Nathan Tanner

My research is intimately connected to my upbringing, and my professional career where I had the opportunity to work with some Indigenous youth, mostly Diné and Lakota. My interest in researching the Mormon Indian Student Placement Program specifically stems from growing up around it in my hometown, and being familiar with aspects of the program resulting from being raised in the Mormon church. As an adolescent, I had virtually no context for understanding the program’s origins or purposes outside of narrowly tailored narratives from church leaders whom I was taught to revere and trust. As an adult who is no longer affiliated with the Mormon Church, I am determined to reckon with my own colonial, political, racial, religious, and spatial histories. This includes striving to understand the communities and relationships that my personal and wider cultural and religious histories, upbringing, and adult life are entangled with. I want to learn about how myself and the Indigenous peoples with whom I have been working (and hope to have the privilege to get to know) have been shaped by our pasts, but perhaps more importantly how we all can work together in the “now” described so beautifully by Mark Rifkin: The “now” that is “disparate…related to the legacies of historical events and dynamics…is relative…[or that can exist through] recursive forms of inhabitance.” In so doing, I hope to engage in ethical, community-based research, collaboratively develop historical narratives, and work towards constructing liberatory futures grounded in self-determination.