I. The Sixty-Day Synchronization
The Machine requires two distinct movements to clear a people from their ancestral soil. First it physically deploys the sword; next, it rewrites the population’s memory. When the United States cleared the American continent in the Spring of 1830, its ‘legal office’ participated in a two-layer synchronization with the author of a new theology. The new theology provided a fictio legis by which ancient, organic indigenous communities became landless anomolies. However, this time, the fiction was the result of human desperation.
The mechanics of the synchronization were the appearance of the first edition of the Book of Mormon on March 26, 1830, and Andrew Jackson’s signing of the Indian Removal Act into federal law on May 28, 1830. It was not a conscious, backroom partnership; in fact, it represented a fierce rivalry. The early Mormons were radical anti-government outsiders who viewed the American Republic as a glorified fraud. They were not wrong, historically speaking, but they did not arrive at this opinion through a study of American history. Nor did they have the self-interest of America’s aristocrats. Joseph Smith and his followers echoed the agenda of the American republic because they were the products of its wreckage.
Who Were the Early Mormons?
On both sides of Joseph Smith’s family were early New England Settlers who had worked the land for generations and built communities under a radical religious solidarity. But by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Anglo-Norman legal machine was making itself known. The families of Smith and his followers had been wiped out through predatory debt laws, land speculation monopolies, and the devastating crop failures of 1816. Additionally, the minds of these people had been colonized by the same architecture of beliefs held by the oppressive government.
While Jackson’s legal ploy would map out physical evictions and turn communal tribal lands into tradeable real estate (dominium), Smith’s scriptural contribution created a psychological camouflage. This camouflage was probably not effective for indigenous women however; it changed the very foundation of their communal life. The biological womb of independent indigenous nations was made irrelevant by the Lamanite myth.
On the other hand, the myth eased the conscience of white settlers who would soon replace Native Americans in their own land. It was like a divine eviction notice.
II. The Ambient Software of the Frontier
Joseph Smith did not invent his narrative out of thin air. Speculation about prehistoric ‘mound builders’ had been the subject of many best-sellers in the “Burned-over District” of New York. Books like Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews (1823) and Josiah Priest’s The Wonders of Nature and Providence Displayed (1825) had conditioned the frontier mind to believe Native Americans were not the rightful owners of the land. Instead, they were the fallen, dark-skinned remnants of an ancient war that had wiped out a white Israelite race on American soil. However, the Book of Mormon formalized this secular mythology into a spiritual worldview. It is not surprising considering the economic chaos of the time that the people of that district accepted the promises found in its pages. Church members came to believe they would inherit the continent as the ‘restored’ guardians of Zion.
The Collision Between the Church and the Government
However, this dream collided resoundingly with the US government when the Mormons revealed their ‘Lamanite Mission’ in the fall of 1830. When missionaries marched past the border of the frontier to present their gospel to the Wyandots (Hurons), the Delawares, the Catteraugus (Seneca Iroquois), and the Shawnees, they provoked the state machine to retaliate. Local federal Indian agents arrived in force against this anti-government religious bloc and evicted them from the vicinity. As the agents understood it, the Church intended to form a rogue political alliance with thousands of displaced Native warriors. Most Mormons are not aware of this because Mormonism has evolved into a compliant, conservative corporate religion. But in 1830, its members were not shy about expressing their hostility to the government.
Although the government and the Church were fighting each other for control, they had the same target. They both wanted to erase the maternal baseline of the Natives to aid in the task of centralization.
III. The Architecture of Colonial Blindness
The blindness was multi-generational; it was present at least from the foundations of the American experiment. But of course, it had been present in the home countries of the colonists as well. However, in the New World, the fear of the wilderness frontier gave rise to the most rigid, defensive and authoritarian Anglo-Roman legal structures American leaders could think of. We are familiar with the dreamers who helped to engineer ‘Americanism’. They include the writers of the American Classics; the Founding Fathers; and the European Enlightenment theorists. Not one of them was equipped to see a possibility for society outside of a vertical, patriarchal pyramid.
