Statements by Church leaders related to the identity of the Lamanites

Statements made by Church leaders on the relationship between Amerindians and Lamanites

Lehi: Is he the exclusive ancestor or among the ancestors of Amerindians?

LDS leaders have expressed a variety of opinions regarding whether or not all Amerindians are literal descendants of Lehi. Population genetics indicate that Lehi can likely be counted among the ancestors of all native Americans—a position that the Church has reinforced by changing the 1981 Book of Mormon introduction from "principal ancestors" to "among the ancestors."

Many Church leaders, most notably Spencer W. Kimball, have made clear statements regarding the belief that Lehi was the exclusive ancestor of all native Americans. However, contrary to the claims of critics who attempt to use DNA evidence to discredit the Book of Mormon, many readers and leaders have also noted that those in Lehi's group were not the exclusive progenitors of the inhabitants of the American continents. When asked about the Church’s official position on this matter by a writer, a Church spokesman said:

As to whether these were the first inhabitants…we don't have a position on that. Our scripture does not try to account for any other people who may have lived in the New World before, during or after the days of the Jaredites and the Nephites, and we don't have any official doctrine about who the descendants of the Nephites and the Jaredites are. Many Mormons believe that American Indians are descendants of the Lamanites [a division of the Nephites], but that's not in the scripture.^[1]

In addition, apostles and seventies have made many statements which differ from critics’ understanding of the matter, taught them in General Conference, and the Church has published such perspectives in their magazines, study guides, and manuals. The Church’s university has passed them on to their students for generations. The Church’s official spokespeople disclaim the interpretation which critics insist we must hold. Why must we? Well, because critics’ DNA theory “disproving” the Book of Mormon is in deep trouble otherwise, as he’s already admitted!

Talking past each other?

Critics are fond of citing Church leaders such as Spencer W. Kimball, who was certainly a powerful advocate for the Amerindians or “Lamanites.” For example, President Kimball said:

With pride I tell those who come to my office that a Lamanite is a descendant of one Lehi who left Jerusalem six hundred years before Christ and with his family crossed the mighty deep and landed in America. And Lehi and his family became the ancestors of all Indian and Mestizo tribes in North and South and Central America and in the islands of the sea, for in the middle of their history there were those who left America in ships of their making and went to the islands of the sea.

Not until the revelations of Joseph Smith, bringing forth the Book of Mormon, did any one know of these migrants. It was not known before, but now the question is fully answered. Now the Lamanites number about sixty million; they are in all the states of America from Tierra del Fuego all the way up to Point Barrows, and they are in nearly all the islands of the sea from Hawaii south to southern New Zealand. The Church is deeply interested in all Lamanites because of these revelations and because of this great Book of Mormon, their history that was written on plates of gold and deposited in the hill. The translation by the Prophet Joseph Smith revealed a running history for one thousand years-six hundred years before Christ until four hundred after Christ-a history of these great people who accompanied this land for those thousand years. Then for the next fourteen hundred years, they lost much of their high culture. The descendants of this mighty people were called Indians by Columbus when he found them here.^[2]

Clearly, President Kimball here considers all Amerindians under the rubric of “Lamanite.” Does this support Southerton’s argument? It might be that President Kimball is expressing the point of view which Southerton attributes to all the “prophets.” If so, we must remember that other leaders expressed different views.

With the arrival of DNA data, critics have insisted that this proves that LDS prophets who have mentioned such ideas (as with President Kimball above) are "wrong." Poorly researched newspaper accounts have sometimes dramatically recounted how Church members from various Amerindian groups (e.g. Navajo, Pacific Islanders) have expressed dismay at the idea that DNA has "proved" that they are not "really" descendants of Lehi as the Church has taught them.

Regardless of the population model which one uses (Lehi as small, major, or exclusive source of Amerindian DNA), or the Book of Mormon geographical model (hemispheric or limited), this claim is demonstrably false.

20th century statements

1927

A 1927 Book of Mormon study guide noted that:

All Indians Are Not the Descendants of Lehi …Students of the Book of Mormon should be cautioned against the error of supposing that all the American Indians are the descendants of Lehi, Mulek, and their companions, and that their languages and dialects, their social organizations, religious conceptions and practices, traditions, etc., are all traceable to those Hebrew sources.

Because the Jaredite record is very brief we are apt to forget that it embraces many centuries—how many, we have no means of ascertaining—and that it gives an epitome principally of the history of Moron, where the Jaredites first established themselves. It stands to reason that the Jaredites gradually settled in favorable localities all over the American continents, and that both Nephites and Lamanites came in contact with them, and that an amalgamation took place everywhere as in the case of the Nephites and Mulekites in Zarahemla. If so, the Jaredite culture must have become a factor in the development of the institutions and languages of the country. But the Jaredites came from some center of population in Asia…^[3]

1928

Taught Elder Levi Edgar Young [First Council of the Seventy] in 1928 general conference:

There must be a clear distinction, it grows every year more evident, between the origins of America's ancient people and the sources of their culture. The human material of the pre-Columbian societies probably came from Asia by way of Alaska, the orthodox route long accepted for the American Indians…Among many social belongings abandoned along the route seem to have been most of the things called intellectual. The men and women who peopled America arrived, intellectually, with the clothes they stood in…Dr. Uhle urges an alternative [theory for how high culture arose in the Americas]…Occasional cultured mariners from India, China, Japan or other lands may have landed, he believes, few in numbers, but full of ideas, to bring to the rude American societies…just the hint that culture was possible. Small numerically as this source of inspiration must have been, it may conceivably have been the seed from which sprouted the great achievements of Peru and Central America…^[4]

