Jon Antelope: Being Native isn't always easy on our own land

Living cheap is hard enough, but it is harder still in small-town Utah when your Mormon welfare dries up completely.

Several years ago, one of the local leaders of the Mormon church tried to run our family out town because he didn't want us to be teaching the language to other Indians. The Mormon religion teaches that whites (Nephites) are the original inhabitants of America, not Indians. The white Nephites were a peaceful and loving race who lived in this paradise called America. Only very recently Indians (Lamanites) moved to America from Israel. Indians brought along our sinful, loathsome and ungodly culture here to America. And then we murdered all the whites who lived in the Americas and completely wiped out the entire white Nephite race.

The Bishop wanted to save the Indian people from our sinful culture and believed the best way to kill Indian culture is for our language to die. When my family started offering free language classes to Indians, he viewed us as a major problem and wanted to run us out of town. My family and I were truly living in hostile territory back then. The Bishop started inquiring who we were renting from. Now a Bishop has enormous resources, especially in a region where almost everybody is Mormon, including the police and the guy who runs the social security office in town. The Bishop approached the local social security office and the town hospital but all he got was our post box address. The postal people didn't know where we lived either and sent us a letter asking for our updated home address. We ignored that letter and USPS immediately shut down our post box. Then the Bishop approached the local tribe, and the tribe – most of them are Mormon - happily gave him our home address.

The police started harassing us almost immediately – once it was because somebody's car got stolen and they said it was us. Another time someone sprayed graffiti on some church, so that must have been us too. A third time, a store in town was robbed. And so on.