What to do with the Lamanites?

I think an honest answer to your last question would be, “we don’t know”

It does seem to me that the MO of the church is to almost never say, “we stop teaching that, and now we teach this.” They generally just stop saying anything about it and most of the time it just fades into history (until the Internet brings it back to light).

…I thought they were moving away from this…

The church has moved quite a bit in the last decade but members move at a different pace. I know many members that still seem to be under the impression that SWK is the prophet.

…I thought they were moving away from this…

The church has moved quite a bit in the last decade but members move at a different pace. I know many members that still seem to be under the impression that SWK is the prophet.

I think more correctly, at least here, that Bruce R. McConkie is the prophet. Judging by how frequently he is quoted, he is surely infallible.

The whole Lamanite thing is something I struggle a bit with also. I do recognize and applaud the church’s changed rhetoric in regard to them, but as you point out a new publication still seems to indicate the Lamanites were the Native Americans. In fairness, that section/chapter could be read objectively as simply those involved believing the natives were Lamanites. Several sections of the D&C would need to be altered to completely change the narrative, and we’re not in the habit of doing that.

What works for me, since I don’t believe the BoM to be a historical record (or literal at all for that matter) is that the early church members, including JS, were just mistaken and like many such early mistakes the idea has been perpetuated over the years. Unfortunately repeating doesn’t make it true. That said, don’t hold your breath for any member of the Q15 or anyone else to refute the idea this weekend – next April’s report would see the church’s first decline in membership if they did.

Rough Stone Rolling presents those ideas that the origins of Native Americans was a bit of a hot topic in that time frame when the Book of Mormon was being “translated”. So this idea didn’t come about in a vacuum.

I think it is an interesting thing to think about…that perhaps the prophet is getting revelation, and one evidence it is revelation is precisely the fact that the stuff revealed were outside Joseph’s mind that even he struggled to understand it fully, supporting the teaching that we need continuing revelation and the need for prophets in our day to increase and expand our knowledge of prior revelations. It can be presented as…Joseph didn’t have an agenda…he just revealed what came to him…even if he didn’t understand it.

Of course, the flipside argument is…the topic of origins of the American Indians was borrowed by sources like the Spalding Manuscripts and other religious movements of the time that Sydney Rigdon was familiar with, and early saints were wrong about these interpretations, and the church now tries to maneuver around it today in order to save face.

I think we get to pick what we believe. Neither can be proven true or false.

The essay on LDS.org on Book of Mormon and DNA Studies is suggesting that we don’t know and there are too many factors to prove or disprove it either way.

Much as critics and defenders of the Book of Mormon would like to use DNA studies to support their views, the evidence is simply inconclusive. Nothing is known about the DNA of Book of Mormon peoples. Even if such information were known, processes such as population bottleneck, genetic drift, and post-Columbian immigration from West Eurasia make it unlikely that their DNA could be detected today. As Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles observed, “It is our position that secular evidence can neither prove nor disprove the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.”

That’s probably the right way to handle it. It isn’t black and white. It is simply a mystery…but doesn’t impact our faith in Christ and his teachings.

nibbler, I’d say the church is moving towards distancing itself from “knowing” the exact application of the Book of Mormon ancestors, and moving more towards the spiritual use of the book, regardless of the history.

The way I see it the church has two “minds” on the subject:

1) In Sunday school class when referencing the mission to the Lamanites we understand what they meant by Lamanites, and go with the flow – effectively stepping back in time to adopt their understanding.

2) The modern research and direction you refer to.

Fwiw, the Book of Mormon itself actually is pretty clear, when you look at the demographic statements analytically, that the Lamanites must have inter-married with indigenous people quite early on (certainly before the Nephites joined the Mulekites and probably significantly before that). The population statements don’t make any sense otherwise – and they make perfect sense if that was the case. It also would explain the racial descriptions perfectly.

Who were those indigenous people?

Given the structure of the Jaredite kingship narrative in Ether (focused SOLELY on the kingship families and their capital city/area) that covers thousands of years, the indigenous people would be descendants of Jared’s group and other people the Lord led to the promised land.

Where did the Jaredites originate?

Most likely the steppes of Northern Asia, since that society fits well the description of the people of Jared – both before and after their trip to the promised land.

What is the ancestry of the “Laminates” who survived – and continued to intermingle?

Most likely, the dominant ancestry would be Asian – which is exactly what the modern research says.

When you actually analyze the Book of Mormon as a historical record, looking at only the actual words in it and throwing out the assumptions of the author and those who accepted his assumptions, it is interesting how much better the history fits what we now know.

As I have said in other places and threads, I don’t know quite how to take the Book of Mormon, since I see it as much more complicated than most people realize. Jewish midrash seems like the best example – and it is a fascinating topic.