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Show v: 68 Nuwuvi: A Southern Paiute History act. Brigham Young explained his position in a message to the Utah Legislature in 1852: This may be said to present a new feature in the traffic of human beings; it is essentially purchasing them into freedom instead of slavery; but it is not the low, servile drudgery of Mexican slavery, to which I would doom them, not to be raised among beings scarcely superior to themselves, but where they could find that consideration pertaining not only to civilized, but humane and benevolent society.53 A second reason to purchase Indians was a belief that it was the Mormon mission to restore Christianity to the Indians, whom they believed were former Christians. The most convenient way for them to accomplish the conversion was to raise children in their homes. The Nuwuvi were forced to accept a new culture which they didn't understand and which was totally different from their own. In moving onto Nuwuvi lands, the new settlers were depriving the Nuwuvi of their traditional livelihood. Jacob Hamblin was one of the few to see this. He explained that "When the white man has settled on the [Nuwuvi] lands, and his cattle has destroyed much of their scanty living, there has always appeared in them, a disposition to make all reasonable allowances for these wrongs." 54 Nuwuvi children were supposedly purchased in order to save them from poverty and possible starvation. The settlers, however, in their relentless expansion into the fertile southern valleys that had served as the Nuwuvi's livelihood, very rarely realized the extent to which they were responsible for the impoverishment of the people they were trying to save. |