1929

In April 1929, President Anthony W. Ivins [Counselor in First Presidency] said in General Conference:

We must be careful in the conclusions that we reach. The Book of Mormon teaches the history of three distinct peoples, or two peoples and three different colonies of people, who came from the old world to this continent. It does not tell us that there was no one here before them. It does not tell us that people did not come after. And so if discoveries are made which suggest differences in race origins, it can very easily be accounted for, and reasonably, for we do believe that other people came to this continent.^[5]

1938

A Church study guide of 1938 was even more definitive:

Indian ancestry, at least in part, is attributed by the Nephite record to the Lamanites. However, the Book of Mormon deals only with the history and expansion of three small colonies which came to America and it does not deny or disprove the possibility of other immigrations, which probably would be unknown to its writers. Jewish origin may represent only a part of the total ancestry of the American Indian today.^[6]

1940

And, in 1940, members with the critics' attitudes were cautioned:

There is a tendency to use the Book of Mormon as a complete history of all pre-Columbian peoples. The book does not claim to be such an history, and we distort its spiritual message when we use it for such a purpose. The book does not give an history of all peoples who came to America before Columbus. There may have been other people who came here, by other routes and means, of which we have no written record. If historians wish to discuss information which the Book of Mormon does not contain but which is related to it, then we should grant them that freedom. We should avoid the claim that we are familiar with all the peoples who have lived on American soil when we discuss the Book of Mormon. . . There is safety in using the book in the spirit in which it was written. Our use of poorly constructed inferences may draw us far away from the truth. In our approach to the study of the Book of Mormon let us guard against drawing historical conclusions which the book does not warrant.^[7]

1950s

Elder Dallin H. Oaks [Apostle] noted that he had been taught this idea in the 1950s at BYU:

Here [at BYU] I was introduced to the idea that the Book of Mormon is not a history of all of the people who have lived on the continents of North and South America in all ages of the earth. Up to that time, I had assumed that it was. If that were the claim of the Book of Mormon, any piece of historical, archaeological, or linguistic evidence to the contrary would weigh in against the Book of Mormon, and those who rely exclusively on scholarship would have a promising position to argue.

In contrast, if the Book of Mormon only purports to be an account of a few peoples who inhabited a portion of the Americas during a few millennia in the past, the burden of argument changes drastically. It is no longer a question of all versus none; it is a question of some versus none. In other words, in the circumstance I describe, the opponents of historicity must prove that the Book of Mormon has no historical validity for any peoples who lived in the Americas in a particular time frame, a notoriously difficult exercise.^[8]

1954=

LeGrand Richards [Apostle] 1954: The dark-skinned people who occupied this land of America from that time on were called "Lamanites," who are the people known generally as the American Indians, all of whom are of the house of Israel.^[9]

1957

In 1957, Elder Richard L. Evans [Apostle] prepared material for a secular audience, and described the Book of Mormon as

part of a record, both sacred and secular, of prophets and peoples who (with supplementary groups) were among the ancestors of the American 'Indians'^[10]

This article was republished twice (in 1963 and 1975) and the latter publication was reapproved for publication by the First Presidency.^[11]

1992

The Ensign published an article from John Sorenson, one of the most prominent advocates of the presence of other non-Israelite peoples in the Americas:

Archaeological evidence from all New World areas where the early Nephites and Lamanites could have lived makes clear that peoples who descended from the Jaredite era also lived during the time of Lehi’s descendants. Given Laman and Lemuel’s ambition to rule, perhaps they or their descendants ruled over and absorbed such “natives.” Nephite record keepers perhaps did not know the details of that process, but that is the best explanation that I know of for the remarkable growth in the number of Lamanites.

The case of the numerous Amulonites [in Alma 43:13] can be explained on similar grounds—taking control over a resident population.^[12]

Endnotes

1. [note]  Stewart Reid, LDS Public Relations Staff, quoted by William J. Bennetta in The Textbook Letter (March-April 1997), published by The Textbook League (P.O. Box 51, Sausalito, California 94966).
2. [note] Janne M. Sjodahl, "Suggested Key To Book of Mormon Geography," Improvement Era 30 no. 11 (September 1927), ?.
3. [note]  Levi Edgar Young, Conference Report (October 1928), 103–106, italics added.
4. [note]  Anthony W. Ivins, Conference Report (April 1929), 15, italics added.
5. [note]  William E. Berrett, Milton R. Hunter, Roy A. Welker, and H. Alvah Fitzgerald, A Guide to the Study of the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: LDS Department of Education, 1938), 47–48, italics added.
6. [note]  Roy A. West, An Introduction to the Book of Mormon: A Religious-Literary Study (Salt Lake City: LDS Department of Education, 1940), 11, italics added.
7. [note]  Dallin H. Oaks, "The Historicity of the Book of Mormon," (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 1994): 2–3; republished in Dallin H. Oaks, "The Historicity of the Book of Mormon," in Historicity and the Latter-day Saint Scriptures, edited by Paul Y. Hoskisson (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2001), 238–239.
8. [note]  LeGrand Richards, Israel! Do You Know? (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1954), 37.
9. [note]  Richard L. Evans, "What Is a 'Mormon'?" in Religions of America, edited by Leo Rosten (London: Heinemann, 1957), 94, italics added; reprinted as Religions of America: Ferment and Faith in an Age of Crisis: A New Guide and Almanac (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).  (needs URL / links)
10. [note] The quote and this observation are from Matthew Roper, "Nephi's Neighbors: Book of Mormon Peoples and Pre-Columbian Populations," FARMS Review 15/2 (2003): 91–128. off-site
11. [note]  John L. Sorenson, "I Have a Question," Ensign (September 1992): 27, italics added. (needs URL / links)