Provost's Developmental Editing Grant

This book traces the rise of Indigenous short-form educational media and the public mediation of Indigenous childhood across the long 1970s. It is by design a book about small media, setting out to re-value the fragments, segments, micro- and unfinished projects produced with public funding, and circulating on public television and in educational spaces for youth and general audiences, rather than the feature films made for theatrical distribution by independent and for profit entertainment industries. At a transformational mid-century moment in the midst of renewed Indigenous rights movements and expanded access to the press and to media production and distribution, the 1970s gives us another archive and another origin story in North American Indigenous media history.

A full-length monograph of the history of the relationship between American Indians and the Mormon Church, from 1823 to the present. From the earliest days of the Church’s founding in 1830 to the present day, Mormon missionaries have carried the message of Moroni to the rest of the world and, quite purposefully, into the homelands of Native nations. The imperative of restoring the gospel of Jesus Christ to American Indians is the leitmotif of the Book of Mormon. There is another side to this story, the American Indian side, and it is less well known. American Indian people, from the Shawnee communities of the Ohio Valley, the Omahas at Council Bluff, Iowa, to the modern-day Southern Paiutes, Utes, and Shoshones of the Colorado Plateau, have dealt with Mormon efforts to redefine, convert, and assimilate them since the earliest days of the church in the 1830s. Like most stories of the frontier, it is also the story of attempted conquest through spiritual, cultural, and territorial encroachments, and like most frontiers, it has multiple points of contact and conflict. This account of the story includes both Mormon encroachments and Native strategies of resistance and accommodation.

In this monograph, Dr. Moodie draws on archival and ethnographic source material to trace a transnational history of what she calls "business school religion" that produced and has been produced by elite American and Indian business over the past century and a half. American management expertise is dominant across the globe. It was in the United States that university business schools emerged in the 1880s, largely through departments of economics that took for granted capitalism's divine origins and the unique capability of Christians to harness its productive powers for the greater good. In the latter half of the twentieth century, after management knowledge had become a science scrubbed clean of that theological language, American-style business schools and their attendant models of employer benevolence and employee devotion proliferated. Formerly colonized nations including India sought this worldclass expertise to advance their developmentalist goals. In 1980s, when Indian scholars began to push back against the neo-imperialism of their institutions, they created Hindu modes of management that re-sacralized capitalist relations in a spiritual register. American and Indian business schools are now locked in a global feedback loop where one project reinforces the universality of the other. Moving between the U.S. and Indian contexts from the 1880s until the 2020s, Dr. Moodie demonstrates that this religion has taken alternate valences from Christian to scientific to Hindu to spiritual as management experts and business leaders alike have debated its terms.