Professor Peter Coviello

Once again, I will say the pretext for a lot of that decimation was not land theft.

It was religion and a religion that deranged people sexually.

The Native peoples, they didn't live in coupled households.

They didn't have houses.

They needed to be disciplined into that.

This is how the native ill-fittedness for American life was again and again spoken, which of course had great resonances for the Mormons and the Mormons' polygamousness.

They knew what extermination looked like.

Yeah.

It was very near them.

And so this is the context in which at the end of the century, they end up renouncing polygamy as a condition to gain statehood.

And with it, the protections and sovereignty that come with statehood.

The federal government threatened to murder everyone.

And that had a pretty normalizing effect.

I'll read you a little passage in a letter Woodruff wrote, which is, for me, incredibly revealing.

He writes this letter in 1889 to a friend of his named William Ackerman.

He says, we are now, politically speaking,

the dependent,

or ward of the United States.

But in a state capacity, we should be freed from such dependency and would possess the powers and independence of a sovereign state.

A dependent or ward, what's striking to me about that is that is exactly, as you know, that is exactly the language with which the state described the relation of native tribes to the federal government.