Leona Peyope Hasuse was a Northwestern Shoshone ecclesiastical leader and community builder. She was born to Lucy Cojoe (1890–1964) and Jacob Peyope (ca. 1876–1956) at Washakie, Utah Territory, on 10 October 1919.¹ She attended the local Washakie Day School as a child but began to attend the Fort Hall Boarding School later with her older sister, Griffin Peyope (1916–1940).² Their home remained at Washakie, and they both used their education to maintain local newspaper columns outlining events in the daily lives of the Washakie Shoshone.³ Leona began writing when she was eighteen and sent her column titled “Washakie Indian News” to the Ogden Standard-Examiner consistently in 1938.⁴ She stopped writing her column only after enrolling at Carson Indian School in Stewart, Nevada, in the fall of 1938.⁵

Even with her frequent travels for school and trips to see family and friends in Idaho, Leona’s home remained at Washakie. In 1946, she married Paul Henry Hasuse (1919–1959), adopted his surname, and became known as Leona Hasuse or Leona Peyope Hasuse.⁶ Together they had one son, Richard Paul Hasuse (1947–2021).⁷ Paul Hasuse was killed by a car near Tremonton, Utah, on 17 January 1959 when Richard was just eleven years old.⁸

Leona’s family and community at Washakie provided a support network after Paul’s death. She remained active in church services and callings in the Washakie Ward, where she had been baptized in 1928.⁹ Washakie Ward Relief Society records are not extant from the 1930s to the 1950s, but when records pick up in 1959, it is clear that Leona was an integral part of the Washakie Ward—a ward that was declining in membership due to economic opportunity elsewhere. She bore her testimony often in Relief Society meetings and served her fellow Washakie Saints as a visiting teacher.¹⁰ In 1960, Washakie Ward membership had declined enough for Malad stake officials to change the ward’s status to that of a branch.¹¹ Still Leona remained and in 1961, she was sustained as a Sunday School teacher and taught in the Washakie Ward Sunday School.¹²

On 31 March 1964, Leona, Richard, her mother Lucy Cojoe Peyope, and her brother Evans Peyope (1911–1999) moved their church membership records to the Bannock Creek Branch, where other Shoshone Latter-day Saints held meetings on the Fort Hall Reservation.¹³ According to Leona, “This was our way of life. We lived a few months here and a few months there. Washakie was always our home.”¹⁴ She once again served diligently at church and was called as the Relief Society work director on 11 August 1964.¹⁵ In 1967, she began serving as a counselor in the Primary presidency, where she taught and served the branch’s children.¹⁶

In the late 1960s, church leadership decided to sell the land Washakie was built on without conferring with the remaining residents. To prepare the land for sale, local church officials burned down homes they incorrectly assumed were unoccupied, which they described as “shanties.”¹⁷ When Leona learned that her home filled with personal records, church documents, appliances, furniture, and food had been burned, she immediately returned to Washakie. “As I stood looking at my burned stove and metal beds and my refrigerator sitting in the ashes, I cried. I mean, I cried out loud. I felt real bad. I was never notified by mail or any other way that my place was going to be burned.”¹⁸

Following the loss of their home at Washakie, Leona and her family took permanent residence at Bannock Creek, where they felt somewhat ostracized by other Native Americans who saw them as “Mormon outsiders.”¹⁹ Nevertheless, Leona remained dedicated to the church. At a 1974 meeting where families discussed the home burnings, she shared the following story:

One day at Fast Meeting while I was bearing my testimony, I told of my home being burned down and of my faith in the church and of not hating the church for what they have done to me. After church one of the white members asked me why I didn’t give up my membership in the Mormon church and go elsewhere. I told this lady I was raised in the Mormon church and have lived its laws and rules all my life and was not going to give it up just for this. My faith is strong. I am not angry at the church. I am only hurt very deeply.²⁰

Leona was called as Bannock Creek Branch Relief Society secretary on 16 March 1969 and served until she was called as the Relief Society president on 13 September 1970.²¹ As president, she organized the teaching and ministering efforts of the women in the branch and contributed to major congregational events like a branchwide Thanksgiving dinner²² and a “Pow Wow on weeds” where the branch members organized to collectively care for corn, potatoes, carrots, onions, and squash.²³ Her long and faithful membership in the church culminated in her endowment in the Idaho Falls Temple on 20 March 1971.²⁴

Many other homes at Washakie were burned throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s until the land was sold to cattle ranchers in April 1972.²⁵ The Northwestern Shoshone were devastated and confused about the church’s actions and in 1973 met with church officials such as John H. Vandenberg, Bruce R. McConkie, and Spencer W. Kimball in an attempt to recoup their terrible losses. In the following years, the testimony of Leona and other Northwestern Shoshone surrounding the home burnings played an important role in the church’s decision to donate 184 acres of land to the tribe.²⁶

Her faith unbroken, Leona always hoped that her people could obtain more land on which to build a Northwestern Shoshone community beyond the 184 acres, but she did not live to see a larger acquisition. She passed away in 1979 in the St. Anthony Community Hospital in Idaho and was buried in the Washakie cemetery.²⁷