Reunion 009: Family Legacies and Latter-day Saint History with Matthew Bowman and Lisa Olsen Tait

In the spring of 1906, a young woman named Leah Dunford stood in the parlor of her mother’s Salt Lake City home, watching her husband, John A. Widtsoe, pack for a trip east. He was headed to Cornell to study agricultural chemistry. She was staying behind with their infant son. Leah’s mother, Susa Young Gates, hovered nearby, offering advice, encouragement, and, as always, a steady stream of opinions. Susa had raised Leah to believe that education and motherhood were not opposites but complements. She herself had published books, edited magazines, and lobbied Church leaders, all while raising a large family. Her legacy was one of ambition, faith, and relentless energy.

Just a few blocks away, Joseph Fielding Smith was beginning his own journey into Church service. The son of President Joseph F. Smith, Joseph Fielding had grown up in the shadow of prophetic authority. He was quiet, studious, and deeply committed to preserving the doctrines and history of the Church. His legacy would be one of guardianship, of doctrine, of tradition, of a particular vision of what it meant to be a Latter-day Saint. Today, we’re joined by Matthew Bowman and Lisa Olsen Tait to explore how these two figures—Susa Young Gates and Joseph Fielding Smith—shaped and were shaped by the families they came from, and how their stories help us understand the power of family legacies in Latter-day Saint history.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Listen on Apple Podcasts: LINK

Listen on Spotify: LINK

Listen on YouTube: LINK

TODAY'S GUEST

In a quiet kitchen on the Diné (Navajo Nation) reservation, a grandmother begins to speak. There’s no script, no microphone, just her voice, steady and rich with memory. She tells of boarding schools, of ceremonies held in secret, of laughter shared under desert skies. Her story isn’t written in books or stored in archives. It lives in her words, passed from one generation to the next.

For Farina King, these stories are history. In her work as a historian and citizen of the Navajo Nation, she listens to voices often left out of official records. Oral histories, she shows us, are not just sources. They are relationships. They carry emotion, identity, and the power to connect past and present in deeply personal ways.

Today, Dr. King joins us to discuss how oral histories transform our understanding of families, communities, and the significance of history itself. We’ll explore how listening, truly listening, can be an act of scholarship, of care, and of cultural survival.

SHOW NOTES

TODAY'S GUEST

Farina King, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, is Horizon Chair of Native American Ecology and Culture and Professor of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She received her PhD in History from Arizona State University. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Native American history, with particular attention to Indigenous educational experiences, oral history, and the cultural and environmental contexts of boarding schools.

She is the author of The Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century, which examines Diné relationships to land, memory, and schooling. She is co-author, with Michael P. Taylor and James R. Swensen, of Returning Home: Diné Creative Works from the Intermountain Indian School, and the author of Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century, which explores Navajo religious, cultural, and community life within twentieth-century Mormon contexts.

Dr. King serves as a series editor for the Lyda Conley Series on Trailblazing Indigenous Futures at the University Press of Kansas and is co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Oral History. She is Editor in Chief of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Indigenous Studies. She also co-hosts the Native Circles podcast with Dr. Davina Two Bears and Eva Bighorse. From 2021 to 2022, she served as President of the Southwest Oral History Association.