"Stand Firm and the Waves Will Break": An Autoethnography of Tongan Resistance to Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Colonialism

• In Event: Vice-Presidential Session. Connecting Home(lands): Continuing Legacies of Pacific Islander and Asian Anti-Imperialism Across Oceans

Abstract

For this project, I examine how religious institutions, specifically the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), have embedded themselves within the Tongan population using ideal representations of knowledge, rhetoric of modernity, and logic of management and control. Through this research, I ask how the LDS church has used rhetoric of modernity in order to foster beliefs rooted in coloniality and epistemic racism? Also how will we constitute ourselves within the church once we acknowledge such tactics?

I primarily rely on scholars of (de)coloniality, such as Frantz Fanon, Ramon Grosfugel, and Haunani-Kay Trask. Religion has been used to displace indigenous people from their land (Lephakga, 2015) and create a colonial world Fanon described as Manichean (Fanon, 1963) in which settlers perceive native people as quintessence evil. Today, Tonga has the highest number of LDS members per capita than any other country globally (Fletcher, 2017). Therefore through this project, I analyze the relationship between Mormonism and imperialism, specifically within the Tongan population, and the acts of resistance that continuously occur.

To comprehend the larger impact of the LDS church on a population, I begin with myself. I utilize autoethnography, drawing upon my experiences within the church, within my family, and from when I went to Tonga to better understand the impacts of existing within a colonial religious institution such as the LDS.

When my mother’s family moved from Tonga to Hawai’i around 1973, a Pālangi woman (white) in the church told my grandmother teaching her kids Tongan was a waste of time and that they needed to learn English. In the church, there is something known as the “gospel culture”; it is sold to members as a plan of salvation and to pursue a common way of life (i.e., language) when in reality, it is a means of indigenous cultural erasure. My data comes from stories such as this one, where my grandmother was told our language was unimportant, and now only four people out of an immediate family of thirty-five know Tongan.

Through this research, I argue that the gospel culture of the Church does not allow Tongan people to honor and protect indigenous ways of being. Tongans have resisted parts of gospel culture by embedding certain cultural practices within the Church (i.e., Tongan congregations); however, I argue that we as Tongan people must question the existence of such an institution in our lives.

Thus far, limited research has been done regarding Tongan involvement in the church that extends beyond the church's perspective. By engaging in autoethnography, I make public my experiences within the church and the contradictions between what I believed and what I was taught. This project is done through a place of hope in the understanding that what is, does not have to be what continues.

Author

• Naeisha McClain, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author