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It is Tuesday night and I have just arrived at the Iosepa Association Executive Board meeting. When I arrive, the board members are already in a heated discussion about a conflict they are having with the landowner, Chris Robinson of the Ensign Group. The conflict is over the board's desire to expand the footprint of the Iosepa Historical Site and the landowner's determination to block all further expansion. At one point in the discussion, one of the board members pulls out a topographical map of Iosepa and the surrounding area while another clears off the table. They lay the map out on the table as we all gather around. Uncle Richard, a former Iosepa Association president traces the boundaries of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) parcels, then the boundaries of the Ensign Group properties, and then the area marked as part of the state historical site. They begin to strategize about how they could expand if either the BLM or the Ensign Group could be persuaded to "return" some of the land. Throughout the discussion the members repeat an impassioned declaration that this is "our" land and that both the Ensign Group and the BLM should return the land to "us."
This article is a meditation on the central contradiction of the opening scene: the board members are indigenous peoples from Oceania strategizing to reclaim land in Utah, which they feel is "theirs."1 Recently I started to reflect on the implication of what it means to claim the land as "ours," when it is not "ours" any more than it belongs to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) or Chris Robinson of the Ensign Group, who currently owns and operates a ranch on private and public land. In this essay, I examine the stories that the Polynesian Latter-day Saints who gather annually at the Iosepa Festival held at Iosepa, Utah, tell about this place as a way to understand why and how they make a claim to the land.2 I will trace how the stories told about Iosepa perform a kind of memory work that is simultaneously indigenous, religious, and settler-colonial, to name only three vectors of power examined here. My objective is to think through the political implications of indigenous peoples who settle...