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From the earliest days of the Restoration in the 1830s, Church leaders worked to spread what they characterized as the restored gospel. Their unstinting efforts included missions to the Lamanites, whom they believed to be most, if not all, Native American and mestizo peoples in the Western Hemisphere and Polynesians of the Pacific. Whatever the extended interethnic mixing down through perhaps a hundred generations, early leaders considered these peoples in some sense to be descendants of Lehi and his extended family, who took an epic voyage to the Americas from the Arabian Peninsula after having fled Jerusalem in about 600 BC.[1] Two other transoceanic voyages recounted in the Book of Mormon, one from Mesopotamia, the other also from Jerusalem, likewise undoubtedly left their own generations, either as distinct peoples for a time in the New World or as remnant populations that mixed with others they encountered. DNA evidence is inconclusive.[2]

Even during the wars of extermination in the fourth century AD in which large numbers of Lehi’s descendants on the American continent were slaughtered, the great chronicler and prophet Mormon, for whom the record is named, affirmed that God would not forever forsake this “remnant of the house of Israel.”[3] He had in mind the Lamanites, who by then consisted of various ethnic groups, including apostate and frightened Nephites whose courage had failed them in the wake of errant living and interethnic savagery. In the last days, God would favor them with blessings that once again would bring them to know their Savior and elevate them to a prominent position in His kingdom. Indeed, the “Lamanites [would] blossom as the rose” (Doctrine and Covenants 49:24).

The Book of Mormon’s promises to the Lamanites intrigued the Prophet Joseph Smith. In October of 1830, just six months following the organization of the Church, he supplicated the Lord to determine whether missionaries should be sent soon to Native American tribes, even those as far away as the western frontier of the then United States (which included Missouri). Section 32 of the Doctrine and Covenants details the Lord’s answer. Oliver Cowdery, the “second elder” of the Church, along with Parley P. Pratt, Ziba Peterson, and Peter Whitmer Jr. (Frederick G. Williams, a physician from Kirtland, Ohio, joined the group later), began their epic two-thousand-mile roundtrip, much of it on foot, carrying their literature and personal effects in knapsacks. Starting with the Cattaraugus tribe near Buffalo, New York, they worked their way west through Kirtland, Ohio (to visit a non–Native American Baptist congregation headed by Sidney Rigdon), then on to the Wyandot tribe at Sandusky, Ohio, and thereafter to the western frontier village of Independence, Missouri, where they met with the Delaware tribe. Later, the missionaries appointed Parley P. Pratt to return to New York to report to Joseph Smith that their mission had gone well and that they had been able to take several copies of the Book of Mormon to three great Indian tribes and preach the restored gospel among them.

Especially after the Prophet Joseph’s martyrdom in 1844 and the relocation in 1847–48 of many of the Latter-day Saints to Mexican territory in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, Church leaders maintained an abiding interest in the Lamanites. In 1851–52 Parley P. Pratt undertook a mission to Chile, where he thought the Lehite voyagers may have landed.[4] In the mid-1850s, missionaries were sent to what was called “Indian Territory” to live among and preach to Native Americans. For example, Henry Eyring (1835–1902), great-grandfather of Henry B. Eyring of the Church’s First Presidency, was sent among the Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee nations, where he served from 1855–1860. In 1876 the Church sent missionaries to Mexico to “preach the Gospel to the Lamanites,” distribute a translated portion of the Book of Mormon (Trozos Selectos del Libro de Mormón), and reconnoiter the land.[5] Shortly following this missionary group’s return, Church president Brigham Young asked Daniel W. Jones, the group’s leader, to return to the Casas Grandes area of Mexico’s state of Chihuahua and found a settlement. That assignment proved to be too tough even for the steel-willed Jones; he had to settle for the Salt River Valley of Arizona (Phoenix and Mesa). Undeterred, Brigham sent an exploratory group into the Mexican state of Sonora. A lengthy and fierce war there between Yaqui Indians and the Mexican government forced them back.[6] Three years later, in 1879, Apostle Moses Thatcher arrived in Mexico City to baptize new believers and begin what he hoped would be a sustained missionary endeavor in Mexico. He was mostly right in his hopes. With the exception of three interruptions caused by political events in Mexico and the United States, missionary work by Anglo-European foreigners has continued unabated in Mexico since 1879.

In the late 1870s and early 1880s, reports circulated about spectacular heavenly visitations to Native Americans in the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. High-level delegations of Latter-day Saint leaders left Salt Lake City to visit the tribes. Apostles Brigham Young Jr. and Heber J. Grant went to Arizona and New Mexico, Apostle George Teasdale made new rounds in Indian Territory; Apostle Francis M. Lyman traveled the Ute Reservation to the east; and Apostles Lorenzo Snow and Franklin D. Richards attended to the northern tribes where 1,188 Native Americans were baptized.[7] Later, from their Washakie colony near Brigham City, Utah, these native converts marshaled much help for the building of the Logan Temple.[8] Baptisms occurred in all the Native American areas to which the apostles went. President Wilford Woodruff was intent on reaching out to the Lamanites everywhere he could.[9] Appropriately, Apostle Moses Thatcher was already in Mexico City welcoming new converts into the Church.

