a few less-racialized theatrics, the verse would end with heads bowed as though in prayer.

Fundamental to Mormonism is the belief that around 600 BCE, a Jewish man fled Jerusalem with his family and relocated to the American continent, where his sons would father two warring tribes: the righteous Nephites and the Lamanites, cursed with brown skin as a result of their annihilation of the former group. The Lamanites were, according to the Book of Mormon, the ancestors of some of North America’s Indigenous population. When Joseph Smith, the founder of the LDS Church, put pen to paper in the 1830s, he believed that part of his life’s work was to tell Indigenous people their own history as it had been revealed to him.

Ruth Cuthand, an artist of Plains Cree, Scottish, and Irish descent, grew up in Cardston, Alberta, the first Canadian town founded by Mormon settlers. Produced over thirty years after she left her childhood home, Cuthand’s Cardston, Alberta 1959-1967 painting series articulates the cultural alienation she felt growing up there as an Indigenous youth. In an interview with curator Jen Budney, Cuthand compared making the series to slaying a dragon with a stick, a courageous act first and foremost for herself.​​² That it was such a daunting task for Cuthand attests to the lasting impact of being exposed to Mormon rhetoric as a child.

Founded in 1887, Cardston remains a Mormon stronghold. Before the temple in Regina was built, my family travelled from Swift Current to Cardston as often as possible to perform ceremonies that can only happen in an LDS temple. As a child, unable to enter the site myself, I understood it as a special place where sacred rituals were performed, and that inside, everything was white and beautiful. In Cuthand’s six paintings, the temple has an imposing presence, not simply because of the weight of its solid granite walls, but because of the belief system it symbolizes as it floats, totemic, in the background. 

Easily identified by its unique design, the Cardston temple is one of only eight temples worldwide that does not feature a golden figure of the angel Moroni atop a spire. It was also the first temple whose design was opened to prominent architects. Harold Burton and Hyrum Pope, disciples of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School, won the bid and took design inspiration from Wright’s Unity Church. Sitting cake-like on the hill, it has always been spoken of as one of the most beautiful temples in Canada. As a child, I once insisted that I would be married in the Cardston temple, because it was just so much prettier than all the others. 

I came across Cuthand’s paintings in 2018 in the vault of the MacKenzie Art Gallery. The garish glow emitted by their Harlequin-green backgrounds confronts the viewer. The image of the temple dominates the top third of each canvas, while in the foreground, Cuthand renders the same nuclear family in the robotically wholesome Dick and Jane aesthetic of the 1950s. Excerpts from the Book of Mormon float on top of each canvas; the passages that have shaped generations of Mormon perspectives on Indigenous peoples are inscribed in gold, referencing the golden plates that the record of the Nephites were supposedly etched onto before they were buried for Smith to uncover centuries later. The passages that Cuthand painstakingly scripts describe the “Lamanites” as cursed, dark, filthy, loathsome, and idle.

Members of the LDS Church are challenged to read the Book of Mormon at least once a year. I was tracking my progress with a sticker chart before I could even really read, and definitely before I had met, or knew I had met, an Indigenous person. Each reading reinforces a binary, the belief that a body is either white and delightsome or dark and loathsome. The verse Cuthand quotes in the sixth painting, 2 Nephi 30:6, was amended in 1982 to read “pure” instead of “white,” but that does little to efface the privileging of whiteness that pervades the text and subsequent attitudes, doctrines, and even aesthetics of the Church. 

In 1947 LDS general authority Spencer W. Kimball unofficially started the LDS Indian Student Placement Program, which would not become an official, federal, or Church-recognized program until 1954. Indigenous families living on reserves throughout the United States and Canada were approached by Mormon missionaries offering access to higher-quality education, on the condition that their children live with a suburban Mormon family for the school year, be baptized into the Mormon faith, and adhere to a Mormon lifestyle. By 2000 when the last student in the program graduated, roughly 50,000 students had participated in the program.

Kimball, who would later become president of the Church, championed the program for its success. Standing from the pulpit at the 1960 General Conference, he showed photos of students enrolled in the program to demonstrate that in keeping with the controversial line of scripture found in 2 Nephi 30:6, their skin had lightened because of membership in the Church. They were becoming white and delightsome—I mean, pure and delightsome. Sadly, because families would volunteer to be part of the Placement Program and participated willingly (if under systemic duress), there has been no official apology by the LDS Church for separating children from their families with the clear goal of assimilating Indigenous participants into an LDS worldview. However, by continuing to abide by doctrines that espouse a belief in an ancient past where whiteness is celebrated synonymously with wellness and goodness, the Mormon faith risks perpetuating racist rhetoric that is inseparable from the gospel of the Book of Mormon.

Cuthand’s series draws attention to the colonial histories I had previously been taught to soft-pedal. By highlighting the trauma LDS teachings inflicted on Indigenous communities, Cuthand reminds us that the harm caused by Mormonism’s safeguarded histories extends beyond Church membership. The ideologies presented in the Book of Mormon are not far away, long ago, or easily erased as the psychological effects caused by generations of racist stereotypes coded in the family values of the LDS faith continue to radiate across the prairie landscape.

The author would like to thank Blair Fornwald for her mentorship.

Jera MacPherson (she/her) is an arts administrator, writer, and artist based in Regina, SK on Treaty 4. She holds a BFA from Concordia University and the role of Member & Volunteer Coordinator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery.

1. As of Oct. 2018, LDS Church services were reduced to two hours long.
2. “The Last Word: Ruth Cuthand in Conversation with Jen Budney” in Ruth Cuthand: Back Talk, ed. Jen Budney (Saskatoon: Mendel Art Gallery, 2012), 99.

This article is published in issue 37.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue