To see the context for this and other questions in this series, please see the introduction, parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Who Were (Are) the Lamanites?
This is a very complicated question. It involves a few
different topics: Book of Mormon geography, DNA studies, internal Book of
Mormon history and prophecies, and statements by Joseph Smith and others. Too
much here for one post, but I’ll at least lay out the parameters for now. Later
on, I may explore some of the topics hinted at here.
Internal Book of Mormon History
It may appear at first glance that the Lamanites in the Book
of Mormon are pretty easy to identify: they are the descendants of Laman and
Lemuel and all who followed them instead of Nephi. This group was cursed with a
dark skin to differentiate them from the white-skinned Nephites. (Yes, I know
that some modern readers have tried to explain this curse away, but their
efforts are unconvincing at best.) Things start to get messy, though, with the
missionary efforts of the sons of Mosiah, who convert King Lamoni and many of
his people (and presumably others), who then join the Nephites in the greater
land of Zarahemla.
Things get even more messy in 3
Nephi 2, where the Nephites and “all the Lamanites who had become converted
unto the Lord” (v. 12) combine to defend themselves against the Gadianton
robbers, at which point the curse is taken away from the Lamanites so that
“their skin became white like unto the Nephites; and their young men and their
daughters became exceedingly fair, and they were numbered among the Nephites,
and were called Nephites” (vv. 15–16).
Presumably, there were still dark-skinned Lamanites who were not converted, but
Mormon’s record is fairly silent about them. We do read in 3 Nephi 1:29 that
some of the Lamanites’ children are led away by the lyings of the Zoramites to
join the Gadianton robbers. We can only assume that they remain dark-skinned.
But the Nephites under Lachoneus defeat the robbers and put to death all who
refuse to enter into a covenant to forsake their ways. In 3 Nephi 6:3, some of
the robbers who have entered into the covenant desire to remain Lamanites, so
they are given lands, and peace begins to prevail.
Before long, however, the people
become unequal and the church breaks up, except “among a few of the Lamanites
who were converted unto the true faith” (v. 14). It is unclear who these
Lamanites are. If they are the Lamanites who had joined the Nephites to defeat
the robbers and had become Nephites, why would they now be identified as
Lamanites? Or if they are the Lamanites among the Gadianton robbers who entered
into the covenant to forsake their ways, do they suddenly become more righteous
than the Nephites who defeated them and pressed them into the covenant? A bit
problematic either way.
Regardless, in chapter 7 Nephite
society falls apart. The people have largely become evil again, and a new group
of wicked lawyers, high priests, and judges combine to murder the chief judge
(governor), but instead of taking over the government, they are unable to hold
things together, and the people divide up into tribes based on family and
friend relationships. A large secret combination makes a man named Jacob their
king, and they flee to the northernmost part of the land, where they set up a
kingdom. No indication if there are any Lamanites among them.
This is the state of affairs when
the Savior destroys most of the Book of Mormon peoples. He then appears to
those who are left, who are somehow the more righteous part of the people. How
the massive destruction spares just the righteous is not explained, but
whatever. The resurrected Jesus then teaches these people his gospel, sets up
his church, and leaves his twelve disciples to manage affairs after his
ascension. We then have about 166 years of peace (from Jesus’s appearance in
the thirty-fourth year until the two hundredth year). Sometime toward the end
of this peaceful stretch, however, “a small part of the people who had revolted
from the church and taken upon them the name of Lamanites” broke away, “and
there began to be Lamanites again in the land” (4 Ne. 1:20).
This is a really odd development.
After all the intermixing, for nearly 200 years, and after the Lamanites became
fair-skinned, all of a sudden we have a group—that would have had to be a mixture of Nephites and
Lamanites and Mulekites and whatever else—break away and take the name Lamanites. And it
wasn’t just Lamanites. The Lamanites once again included Lemuelites and
Ishmaelites as well (4 Ne. 1:38), almost as if the previous centuries of genetic
mixing had not happened at all. And the Nephites weren’t just Nephites; they
included Jacobites, Josephites, and Zoramites (4 Ne. 1:36). It’s a big stretch
to believe that these groups were descended purely from the original Laman,
Lemuel, Ishmael, Nephi, Jacob, Joseph, and Zoram (apparently Sam had no
posterity). So, which of these could be considered descendants of the original
Lamanites? Probably all of them. But these divisions apparently held until
Mormon and all his people were destroyed (except for Moroni), and these new
Lamanites then inhabited the promised land, wherever that is. But what color
was their skin? We read of no new curse.
Book of Mormon Geography
So, where did the Book of Mormon account take place? Right.
If you think I’m going to wade into that swamp, you’re crazier than I am. So
I’ll just stick a toe in without getting too slimy. I’m pretty much a Book of
Mormon geography agnostic. I’ve looked at the various options, including my
favorite (the Malaysia theory—my
favorite only because it’s so preposterous, although the geography does work
better than any of the others), and the only conclusion I have reached is that
all of them have disqualifying problems.
