Overview

Winner of the Mormon Historical Association Best Community HistoryIn the late nineteenth century, a small community of Native Hawaiian Mormons established a settlement in heart of The Great Basin, in Utah. The community was named Iosepa, after the prophet and sixth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Joseph F. Smith. The inhabitants of Iosepa struggled against racism, the ravages of leprosy, and economic depression, by the early years of the twentieth century emerging as a modern, model community based on ranching, farming, and an unwavering commitment to religious ideals. Yet barely thirty years after its founding the town was abandoned, nearly all of its inhabitants returning to Hawaii. Years later, Native Hawaiian students at nearby Brigham Young University, descendants of the original settlers, worked to clean the graves of Iosepa and erect a monument to memorialize the settlers.Remembering Iosepa connects the story of this unique community with the earliest Native Hawaiian migrants to western North America and the vibrant and growing community of Pacific Islanders in the Great Basin today. It traces the origins and growth of the community in the tumultuous years of colonial expansion into the Hawaiian islands, as well as its relationship to white Mormons, the church leadership, and the Hawaiian government. In the broadest sense, Mathew Kester seeks to explain the meeting of Mormons and Hawaiians in the American West and to examine the creative adaptations and misunderstandings that grew out of that encounter.

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9780199844913

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<br> [An] example of the new generation of Mormon historical studies: it blends exhaustive research with sophisticated theory to address issues much broader than Mormonism itself...Its intended audience is much larger than [the Mormon Historical Association]--though it should certainly be an important contribution to that field, as well. --Juvenile Instructor<p><br> Matthew Kester begins with a grain of sand - the Native Hawaiian community of Iosepa, Utah - and builds a story that embraces more than a century of Oceania's history. His sensitive ear and engaging prose take us on a voyage from the eighteenth-century colonization of Hawaii to the Pacific Islander diaspora across western North America, from the struggle to retain indigenous space in their homelands to the recreation of indigenous places in locations as various as British Columbia and the Great Basin. In this journey we see contest and accommodation over faith, race, and memory, a journey that continues to unfold in the twenty-first century. -- James F. Brooks, president and CEO, School for Advance Research, Santa Fe, NM, and author of Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands<p><br> Remembering Iosepa, is part of an expanding body of scholarship that frames Hawai'i and Hawaiians not as victims of history but rather as active agents eagerly participating in the social milieu in which they lived...He masterfully demonstrates that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which continues to be misunderstood and marginalized within American history, was a key player in westward expansion and settlement despite being targeted by the US federal government as un-American and by non-Mormon settlers who saw their practices as peculiar and at times sinister. By focusing on the intersection of religion and race, Kester gives us a balanced and critical account showing how the history of the American West is also a Hawaiian history of eastward expansion and settlement.

Author Information

Matthew Kester is a historian of Hawaii and the American West who teaches history and cultural studies at Brigham Young University Hawaii.

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