The post-2007 introduction to the Book of Mormon (not a part of the record itself) states that the Lamanites “are among the ancestors of the American Indians” (emphasis added). Before 2007, the introduction stated that they were “the principal ancestors of the American Indians” (emphasis added). The title page of Trozos Selectos, the first translation of selections from the Book of Mormon into Spanish, staked out an even more inclusive position: “Trozos Selectos from the Book of Mormon, which is a sacred history of the ancient inhabitants of America.” A few early non–Latter-day Saint observers considered that Mesoamerican peoples were descended from the tribes of Israel.[10]

In recent years, controversies have arisen as to whether descendants of Book of Mormon peoples can be so extensively defined, or even if they exist at all.[11] The ensuing response includes numerous pushbacks on that idea[12] as well as an official Church statement on the matter.[13] An affiliated group has produced an informative video on the subject.[14] The discussions are lively with considerable faith-affirming research in juxtaposition to the alternative thesis.[15]

Notes

[1] The narrative regarding Lehi’s family is found in the Book of Mormon in the book of 1 Nephi. Harold Brown, the first stake president in central Mexico and the first president of the Mexico City Temple, gives contextual sensitivity to ancestral provenance as understood in the Church at the time. See his “What Is a Lamanite?,” Ensign, September 1972.

[2] The book of Ether in the Book of Mormon recounts the saga of the Jaredites from Mesopotamia. Mulek, one of the sons of King Zedekiah, and his followers who left Jerusalem and landed in the Americas are mentioned in Omni 1, Mosiah 25:2, and Helaman 6:10. On the question of DNA evidence, see notes 11–14 below.

[3] See, e.g., Mormon 7:1–10; compare 1 Nephi 15:13–14; 2 Nephi 30:3–5.

[4] See LaMond Tullis, “California and Chile in 1851 as Experienced by the Mormon Apostle Parley P. Pratt,” Southern California Historical Quarterly 67, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 291–307; and Delbert Palmer and Mark L. Grover, “Hoping to Establish a Presence: Parley P. Pratt’s 1851 Mission to Chile,” BYU Studies 38, no. 4 (1999). Rod Meldrum, a particularly aggressive advocate for a US heartland for Book of Mormon geography, is scathingly critical of the source behind Joseph Smith’s alleged statement that “30 south Latitude,” in Chile, was the Lehi voyage’s point of disembarkation. See Meldrum’s Exploring the Book of Mormon in America’s Heartland (New York: Digital Legend, 2011). The internet is laced with his detractors.

[5] See LaMond Tullis, Mormons in Mexico (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1987), 14–30.

[6] See Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 31–34.

[7] See Tullis, Mormons in Mexico, 40–41. Between 1877 and 1892 there was general excitement among the Saints over the widely circulated reports of visions received by an Indian named Moroni and also by chiefs Shivitts, Wovoka, Sitting Bull, and other tribal leaders. In the United States, from the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains, Native Americans became interested in Latter-day Saints and Book of Mormon narratives and developed their own rituals, which others pejoratively called the “Ghost Dance” (associated with Native American belief that a Messiah would soon return to the earth and save them from their plight by annihilating the whites and restoring the buffalo). This terrified many non-Mormon whites and alarmed the US federal government, who combined to precipitate the now infamous 1890 massacre of Native Americans near Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota Sioux Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. See Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971); and James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, part 2 of the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, 1892–93 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896). Because of Native Americans’ relationship with the Latter-day Saints, outsiders began to blame the Saints and hold them responsible for the religious fervor consuming the Native American nations.

[8] See Darren Parry (chairman, Northwestern Shoshone Nation), “What Chief Sagwitch’s Conversion Means to My People,” paper presented at session 5F of the Mormon History Association’s 2019 convention in Salt Lake City. Copy in my possession, but the same narrative under a different title can be found at . See also “Native Americans Own Sacred Site,” Church News, March 27, 2003.

[9] Wilford Woodruff, letter to Benjamin F. Johnson, Salt River Valley, Arizona, December 7, 1882. Benjamin F. Johnson correspondence, 1859–1882, MS 3021. Church History Library.

[10] See the monumental works of Lord Kingsborough (Edward King, Viscount of Kingsborough), who was so convinced that he expended his entire fortune in publishing his Antiquities of Mexico (London: Robert Havell and Conaghi, 1831, 9 vols.) and died in a debtor’s prison for his efforts. In light of DNA challenges and discussions, the Church has published a thoughtful piece at https://www.lds.org/topics/book-of-mormon-and-dna-studies.

[11] See, e.g., Thomas Murphy, “Simply Implausible: DNA and a Mesoamerican Setting for the Book of Mormon,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 36, no. 4 (2003): 109–31.

[12] See, e.g., Daniel C. Peterson, “Prolegomena to the DNA Articles,” FARMS Review 15, no. 2 (2003): 25–34; David G. Stewart Jr., “DNA and the Book of Mormon,” FARMS Review 18, no. 1 (2006): 109–38; Bruce A. Van Orden, “Lamanite Civilization,” in Book of Mormon Reference Companion, ed. Dennis L. Largey (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2003), 493–94; and John-Charles Duffy, “The Use of ‘Lamanite” in Official LDS Discourse,” Journal of Mormon History 32, no. 1 (Winter 2008), 118–67. See also Matthew G. Geilman, “Taking the Gospel to the Lamanites: Doctrinal Foundations for Establishing The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 2011), copy in Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT.

[13] See “Book of Mormon and DNA Studies,” Gospel Topics Essays, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/book-of-mormon-and-dna-studies.

[14] Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, The Book of Mormon and the New World DNA (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2008); and Daniel C. Peterson, The Book of Mormon and DNA Research (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2015), e-book.

[15] See citations in note 12 above.