Men like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were trained by the aristocratic, slave-owning legal fictions of classical Greece and Rome. So, they naturally constructed a Senate and a Republic based on top-down property lines. Meanwhile, European philosohers like John Locke provided intellectual software for the outright theft of the continent. They explicitly argued that American soil was legally vacant Terra Nulius unless a male head of household built fences and registered a paper deed. Nor could the white settlers perceive another reality. Even if they came face-to-face with sophisticated civilizations like the Cherokee Nation or the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, they could not understand or appreciate them through the fog of the Anglo-Roman operating system. Instead of Clan Mothers they saw an untamed, lawless wilderness.
IV. The Re-Coding of the Womb
The Machine is not satisfied with eviction of bodies from the soil. It can’t rest until it has made biological sovereignty invisible. In the Americas, the matrilineal clan was the anchor of tribal identity and relationship to the earth. In such a society, the blood of birth and the physical womb of the mother provides organic certainty. But Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon buried this reality with a powerful fictio legis that rewrote natural reality. Today, that ancient artificial cage has achieved the final clearance of sovereign biological voices and independent nations.
For its part, the Book of Mormon executed a thorough theological override. The real physical, earth-bound lineages of independent indigenous people became the Lamanites. Instead of people belonging to the earth, they became descendants of a male patriarch in Jerusalem, and an ancient global migration. They now stood in need of salvation by a white, corporate hierarchy.
V. The Defiant Voice of the Clan Mothers
The tragedy of this mythological rewrite of reality is especially stark in light of actual resistance that was taking place that same spring. The Cherokee Clan Mothers were fighting desperately to defend their tribe against Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. They formed a delegation led by Beloved Woman Nancy Ward to deliver formal petitions to the Cherokee National Council. When speaking to the Council, they did not use the language of contracts and state deeds. They appealed to the sanctity of the womb.
Your mothers, your sisters, ask and beg of you not to part with any more of our land. We say ours. You are our descendants; take pity on our request… Only keep your hands off of our paper talks, for it is our own country.
The mothers diagnosed the problem: white-settler men, opportunists, had married into the tribe. These women warned the sons of these men that breaking their relationship to the soil would result in their own erasure.
We do not wish to go to an unknown country… this act of our children would be like destroying your mothers.
But their words fell on deaf ears. Previously, in 1827, the Cherokee male leaders had been desperate to prove to the federal legal administrators that they were ‘civilized’ and that they deserved to keep their land. So, they passed a written constitution that fatally compromised the internal safeguards of the nation. This mistake can be compared to the belated disaster of the Picts in 839 AD made possible by King Onuist. It is also similar to the strife within Clan Chattan brought on by a feudal overlords’ scheme. The men of the Council had unwittingly thrown over their own matrilineal customs for short-term strategies.
The 1827 Cherokee Constitution specifically excluded women from any formal role in the newly centralized tribal government. When it blatantly silenced the Clan Mothers it dismantled the true shield of the tribe. The men had trained themselves to use the vocabulary of the Machine because they thought it would buy them security. They didn’t yet know the Machine’s talent for waiting. Three years after the Cherokee men silenced their mothers, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act.
Using the prison’s guardrails can never result in freedom.
VI. The Technical Mutation
The flashpoint of 1830 was a ‘successful’ fieldtest. It established a permanent, interchangeable blueprint for the total enclosure of the reservation era. The test case demonstrated that if you can colonize a people’s thinking and force them to govern themselves using your fictitious architecture, you don’t need an army garrison. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 was the final execution of a process that started with the Lamanite data update and Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act.
The US government flattered native men into polished, climate-controlled reservation boardrooms and forced them to adopt standard, corporate-style business constitutions. Today, when tribal leaders publicly claim matrilineal sovereignty, it doesn’t occur to them that they rule their people with the same Anglo-Roman extractive, paternalistic system that dispossessed them. When they shrug and say to themselves, ‘This is just the way things are’, it is a type of amnesia. They are forgetting the womb, the clan, and the song to Mother Earth.