3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
Religion and Race: Evaluating Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (Room 101)
Panel: Brad Westwood (chair), David Rich Lewis, Michael H. MacKay, Paul Reeve, and LaShawn Williams-Schultz
Diversity and Sport (Room 102)
Joseph Soderberg: Wicket Mormons and Cricket Gentiles: Cultural Imperialism in Utah’s Sporting Past
Intermountain Cricket League Exhibition
Religious and Cultural Difference (Room 104)
Will Bagley (chair)
Isaiah Jones: The Gentile Stays in Cache Valley
Craig L. Foster and Newell G. Bringhurst: Two Changing Faces of Fundamentalist Mormonism: Rulon and Warren Jeffs
Native-White Interaction in Nineteenth-Century Utah (Room 105)
David Grua (chair)
Wendy Simmons Johnson: An Underground Store, the Skull Valley Goshute, and Red Ink: Contact Period in Rush Valley
Hadyn B. Call: Kidnapped and Purchased: Piecing Together the Story of Ruth Piede Call Davids—a Paiute Indian
Jim Keyes: Showdown in the canyons: History of interaction between early cattle ranchers and Native Americans in southeastern Utah.
Exploring Utah’s Multicultural Past through Oral History (Suite A)
Panel:
Jodi Graham (chair)
Randy Williams: Cache Valley Refugee Voices
Deborah M. George: New Zion Community Advocates, Inc.
Sarah Langsdon Singh
Religion and Race: Evaluating Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for WhitenessPanel AbstractIn Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness, Paul Reeve explores nineteenth-century representations of Mormonism as a marginalized group physically different from the white Protestant majority. Reeve additionally chronicles Mormonism’s controversial history of race and blackness. Panelists will take a critical look at Reeve’s arguments within the context of race and religion in Utah and the United States.ModeratorBrad Westwood, Director of the Utah Division of State HistoryPanelists
David Rich Lewis, Professor of History at Utah State University
Paul Reeve, Associate Professor of History at University of Utah. His Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness was published by the Oxford University Press.
Jacob Rugh, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Brigham Young University
LaShawn Williams-Schultz teaches African-American culture at Salt Lake Community College
Diversity and SportJoseph Soderberg AbstractBritish immigrants brought the “English sport” of cricket to Utah in the mid 1850s. The fortunes of cricket waxed and waned in Utah as it did in other parts of America. Organized in the 1860s and popularized in the 1870s, by the 1880s cricket was competing fiercely for players and fans with baseball and other emerging sports. Nevertheless cricket only endured up to the time of the Great War, a victim of surging American nationalism and a widening field of sport. The history of cricket in Utah highlights some national trends as well as a few unique to Utah.Joseph Soderberg BioJoseph Soderberg has a bachelor’s degree in history from Utah State University and a Certificate of International Relations. He lived in Wales for a year and studied at the University of Wales at Swansea. Soderberg has worked in the on-demand publishing business and done freelance genealogical and historical research. He has lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Guangzhou, China, while teaching English in those locations. He has presented papers on Utah, American, and Mormon history. He is currently working with John Peterson as his research assistant on his forthcoming book “Brigham’s Bastion,” a history of Pipe Spring National Monument.
Religious and Cultural DifferenceIsaiah Jones AbstractJ. Simmonds’s volume, The Gentile Comes to Cache Valley (1976),was the last major work on non-Mormons in Cache Valley, Utah. Much has happened since then. What happened to those Gentiles who stayed in Cache Valley in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? The purpose of this paper is to bring Cache Valley and the state of Utah up to date on its non-Mormon history by picking up where Simmonds left off. Like Simmonds, Jones uses the oral and written tradition of Cache Valley. He supports his claims with the written record of non-Mormons in Cache Valley as well.Isaiah Jones BioIn his senior year of high school, Jones was offered a full-ride scholarship to play football at Colorado Mesa University, where he played for a year before transferring to play football at USU. During his junior year of college, he took a class from Dr. Phil Barlow, where, he found his new passion in theology, history, and religious studies. His research interest includes infant baptism, race, African religion, and Eastern Orthodoxy. His thesis is titled “The Mystical Union of Infant Baptism: How Baptist Contributed to the Idea of Race by Their Rejection of Infant Baptism.”Newell G. Bringhurst Abstract
This paper examines the metamorphosis of Rulon Timpson Jeffs from a devout, active member of the LDS Church to his emergence as Prophet-President of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—most remembered as the father of the notorious Warren Jeffs. Rulon Jeffs rose through the FLDS ranks thanks to his acute organizational and business skills, extreme intelligence, and strong commitment to the practice of plural marriage. This presentation will explore Rulon Jeffs’s activities prior to taking over leadership of the FLDS Church, both as an emerging church leader and highly successful businessman—such qualities enabling him to seize control of the sect in 1986.
Craig Foster Abstract
In 2011 Warren Steed Jeffs, the FLDS prophet-president, was sentenced to life in prison plus twenty years for sexually assaulting two underaged girls. Experts and a curious viewing audience alike questioned if this would finally end Jeffs’ power and control over members of the FLDS church. This paper will examine Warren Jeffs’s continued control of the FLDS, discuss the reasons why he is able to exert such control, and analyze the impact on the FLDS. The paper is based on study of FLDS literature, including Jeffs’s claimed revelations, as well as interviews with members of Jeffs’s own family, former FLDS leaders, and other members of Hildale and Colorado City.
