This is an essay that I wrote for a class.

A Salt Lake Stolen, A Mourning Misappropriated: Intersections of Mormonism and Colonialism through Refuge by Terry Tempest-Williams

March 2021

Terry Tempest-Williams’s nature-memoir turned grief-piece Refuge creates a dynamic ecosystem of its own. It weaves together the rising of Great Salt Lake, Williams’s career as a naturalist and divine connection to birds and nature, and the final years of her mother’s life over a cancer resurgence. As stand-alone as the rising of the lake feels, Williams connects the flooding of the adjoining bird refuge and her mother’s declining health together with spider silk – that is to say, with elegance and profound strength. However, an overarching theme of Williams, her mother, the lake, and even the birds themselves, casts a shadow over Refuge that chills the otherwise warm and layered piece – Mormonism and the legacy of Brigham Young. Williams’s sense of place is overwhelmingly corrupted by the colonizing insensitivity of Mormon doctrine, which is reflected through her appropriative connection to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and Utah throughout her novel.

Williams binds her sense of family to her sense of place before the reader even has the chance to guess otherwise. “As a people and as a family, we have a sense of history,” she reflects, “And our history is tied to land” (Williams 14). Intimately aware of her genealogy and family, Williams goes further to include the nature around her as part of that family, describing the birds themselves as relatives (Williams 19). This feeling fosters a familiarity and belonging with the land and the birds that may extend further than a relatively simple belonging. In this, Williams not only announces her belonging with the birds, but a sense of the birds belonging with her as well. She even goes as far to say that she “could not separate the Bird Refuge from [her] family” (Williams 40). This connection to the land, and this extreme sense of grief over the flooding of the refuge, is then justified in comparability to the grief over a human family member later in the novel.

How does Williams’s equation of family and nature manifest? Nearly every emotion and aspect that Williams shares with the matters of her family is one she shares with the birds, whether that is helplessness, perseverance, or intense spirituality: Williams prays to the birds and believes in them to carry her emotions and intentions (Williams 149), and yet, the doctrine of Mormonism causes even the blessing from a woman to be something done in secret. The connection of quiet rebellion between praying to the birds and blessing her mother ties Williams’s sense of family and sense of place together across the avenue of Mormonism and spirituality. Mormonism also drives the B-plot of the rise of Salt Lake; Throughout the novel, Mormon forces are in control of the rise management strategies. They call prayer and disperse congregation during floods (Williams 45).

But, Mormonism isn’t all about prayer and togetherness. An article by PBS describing the “Great Mormon Migration” retells that, following the murder of Joseph Smith, a certain Brigham Young – an influencer among Latter-Day Saints – organized a wagon-train migration of persecuted Mormons westward from Illinois (PBS). While this would eventually lead to apparent sanctuary of Mormons in the then-called Utah Territory, this also led to the horrific colonization of people indigenous to the area. With Mormon settling came a sense of Mormon ownership, causing the seizing of Indigenous children and placing them in Mormon schools, in groups of up to 5,000 less than a decade ago (Boxer 2015). This suggests within a Mormon identity – especially one that Williams grew up with – a hierarchical and ideological authority over Indigenous peoples and ideas. When Brigham Young said “This is the right place” (PBS) he may have indicated that “This is our place”. White, Mormon people assumed positions of authority over Indigenous affairs, Indigenous education, and ultimately settled without consent on Indigenous land. Where lie the lines between connection, identity, and ownership?

For much of America, they may overlap severely. For perspectives outside of capitalism and colonization, they may have implicit boundaries from one another. From a Mormon perspective, identity from and with the land extends to an ownership of the peoples and ideas supported by the land before they came.

As tempting as it is to write her off as such for the sake of cut-and-dry antagonism, Williams isn’t a cut-and-dry complacent Mormon woman, and her well-intentioned and deeply personal actions are heavily nuanced by her background in the Church. Williams’s feminism – radical in the eyes of a heavily patriarchal tradition – is articulated softly through the power she feels with her mother and grandmother, but explicitly in “Pintails, Mallards, and Teals”. She describes the voice of the Holy Ghost – the bestower of the “still, small voice” that guided Brigham Young to Utah – as female, and how she challenges the Godhead with the Motherbody in a bold passage on Mormon femininity (Williams 241). Yet, this feminism and rebellion is still inherently Mormon. The damage done by a life spent in the Church seeps through the cracks of an actively healing identity. Though Williams at times rebels from the Mormon practices she grew up with, she continues her ingrained patterns in her connection to nature. It is no wonder how closely Williams identifies with migratory birds as a Mormon person. Migratory birds have a path set into them through forces still not completely known to science; A holiness within them, perhaps, that drives their wingbeats intuitively, could be extricated by the right people with the right upbringing. As persecution did to the Mormons, inhospitable conditions follow the birds as they follow their paths to sanctuary. Quite literally, this applies to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, a sanctuary specifically for air travelers fleeing poor weather. Williams observes the trials and triumphs of the lives of migratory birds on the refuge, from corpses to creation. Ideologically, the concept of sanctuary connects Williams and the birds. In practicality,

Mormonism additionally fosters this connection. If not for the desert pumping project, the damage to the bird refuge would have been much more severe, if not permanent. Mormonism and Mormon ideals are the foundation of Williams’s concept of sanctuary, and ultimately her faith in place-space belonging.