Internal evidence is pretty clear
that the majority of Book of Mormon history took place in a very limited
region, and that this region’s dominant feature was that it was a peninsula. I
appreciate the efforts of Tyler Griffin and the Book of Mormon Virtual Scriptures
Group, who came up with a map based solely on what’s in the book (see https://rsc.byu.edu/fall-2019/visualizing-people-places-plates-book-mormon).
Their map shows where various places mentioned in the text are, in relation to
each other. Significantly, their map strongly hints of a peninsula, but they
conveniently blur the bottom of the map in cloudy mist and cut it off before
the peninsula ends. Gotta keep those Mesoamerican theorists happy, I suppose.
But it is obvious in the text that the Lamanites are trapped to the south in
the land of Nephi. Nobody ever goes south from the land of Nephi. If the
Lamanites could have, they would have expanded to the south, but they don’t. They’re
always trying to go north. But the Nephites guard that narrow neck of land. So,
I pretty much accept that the story takes place largely on this peninsula, with
only the Nephites being able to push northward.
Some have assumed that the narrow
neck of land was Panama and the land southward was the whole continent of South
America, but the internal travels of the two main populations restrict the geography
of the Book of Mormon to a fairly small region.
The Baja California theorists
accept this limitation, as well as acknowledging that the story occurred on a peninsula,
but their theory has other problems, primarily population. The Mesoamerican
theorists have to distort the geography in the book as well as the points of
the compass to force fit the narrative on their preferred geography. And the
Heartland theorists have the same problem as well as the problem of scale to deal
with. So, I’ve never seen a geographical model that can’t be disqualified by
some pretty significant evidence. This leads to the problem of what modern
pronouncements indicate.
Moroni and the Lord Weigh In
Of course, all of what follows in this section came through
Joseph Smith, so we have to factor that into the equation, but both Moroni and
the Lord have something to say about who the Lamanites are now (or at least who
they were in the 1820s and 1830s). Let’s start with Moroni. When he first
appeared to Joseph Smith, he told Joseph about “a book deposited, written upon
gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this
continent, and the source from whence they sprang” (JS–H 1:34, bold added). Joseph obviously believed that
the Nephites and Lamanites in the Book of Mormon record were the ancestors of the
peoples he knew as the American Indians. This belief was confirmed in several
of the early revelations he received.
In what is now Doctrine and
Covenants 3:18, the Lord tells Joseph that the purpose for which the plates
have been preserved is so that “this testimony shall come to the knowledge of
the Lamanites, and the Lemuelites, and the Ishmaelites, who dwindled in
unbelief because of the iniquity of their fathers.” In D&C 10, the Lord
tells Joseph that what we know as the small plates of Nephi contained another
account of what was on the lost 116 pages of the original manuscript and that
the authors of that account had extracted a promise from him that “my gospel
which I gave unto them that they might preach in their days, might come unto
their brethren the Lamanites, and also all that had become Lamanites because of
their dissensions” (v. 48) And who are these latter-day descendants of those
early people?
We find the answer to that
question a couple of years later, when he called Parley Pratt, Oliver Cowdery,
Peter Whitmer Jr., and Ziba Peterson to “go into the wilderness among the
Lamanites” (D&C 32:2) to preach the gospel. And where were these Lamanites?
As explained in Richard Dilworth Rust’s article “A Mission to the Lamanites” in
the Church’s “Revelations in Context” supplement to the Sunday curriculum,
“Because of the Indian Removal Act passed in May 1830, the new territory for
relocating American Indians was to be in present-day Kansas and Oklahoma. Thus,
these missionaries to the Lamanites planned to go west from Independence,
Missouri, into Indian Territory.” In Pratt’s autobiography, he describes a
visit to the Seneca Indians in New York, while the missionaries were still in
the United States. They then continued on to Kirtland, where they found Sidney
Rigdon and his fellow Reformed Baptists, who were open to the missionaries’
message. In Kirtland, Frederick G. Williams joined the four missionaries, and eventually
they made it to Independence. Leaving Whitmer and Peterson in town to earn
money, Cowdery, Pratt, and Williams crossed over into Indian Territory, where
they preached the message of the Book of Mormon to the Shawnee and the Delaware
tribes. The Delawares were receptive, but a federal agent expelled the Mormon
elders from Indian Territory. They sought authorization to return but were
unsuccessful. So ended the mission to the Lamanites. They did, however, find
Independence, Missouri, which Joseph’s revelations soon identified as the
location for the city of New Jerusalem.
The salient point here, though, is
that Joseph and his early followers considered all American Indians to be
Lamanites. This can be seen also in Joseph’s “Zelph” experience with Zion’s
Camp and in the Saints’ encounters over the next several decades with the
tribes of the Great Basin, whom they also identified as Lamanites.