Native-White Interaction in Nineteenth-Century UtahWendy Johnson AbstractFrom the late 1860s to 1914, there was a strange and interesting underground store in Rush Valley (Tooele County, Utah) owned and operated by the William Ajax family. Settlers and local Native Americans would come to the store to browse through the large quantity of merchandise. Just west of the Ajax Store was a protohistoric site. Histories of the area indicate that Goshutes from Skull Valley would come to the Ajax Store to trade pine nuts and gleaned wool for manufactured goods, as well as beg for food. The Ajax Store and protohistoric site, along with local histories, combine to tell a story of the early Mormon settler relations with the local Skull Valley Goshute Tribe.Hadyn B. Call AbstractHistorically, slavery has been an insidious global phenomenon whereby human beings have been exploited for free labor and sex. Utah Territory, no stranger to its own versions of slavery, has its story. Like many marginalized groups, the narratives of slaves in Utah are few. Ruth, a Paiute Indian, is one such case. While information on her life’s experiences is scarce, her story nevertheless merits attention. This presentation will open up a discussion on historical and contemporary controversial issues that Ruth’s story presents—interracial marriage, interpretation of Mormon doctrine, race, class, gender, ethnicity, and culture.Hadyn B. Call Bio
Hadyn B. Call is a doctoral student at Utah State University pursing a Ph.D. in Education, specializing in Curriculum and Instruction with an emphasis in Social Studies and Instructional Leadership. He has a B.A. in History and an M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction from Weber State University and an M.A. in History from Utah State University. He is also a full time educator for Davis School District and teaches AP U.S. Government and Politics, U.S. History, and Spanish at Viewmont High School in Bountiful, Utah. His research interests involve all aspects of social studies, especially history and history teaching.
Jim Keyes Abstract
Conflict between differing cultures is as old as the world itself. Several factors contributed to the problems between American Indian populations and early cattle ranchers in southeastern Utah. The elephant in the room is obviously the encroachment of outsiders on lands the local tribes considered their own. Combined with this, the 19th century attitude of Indians being considered second class citizens and the European ideas of land use emboldened cattle grazers to take what they wanted. It seemed to both Indians and whites the only answer to the conflict was war. The sometimes bloody struggle lasted for almost 50 years.
Jim Keyes Bio
Jim Keyes is an Associate Professor at Utah State University. He works as a Range/Animal Scientist in southeastern Utah, including the Navajo Reservation. Jim served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints among the Navajo People. As a student at USU he worked seven years as an interpreter for the USU Navajo Sheep Project. He received his current assignment with USU due to his bilingual abilities. He and his wife Linda own Keyes Cattle Company. They have been breeding purebred Red Angus cattle in Utah’s canyon country for the past 30 years.
Exploring Utah’s Multicultural Post through Oral History Sarah Singh AbstractTwenty-fifth Street in Ogden was once known around the country. It was rumored that the street was too rough for even Al Capone. Special Collections took the opportunity to document the history of the vibrant street. Using history student interns, we collected 50 oral history interviews of people who worked and lived on the street from World War II on. These are just some of the stories gathered.Sarah Singh BioSarah Singh is the Associate Curator of Special Collections at Weber State University Stewart Library. She holds Masters Degrees from Utah State University and San Jose State University. She has authored three books on the history of Ogden. She has worked on collecting oral histories documenting the history of Ogden’s notorious 25th Street and immigrant communities.Randy Williams Abstract
Cache Valley, Utah is the home of Burmese Muslim, Karen, and Eritrean refugees. Documenting and preserving their stories is an important goal of Utah State University’s Fife Folklore Archives (FFA). In May 2015, USU’s FFA and Folklore Program, with help from the Karen community, hosted a Library of Congress Field School for Cultural Documentation: “Voices: Refugees in Cache Valley.” Working with community scholars, field school students worked to document Cache Valley’s recent refugee communities, creating a digital collection of the voices and an online exhibit.
Randy Williams Bio
Randy Williams is Fife Folklore Archives Curator and oral history specialist at Utah State University’s Special Collections & Archives. Along with managing the world-renowned Fife Folklore Archives, she directs USU’s community-based fieldwork projects, bringing the voice of diverse peoples from the Inter-Mountain West into the Archives. With colleague Professor Lisa Gabbert, she hosted/taught the 2015 USU/Library of Congress Field School: “Voices: Refugees in Cache Valley.” Along with Elisaida Mendez, Williams was honored with a 2009 Human Ties Award from the Utah Humanities Council for the Latino/Latina Voices Project. She is the Archival Liaison for the American Folklore Society.
Deborah M. George Abstract
The New Zion Community Advocates, Inc. (NZCA) first project focused on the heritage preservation component of their mission statement. Through a grant from the Utah Humanities Council/Utah State History and monetary/in-kind services from Weber State University, Stewart Library-Special Collections, we are able to share the experiences of African American/Black community members over 80 years old who have contributed to the history of Ogden city through armed services, work, social life, church, NAACP and educational systems in an environment where their culture was not predominant.
Deborah M. George Bio
Deborah M. George worked for the Internal Revenue Service in Compliance and Human Resources holding clerical, tax examiner, analyst, and management positions. After 30 years of service, she retired as an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Specialist certified in facilitation and mediation. Currently, she is the chair of the New Zion Community Advocates, Inc., a non-profit grassroots group, whose mission statement is to innovate, advance, and sustain community programs for affordable housing, social integration, youth development, heritage preservation and quality of life.
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