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Mormon Stories Podcast

457: The LDS Indian Placement Program Part 2

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.55.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2014

⏱️ 93 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Indian Placement Program was a program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1947 to 2000, in which LDS Native American students were placed in LDS foster homes during the school year, where they would attend public schools and become assimilated into American culture. The program was initially developed to respond to the needs of Navajo teenagers and even younger children who were coming to parts of Utah to work. It was felt it would be better for them to get an education. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the Indian Placement Program came under criticism. Supporters believed that exposure to white culture was beneficial to Native American children, and that it improved educational and economic opportunities, while critics believed the program undermined the children’s Native American identity. In 2000 the last student graduated from the program, though the program never was officially discontinued. Matthew Garrett is currently an associate professor of history at Bakersfield College in California, teaching United States, California, and Native American Indian history courses. His dissertation and forthcoming book manuscript explore the LDS Indian Placement Program. He is also a devoted husband and the father of three adorable little girls.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Music

0:07.0

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0:21.0

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0:28.0

All right, well, so thank you for those of us who were able to listen to the first hour. We're talking with Matthew Garrett. He is an associate professor of history at Bakersfield College in California.

0:41.0

He is a PhD expert in Native American history, but also did his dissertation on the LDS Indian Placement Program. If you didn't get a chance to listen to the first hour, we encourage you to do so.

0:54.0

Now we're going to kind of, you know, we talked about the history of the program. Now we're going to talk what I'd like to do is kind of shift a little bit and talk about how this program affected lives.

1:09.0

And I guess the two groups that I want to focus on at least at first are how it affected, you know, the Native Americans, how it affected their individual identities, what are the positive and the negative aspects of how this affected their culture.

1:27.0

But also want to also want to dig into how it affected, you know, the families that that hosted many of these Native Americans, there are lots of things said positively, negatively about those experiences.

1:43.0

And then maybe we'll talk about the programs ultimately undoing how it how it evaporated and kind of where the church stands today with laymenites and with Native Americans. How does that sound?

1:59.0

Great. And I want to talk about the decline that, you know, how the program was actually dismantled.

2:05.0

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay. So I'll start with this Matthew. You know, I try and tell people, it's a really serious thing to go to an impoverished area. You know, I guess I guess I'll back up when I, when I, one of my heroes is Malcolm X.

2:26.0

He is a civil rights leader in the 50s and 60s who kind of was doing the same work that Martin Luther King was doing.

2:35.0

But, you know, what we, you know, what many people don't know about Malcolm X and I strongly recommend, you know, hit the book by, is it Haley?

2:46.0

But, but also the movie that Spike Lee produced that tells the story of Malcolm X, but he was raised not as Malcolm X, but as Malcolm little.

2:56.0

That was his, what he called his slave name. And what was really important to him was that, that was that, you know, African Americans get in touch with their history, with their culture, with their heritage.

3:08.0

Because all these, all these Africans were brought over on slave boats sold stripped of their identity, stripped of their language, stripped of their names, and had to assimilate into American culture.

3:25.0

And as the civil rights movement was happening in the 50s and 60s in the United States, one of the things that the kind of the black power movements said was, you know, yes, there's a lot of poverty and the lack of education among blacks.

3:42.0

Of course, we were held as slaves for, you know, over a century or two. And, and we've been, we've been stripped of our culture and identity.

3:52.0

So, well, the reason why Malcolm X has the name Malcolm X is because he, he didn't know what his original name was when his ancestors were brought over.

4:02.0

So the X sort of exed out his slave name, which was little or his, you know, white name that was given to him by some master, you know, years before, you know, generations before him.

4:15.0

But it also represented a holding spot for whatever his actual original name was, which he didn't have anymore. But, but during this time, there was this whole movement of blacks going back to Africa, of figuring out about their ancestry of learning tribal dances.

4:29.0

And, and because there was this feeling like you can't, you can't be strong and move forward as a people, as a culture, unless you know where you came from. And identity is really woven into that.

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