“The broad brush you paint with is missing a whole bunch of bristles.”
Well, the bristles you show don’t carry much paint, either.
All I’m saying is, of all the experience I have had dealing with LDS members on a personal basis, I have found them to be of a positive nature as good as, or better than, most of the non-Mormons I have had contact with. And I worked among, around and with members of the LDS in eastern Utah (Uintah and Duchesne counties), much of which is part of the Ouray and Uintah Indian Reservation, and the Utes that were the oboriginals. The tribal people were divided between the LDS members and the non-Mormon, while almost all of the whites were Mormon. From all appearances, the non-Mormon Utes were not being treated any more unfairly by the white LDS members, than the treatment the LDS Utes were subject to. The Utes had a grudging admiration of the LDS as a whole, and sometimes spoke of them in a kidding manner (”Those Mormons can pray water into flowing uphill”), but there was no great underlying tension by either side.
Native Americans are althroughout the Book of MORMON; too. “I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today ... they are fast becoming a white and delightsome people.... For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised.... The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl-sixteen-sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents—on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather.... These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.
(Improvement Era, December 1960, pp.922-23). (p. 209)