The most controversial film of the Idaho International film festival was a documentary made by a Brian Patrick, a faculty member of The University of Utah. In the notes to the film it says something about how people automatically assume that a film about the Mountain Meadows massacre is anti-Mormon, but that he’s trying to avoid that. After our screening he told us that he had “absolutely no agenda” in creating the film other than furthering awareness of the event and so forth.

I was suspicious after the Spudfest fiasco. In August at the Spudfest film festival in Driggs, Idaho, Burying the Past was removed from the festival line up because of threats of picketing from local members. I think Patrick appreciated this event actually, because now he could put words like “banned” and “censored” all over his flier. Nonetheless, I was willing to go into the film in an objective, open-minded way.

But Patrick’s film betrays his own claims. Burying the Past is skewed against Mormons as strongly as possible. Of course, it’s his right to make an anti-Mormon film if he wants to, but disguising the film as nothing more than a mere a historical inquiry seriously undermines the strength of his investigation.

The Mountain Meadows massacre began with a wagon train of 140 people from Arkansas who, while traveling through southern Utah were attacked and killed by a group of Indians and radical Mormons. The documentary re-lives the event and then provides interviews with descendents of some of the few survivors.

One thing Burying the Past does is pull away anything that would make the Arkansans or the Indians look bad. We know, for example, that the travelers made multiple threats to the Mormons about how they were going to finish them off and that more were coming to help them do that. We also know that they poisoned the water, killing ten Indians and some Mormons. None of this is mentioned in the nearly 90 minute documentary. The travelers are made to look as innocent as possible. Will Bagley, a historian from USU, quips that the Arkansans must have tried to get through Utah as quickly as possible. This also eliminates any motive for the Indians to attack. In the documentary we learn that if Indians were involved at all, it was very minimal, because the Mormons were all dressed up like Indians.

Eliminating all other possibilities, the documentary tries to explain that the attack was probably a function of revenge, because the Mormon religion is an Old Testament religion that preaches “eye for an eye” behavior. And, as Bagley says, “it is impossible to see how the church could legitimately interpret what happened.” I’m not exactly sure what he meant by that, but it is implied that he’s blaming the central church for the attack. The whole documentary tries to make this point.

What is possibly the strongest defense of the church is ignored until the end of the film and then obscured. Prior to the attack, one of the Mormons from the south sped up to Salt Lake to ask Brigham Young what to about the impending conflict. In a letter Young told the saints to leave them alone, but that the Indians will do what they will. This letter is only briefly alluded to and then Will Bagley interprets it for us, explaining that it meant to go ahead and attack and blame everything on the Indians. Bagley concludes that Brigham Young, “had to have had something to do with the Mountain Meadows massacre.”

We get multiple interviews in the documentary from descendants of the victims who are angry and want apologies from the church, despite the fact that the church spent a load of money building a memorial for them out in the middle of nowhere.

There are many other things too tedious to go into, things like how the bones of the victims were sent to BYU for study, implicating some kind of conspiracy or something. But everything is slanted against the church; the way the story is told, the tone in their voice – the film is one giant finger pointed at the church. Near the end Bagley mentions with a half smile that the attack was carried out “by a people who believed they were doing god’s will,” at which point a hearty chuckle erupted in the audience. In fact, there were a number of such chuckles and shakes of the head from the audience – and the film wanted it.

The final shot of the documentary is a black screen with white text saying, “Descendents of the victims still await an apology from Gordon B. Hinckley.” Whoa. If this is supposed to be objective, he just as well could have finished with a screen saying, “Though hundreds of people still accuse the LDS church of organizing the event, there is still no evidence that Brigham Young or the central church approved of the attack.” But you would never ever see a comment like that in this film, because this is film with an agenda.

Documentary

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