Professor Peter Coviello

They were wards.

Wow.

And this is 1889.

This is the time of wounded knee, man.

Yeah.

Like Woodruff is not wrong.

To think that while we are a dependent or ward of the state, we are fit to be murdered.

Interesting.

We know what that looks like.

So those are the stakes.

Yeah.

Those are the stakes of renouncing polygamy, which is, of course, an enormous, hugely disruptive act.

You've been told for however many years, however many decades, that this is an essential part of the theology of your religion, which you've been willing to stake your life on.

Interesting.

And then it's renounced.

I'm sorry.

A fantastic, and this is one of the things that I try to write about in my book.

There's an environmental historian named Jared Farmer, I think writes very well, an intensely fraught identification with native people whose lands they, the Mormons, feel they are entitled to.

who they will attempt to colonize and bio-philanthropize, one could say, but whom they also understand to be fellow refugees from an imperial America.

but an imperial America that they also want to be a part of because they want to be imperialists.