Author Meets Critics: Elise Boxer’s Mormon Settler Colonialism: Inventing the Lamanite (2025)

This panel brings together scholars of religion and Indigenous studies to respond to Elise Boxer’s book Mormon Settler Colonialism: Inventing the Lamanite (2025). Boxer examines Mormon religious ideologies and the production of the Lamanite subject position using settler colonialism as a theoretical framework. She takes an episodic approach to examine various historical moments that produce and give meaning to indigeneity, prompting us to deeper understanding of how American settler belonging and Indigenous erasure happen through the figure of the hyper-visible Indigenous as Lamanite in Mormon settler-theologies. Author and panelists will discuss how the book and its Indigenous Studies framework contribute not only to scholarly understandings of Indigenous lived experiences, but to the Mormon religious tradition, by advancing our understanding of how indigeneity is imagined, produced, and embedded in Mormon religious structures.