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Native People in the LDS
Church
When I began doing the
research for the Newberry people, I came up against a lot of ambivalence
regarding their ethnicity.
I love a good challenge and I love the people in my family greatly for
putting me up to this challenge. Many have said,
"prove it". With this site I have attempted to do just
that.
However, even today, many
of the family have tried to suppress the information, or have conveniently
decided to ignore
it - or worse yet - vote it out of existence. Their logic is, if it
can't be documented with census or other records, it isn't true.
My response to this is, there were no records before 1790. At that
period in history, Native
people were struggling to
acculturate themselves in order to survive; so there won't be any record,
unless they stayed with a tribal group. Their tribal
groups split off and intermarried with other tribes and white folks. Few
people were counted on the federal tribal lists before
the 1830's. It wasn't until our forefather's rallied to the battle
cry of "Manifest Destiny" that settlers cared who the Indians
were and where they lived.
It is sad, in a day and age where we claim to have the utmost
tolerance toward all people, we must admit many of our
forbearers weren't terribly enlightened to cultural diversity. To protect
themselves, often native people claimed to be white.
It is analogous to seeing a large, vicious dog chasing you. Wouldn't
you run up a tree and hide in the branches? In essence,
this is what our family did to protect themselves. Dressing, living and
working as white men they protected themselves from
loosing their families, but in the same stroke lost some of their former
identity.
Joseph Smith's church began with the express tenet of returning the Book
of Mormon to the Native people. That mission
changed dramatically when Brigham Young took the Saints to the
Great Basin
.
There WERE native people who were LDS. They dressed
after the fashion of European settlers, but their native roots
began on the Atlantic seaboard, up and down the continent. Our
Newberry family was among those, perhaps not considered
full blood by custom, but Native American all the same. They became
Yankees in the fullest sense of the word, and Christianized
long before Joseph Smith received the messages of Angel Moroni.
Perhaps it was because of tribal blood the attraction to the
Church was strong; or perhaps they felt a greater sense of protection
enfolded in the revivalist theology of the charismatic
Joseph Smith. A theology that expressly mentioned them and their
ancestors. How uncommon that must have felt to them
after 150 years of hearing that they were not good enough the way they
were.
There are quite a few
LDS historians who have proven to me the truth of the statement about LDS
members who were of
native descent in the 1830's. I would like to personally thank, Dr.
Ronald Walker of B.Y.U., and Dr. Lori Elaine Taylor
of SUNY for their enlightened work on this subject.
People like Alpheus Cutler, (Cutlerites) who were dedicated to the ideas
expressed by Joseph Smith, continued his work
among the native people when he was asked to cease and desist.
Finding information on those people and their ethnicity
has given me more proof. Many of his followers were "N.Y.
gentlemen farmers" who also were from native families. Dr.
Danny Jorgensen of University of South Florida has given me a great deal
of support in learning about this group.
The fact remains that
there were a lot of people who joined the LDS Church in Ohio, who were to
some degree Native
American. The fact remains that Ohio was one of the areas where the N.E.
tribes fled when pushed inland. When Joseph
Smith arrived in Ohio in the late 1820's, most of the tribes had been
pushed further west, but the Wyandot tribe remained
rooted in Sandusky, Ohio, which is on the shore of Lake Erie, not
far from Brownhelm, Ohio. The Mormons walked among
the native people wherever they went, and ministered to them when the ear
of the government was out of range. The Indian
agents for the government tried to keep a tight rein on the native
people and with whom they commiserated, for historically
the Mormons were almost as persecuted as they were.
When the Saints arrived in Missouri in 1832, they went there with the idea
that they would live among their Indian brothers,
and together they would inherit the earth and all her riches at trumpet
call of the millennium. This idea heightened the tensions
among the Missouri settlers who already were upon the land,
fomenting the coming disaster for the church. At that time Joseph
Smith reacted, by telling the people to keep their future plans close to
the vest. He also requested that no one write about
such plans, or the people involved - in their letters home, or in their
journals. Most people followed this scorched discipline
to the letter, so there is little written in the LDS history books.
Coupled with the fact that many of the Church records were
destroyed when the Saints were driven from Far West Missouri in
1838, it is not surprising so little first hand information
remains. With scholars such as those listed above, we do get the
slightest, though gratifying peephole back to the past.
I for one commend them for the perseverance and dedication to making
the richness of history shine through for all.
The following is a growing list of those people who were early adherents
of the LDS Church who were known to have been
descended from the native people. Lewis
Denna (Iroquois), Charles Bird (Kickapoo or Kaw), The Averett Brothers,
William McClellin (Cherokee), Edward Whiteseye, Moses Otis, George
and Joseph Herring (Mohawk), Peter Cooper,
James Newberry and Mary Newberry (Cherokee), Elizabeth Fairchild
(Mohawk), Chauncey Whiting, James Brown
(Cherokee), Jean Baptist (Pottawattamie), and George John Wixon
(Wampanoag).
Other possible surnames yet to be proved, but show up in native
genealogies are: Haskins, Beebe, Rose, Dodge, Stephens,
and others.
Prominent names who served as missionaries to
the Indians were, Jonathan Dunham, Charles Shumway, Lyman Wight,
George Miller, Alpheus Cutler, Cyrus Daniels, Daniel Spencer, Brigham
Young, James Emmett, Oliver Cowdery, Parley
Pratt and others.
The research continues on this
front. If anyone can help with other EARLY LDS members who
were native people,
I would enjoy hearing from you at [email protected]
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