“Revelation/Dear Brethren” and Representations of Decolonization

Near the end of my Mormon faith deconstruction, I wrote a letter. On LDS missions, when a male missionary receives a letter from home declaring that his girlfriend is done waiting for him, it’s called a “dear John” and my letter felt a little bit like that. I stopped waiting for the Church to change and admitted that it didn’t want the same future I did. I addressed my letter to the leaders of the LDS Church: “Dear Brethren”, later renaming it to be “Revelation.”

The centerpiece of the letter focuses on an encounter with the divine, but it is not the divine presence I was taught to expect from my white-man-patriarchal religion. The presence is feminine, strong, direct, truthful, and distinctly non-authoritarian. As I show in the story, I recognized this presence as the source of spiritual experiences I had felt within Mormonism, but that also puzzled me. It didn’t match the rigid lines around spirituality that I had been taught to expect.

The spiritual experiences of my deconstruction paired closely with decolonization for me. I suddenly felt hungry to hear from people outside the tradition of white male religious-intellectuals. I needed to know what they saw that I couldn’t. I wanted to know what was hidden from me because of my position as white woman. I listened to stories shared by displaced descendants of original North Americans, Polynesian islands, and other places in the world. I listened to scholars. I read their articles. Some of them had been Mormons once, as well. Their stories were nuanced, grounded, and practical. For the most part, they just wanted to be heard and respected. They wanted the original treaties to be respected and restored. They wanted Mormons to stop stealing identities and stories of Native peoples for their own meaning-making.

More than any other study I did, listening to Native voices exposed the shallowness of Mormon theology. Like smelling salts for a fainted Victorian, their voices woke me up and I saw for the first time the racism, the ongoing efforts to colonize, and longstanding thievery that was still occurring in the name of Jesus.

When I got to a point of collecting my experiences with faith deconstruction in a single letter, I wanted to honor the contributions of indigenous perspectives as well as acknowledge the spiritual validity of the traditions in North America whose traditions were appropriated by Joseph Smith and his successors. To do this, I gave the goddess figure of my own narrative the image of a North American indigenous woman.

In retrospect, I wonder if this was also a kind of appropriation. I chose that image intentionally but I was also only lightly educated in the history of North America’s suppression and usurpation of indigenous identities at the time. From my position at the time of writing, I could see how indigenous identities had been cheated and demeaned but I did not see the ways indigenous groups had been mythologized and idealized for spiritual purposes. Nor did I see how difficult it was for modern indigenous scholars and activists to communicate with modern America against the backdrop of the historical image of “Indians”.

So, should I have represented the divine truth-teller in my narrative as someone more like myself? As a white woman? Or a white man? Maybe a racially-ambiguous non-binary deity? Or a non-bodied entity?

I don’t know. Those options sound fraught too. And maybe that is a weakness of trying to represent embodied deities at all.

Now, posting my story publicly, I decided to let the story and illustrations speak for themselves. If nothing else, “Revelation” is a record of how one white, American Mormon perceived the process of deconstruction + decolonization. As such, it carries with it strains of privilege, white supremacy, and appropriation because I was fed and bred on those traditions and so are most of my readers.

Hopefully, it also shows something else though. I hope it shows how that sealed cocoon of information can be broken, how cognitive dissonance is worth facing even if it disrupts us, how real history can hurt like crazy but also set us free, how the “light of truth” (as Mormons would call it) can find us even in the most closed rooms of our mind, and I especially hope that it shows how important each person’s decision is in opening the door to a new future. I hope it also shows some of my respect for the indigenous people who continue to show up publicly, who continue to protect their kinship with the Earth, who continue to learn law and public policy to defend their homes, who defy empire even after centuries of repression.

Now, four years after writing “Revelation,” I have listened to many more hours of listening to indigenous writers, speakers, and activists and want to share some resources that have helped me along the way.

Please read them, follow their podcasts, watch their content, buy their books, contribute to their work.

Study their critiques with the same devotion you gave to scripture. In addition, learn to pull back from settler colonialist narratives in media.

Stop the violence.

Stop the land theft.

Pull the brakes on racist stereotypes.

Update your understanding of key histories around Thanksgiving, Columbus, and the doctrine of discovery.

That will not be enough to “fix” the generations of harm that have already been done, but it is the minimum payment we owe to the debt of justice.

And for anyone truly committed to loving their neighbor, that should be obvious.

Watching List

Reservation Dogs by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi (Hulu)

Boy by Taika Waititi

Fancy Dance by Erica Tremblay

Exterminate all the Brutes by Raoul Peck (HBO)

the1491s (YouTube channel)

❌ NOT the Avatar movies by James Cameron — listen instead to Melanie Yazzie, Elena Ortiz, and Levi Harter on Red Power Hour

Video · RSS — Blue Cat People are not Indigenous: RPH vs. Avatar (pt.1)
Video (embedded below) — Blue Cat People are not Indigenous: RPH vs. Avatar (pt.2)
Video · RSS — RPH vs. Avatar: Fire and Ash (2026)