“Framing Colonization for Mormon Youth in the Juvenile Instructor“
One of my favorite things about doing art historical research is the moment when you realize that what looked like a simple image at first glance actually has a really fascinating story to tell. Sometimes even the most unassuming images will unfold a surprisingly rich vision of the past if you take a moment to consider them seriously. That’s the case for this engraving—a tiny little picture of a Native American man looking off a clifftop near a waterfall.
American Contact is available from the University of Pennsylvania Press or Amazon.
I wrote about this image for a volume titled American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History, which just came out from the University of Pennsylvania Press. The book’s contributors explore how printed publications have been at the nexus of intercultural encounters throughout the history of the Americas. My chapter takes up this theme in the context of nineteenth-century Utah.
The image was published in the very first edition of the Juvenile Instructor, the first children’s magazine published in the Intermountain West beginning in 1866. Although not initially an official publication of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the magazine was nonetheless a quasi-Mormon production, with church leader George Q. Cannon as its editor. Its audience was almost exclusively Mormon children and their families living in the settlements established by Latter-day Saints beginning in the late 1840s.
If, at first glance, the image looks like a random illustration selected to accompany an article titled “Who are the Indians?” there’s good reason: lacking any capacity to create engraved plates for printing images, Cannon solicited printers back east and in Great Britain for inexpensive second-hand plates that he could use to give the Juvenile Instructor a little pep. Even in the 1860s, common sense suggested that a children’s publication without pictures wasn’t going to succeed.
Despite the fact that Cannon didn’t have much say in the illustration’s details, the image works with—and against—the text that it accompanies in striking ways that reveal the overlapping contexts that came together in encounters between the Juvenile Instructor’s audience and the people the image was meant to represent. In answering the question posed in the title, “Who are the Indians?”, the article recounts contemporaneous Latter-day Saints’ understanding of the Book of Mormon as a history documenting the peopling of America. The illustration Cannon used—a heroic, stoic, classicized Native warrior—aligns well with Mormonism’s unique version of the “noble savage” myth, situating ancient America within a grand biblical narrative. Yet the article’s description of contemporaneous Indigenous People departs markedly from that ostensibly-celebratory position, condemning Native Americans as “filthy, dark and degraded.”
In the tension between text and image, the Juvenile Instructor reproduced the conflicted approach to indigeneity experienced by Mormons of the era. Were Native People savage impediments to civilization, or were they remnants of an ancient biblical America awaiting redemption? That tension was never resolved in nineteenth-century Mormon theology, but, tragically, it was resolved in practice through the violent displacement and forced confinement of Utah’s Native Peoples. Ask your library to get a copy of American Contact if you’re interested in learning more. And the next time you come across a seemingly innocuous illustration, take a moment to look more carefully. The images that we take for granted often convey much more about the worlds in which they were created than we realize.