The Book of Mormon supports this
view, especially in Nephi’s vision of the future of the promised land, in which
he sees the coming of the Europeans to the New World and their impact on the
native inhabitants of the land. “I beheld many multitudes of the Gentiles upon
the land of promise; and I beheld the wrath of God, that it was upon the seed
of my brethren [Laman and Lemuel]; and they were scattered before the Gentiles
and were smitten” (1 Ne. 13: 14).
So, it is apparent that the Book
of Mormon itself, Moroni, Joseph Smith, and even the Lord considered all native
North Americans to be Lamanites. But how does this square with what we know
from other sources about the Native Americans?
Archaeology, Linguistics, and Genetics
Archaeological evidence indicates that Native Americans
began arriving in the Americas 60,000 years ago and continued until about
12,000 years ago. Obviously, this presents challenges for the Book of Mormon
account. While some apologists find evidence in the book for other inhabitants
of the “land of promise,” the account itself is strangely silent on such an
important point, especially if the Nephites and Lamanites absorbed indigenous
populations, as apologists argue, in order to make the numbers work out (population
growth and such). You would think that the record keepers would have mentioned
these indigenous groups, but they didn’t. We learn only of the Mulekites and
the Jaredites (who were extinct, except for Coriantumr and, we assume, Ether,
when the two groups had a brief encounter). The Book of Mormon speaks of the
land of promise, especially in Nephi’s vision, as the entirety of at least
North America, which would seem to indicate that all of the Native American
tribes here are descended from Lehi. But if the Lehites intermarried over the
centuries with not just the Mulekites but also scores of Native Americans, to
the point that their genetic footprint has completely disappeared, how can we
even consider Native Americans to be Lamanites?
The linguistic evidence is equally
problematic. According to Wikipedia, “Over a thousand of these [Native
American] languages are still used today, while many more are now extinct.
The Indigenous languages of the Americas are not all related to each
other; instead, they are classified into a hundred or so language families and isolates,
as well as several extinct languages that are unclassified due to the
lack of information on them.” There are various theories about the origins of
indigenous languages. One theory is that there was a single, one-language
migration to the New World, but this theory is rejected by most linguists. The
large number of seemingly unrelated language families indicates a long history
of linguistic development (and splintering), far longer than the period between
the end of the Book of Mormon account and the arrival of Europeans in the New
World.
I am fairly ignorant in both
archaeology and linguistics and am relying on information summarized online. I
am even more ignorant in genetics, but from what I can gather, using DNA to try
to find a link (or prove no link) between living Native Americans and potential
ancient semitic ancestors is a fool’s errand. According to Wikipedia again, “The Indigenous
Peoples Council on Biocolonialism has also said that haplogroup testing
is not a valid means of determining Native American ancestry, and that the
concept of using genetic testing to determine who is or is not Native American
threatens tribal sovereignty. Author of Native American DNA:
Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, Kim
TallBear (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate), agrees, stating that not only is there
no DNA test that can indicate a tribe, but ‘there is no DNA-test to prove you’re
Native American.’” TallBear writes, “‘Native American markers’ are not found
solely among Native Americans. While they occur more frequently among Native
Americans, they are also found in people in other parts of the world.”
Identifying genetic markers for
ancient Jewish people is also a nightmare because of all the intermarriage and
migration over the years. So, identifying any genetic markers for Lehi, a
descendant of Joseph, would be impossible. A good summary of the futility of DNA
research in this area is David Stewart’s 2006 article, “DNA and the Book of
Mormon,” published in the (FARMS) Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 18,
no. 1. This is, of course, an apologetic piece, and Stewart attempts to show
that the lack of evidence actually supports Joseph Smith and the Book of
Mormon, but his summary of DNA research is quite informative and shows instead,
I believe, that DNA evidence is not helpful to either side in this debate.
Conclusion (or Not)
I think it is pretty obvious that
the indigenous peoples of North and South America were not all descended from
Lehi, even though the Book of Mormon and statements from Moroni and the Lord
(filtered through Joseph Smith) seem to indicate they were. And claiming that
the Nephites and Lamanites intermarried with local, already present tribes in a
small geographical area goes beyond what the Book of Mormon account says. A
plain reading of the text indicates that there were descendants of Lehi,
Ishmael, Zoram, Mulek, and Mulek’s party in the narrative. As far as the record
attests, no descendants of the Jaredites survived and passed their genes on to the
Nephites or Lamanites.
Skeptics will, of course, insist
that the Book of Mormon is just another attempt (among many) to identify the
origins of the American Indians, including an explanation for why they have a
darker skin than their European invaders. I must admit that this explanation
does have its appeal, especially considering all the other questions I have about
Mormon’s book, but, as I confessed in the introduction to this intermittent
series, the Book of Mormon is a complex and perplexing text. I’m not ready to claim
I have it figured out.
So, who are (or were) the Lamanites? Beats me.
