Mountain Meadows: The black sheep of the family...

Friday, September 18, 2009

The black sheep of the family...

When my grandfather was a shepherd for the church among the terraces between Cedar City and Zion's they used to calculate the number of sheep by counting the number of black sheep. So here we are, still in the herd, not treated very well. Black sheep never suffered this discrimination--the were valued for their wool. It takes so little to be deemed a black sheep and once deemed one a dysfunctional process begins.

The chronically ill/disabled and divorced are among the black sheep of the Church.
A TS Eliot quote may be applied to this cruelty:

"Do not ask 'What is it?'
Let us go and make our visit.
The women come and go,
Speaking of Michelangelo."

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On reading this blog . . .

I intended to begin my blog with the Mountain
Meadows and other oral traditions within which my life began. Two centuries now past.

When the raid of the polygamous YFZ Ranch occurred it was hard not to remember. Raids, friction imposed by the Federal Government have been Mormon History since before the Civil War. The Antipolygamy Manifesto of 1989 was adopted by a people exhausted by loss, their leaders in hiding, supplied wives and sons or living in friendly but remote indian villages many
were readying for the large scale emigration to Mexico.

The once verdant territorial South, originally the bread basket for the regional Indigenous population was
decimated by the foraging of California stock.

There was such a church food production effort
at the Church run Lee Ranch. There his wives and

children ran a Church Co-op affiliated with a small mill

that is now a State Monument. Mountain
Meadows was pasturage for stock, when ready
for slaughter, it was parceled out to the indigenous inhabitants whose range had been destroyed.

The Fancher/Bakers with their 800 cattle were not easy to entertain, nor were the instructions of Chuch leaders, to entertain a hard drinking militia from Missouri who bragged about crimes which had occured and which they insisted they had comitted, brandishing an heirloom smoking gun. With this, one of them said he had shot Joseph Smith. They swore to return with any number of the thousand Genocidal militia in California. These had already comitted well known and documented atrocities there, continuing int0 the 1990's.

John D Lee and his families suffered through the Missouri and Illinois periods. It was when one of the Missouri Wildcats, according to my Grandfather, said that he had raped his sixteen year old daughter in Missouri that John D Lee broke and said he could no longer hold the indians by the wrist.

His part in the massacre has been overplayed, since the army blamed it on the Indians he was in charge of the conduct and welfare of the local tribe. After the massacre, he maintained Lee's Ferry. With the threat of the return of the Feds, it was a heartsick John D. Lee who confessed to a massacre in which he played a complicated but vastly over-emphasized role.

There is an absurdly tragic bedrock to the Eastern American Genocide. It spread West between the Revolutionary War and the 20th Century as it padded in.

It is the conviction of the superiority of those at the top of the caste system over those below. Their manipulation of lives, dreams, cultural legacy, beliefs, creeds and faiths to realize a still-expanding hegemony at the expense of all who were on their own land before the invention of the chariot.

We cannot go backward, but neither should we try to impose who we are on others, or abandon them after we have destroyed what we made ours through deployment of one "doctrine" or another.

Mountain Meadows

Friday, September 18, 2009

The black sheep of the family...

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Dedication

Followers

Pages, Kathleen Matheson Weber

On reading this blog . . .