In what appear on the surface as intensely emotional expressions of grief bolstered by dependence on land and belonging following Williams’s mother’s death, Williams applies her sense of place in a way significantly influenced by the mindset of colonizers. In the chapter “Birds-of-Paradise”, Williams claims a site of preserved cave art as her “den of healing” (Williams 237), even describing the place as holy, within her perspective of God being ever-present, especially in nature. Though she does not claim this place exclusively as hers, she frames it as something she carries, without regard to people who may still recognize it as theirs. Is it not within her bounds to recognize herself as a visitor, if not an invader, in a place of someone else’s story? Or does it feel within her reach, in fact, to claim a place her people stole for her own grief? After establishing her place and healing within the cave, Williams references the migration of her family to Utah. This draws the connection that in her time of turmoil and isolation, she settled in this sanctuary, this place of healing – enveloped in someone else’s art. It is not Williams’s appreciation of the art and atmosphere that causes concern, but it is the emotional capitalization off of a stolen place that casts a chilling shadow over her grief.

The tradition from which Williams writes largely encourages these patterns and holds no standard to write in ways that think critically about Indigenous needs and issues. Gilbert White, a renowned English naturalist born in 1720, pathologized his nature as Williams does, personifying and finding a personal bond with the spaces he inhabits. His work set the stage for Thoreau, who may very well be considered the father of American nature literature, largely sidesteps the presences of Indigenous people in his most reputable work, Walden. Penobscot Cultural and Historic Preservation describes Thoreau, however, as increasingly appreciative of Indigenous peoples as he experienced more life with Indigenous guides and peers (Penobscot), though this growth and change was later in his life than Walden was written. How would Williams’s work have been changed had she worked more directly with Indigenous people? The perceptions that Williams writes of are through her grandmother, or through her experience in the field. Williams writes only of knowing Indigenous people through the agency of collective whiteness to appropriate, an example of which nests in the “Greater Yellowlegs” chapter, where Williams and Kevin – the same Kevin that doubts any love in “ancient desert peoples” (Williams 179) - recreate found bird-foot necklaces and dance “wildly like tribesmen around the fire” (Williams 188). An appreciation is seen for Indigenous peoples, but her freedom in privilege encourages the appropriation to reframe a lost necklace from a traumatized people for the enjoyment of their colonizers. Surely a more nuanced and layered perspective on Indigenous connections with birds could have been discussed had Tempest directly included Indigenous people in her narrative, and she could have cultured her fascination into nuanced comradery as Thoreau had. Should Williams’s radicalism had progressed since Refuge, then perhaps her viewpoint as well opened, but as a snapshot of a span of time spent in Mormonism – even with her written feminist views – Williams’s perspective is still colonizing and owning of stolen places and ideas.

At every level in Refuge, the pattern persists: The Mormons own their pocket of Utah, the Church owns Great Salt Lake, and Williams projects her migration onto the cave. Each mesocosm of existence pervades into something it has no claim to. The Mormons base their lives in stolen land, the Church attempts to harness a natural process imperceptibly older than they could ever be, and Williams loads her grief onto the image of lives that her ancestors claimed.

Williams spends nearly the entirety of Refuge analyzing her connection to the land, the rising lake, the birds, and the echoes of an interrupted past. However, she doesn’t question how she came to acquire these connections. Past the bond over birds she and her grandmother share, deeper than the structures built around the lake that house the descendants of migrated Mormons, and stronger than chevrons carved into rabbit bones, are the foundations of colonialism that have allowed Williams to freely connect with place the way she does. She claims to rewrite her genealogy (Williams 241), but her connection to family and place are pervasively appropriative. Her grandmother attributes scarification practices by Indigenous peoples to Williams’s facial scar, which Williams adopts as she copes with her injury (Williams 244). Williams tokenizes and generalizes Indigenous practices in order to grieve for her appearance, just as she tokenizes Indigenous art to grieve her mother. Her connections to place through connections to family are freely given without regard to stolen sacredness, adopted as their own.

Refuge offers challenges to the reader over the nature of humanity: How do we frame death as individuals and as parts of ecosystems? Why do we grieve, and how do we process grief as families? But deeper in the brine of memoir and museums lies the reality of privilege in connection to place. Who has lived where we live now? Whose trauma do we capitalize on, whose pasts do we maximize for our narratives? Williams not only accesses this in Refuge but applies it to manage her grief. Further, then, the story of a rising lake and the passing birds becomes the story of Brigham Young’s legacy: This is the place of refuge, taken and adapted to one’s own appropriation of sanctuary.

Tempest-Williams, T. (1992). Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. New York: Vintage Books. Print.

Boxer, E. (2015). “The Lamanites Shall Blossom as the Rose”: The Indian Student Placement Program, Mormon Whiteness, and Indigenous Identity. Journal of Mormon History, 41(4), 132–176.

The Great Mormon Migration | American Experience | PBS. (n.d.). Retrieved February 26, 2021, from https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/mormon-migration/

Thoreau’s views on Indians. (n.d.). Retrieved March 7, 2021, from https://www.penobscotculture.com/index.php/thoreau-s-views-on-indians