Abstract
This essay explores how rhetorics of whiteness and settler colonialism operate within tours performed at two official Church Historic Sites—The Mormon Battalion Center and the Mormon Trails Center. Using settler colonialism as a theoretical framework, we offer three examples of how tours given at these sites reify settler colonial logics including object representations of family relationalities, the trading of a woven basket, and an interactive narrated map detailing U.S.-Mormon government and war policies. We present a critical case for how the Church does not just merely erase nor downplay memory, but that white Mormons materially and systematically shape memory by reconfiguring Indigeneity and reorganizing colonial pasts, a rhetorical strategy which recasts Indigenous land and Black bodies as property in order to secure white Mormonism and settler colonial development. To conclude, we make two suggestions for intersectional points of engagement from which we can challenge Indigenous erasure in communication.
