Church Authorities from Joseph Smith to Gordon B. Hinckley have long preached that the Native Americans, whether in North, Central, or South America, are primarily the descendents of the Lamanites, who were in turn from the Israelite tribes of Ephraim (Ishmael), Manasseh (Lehi), and to a small degree, Judah (Mulekites). In a 1971 article in the Ensign magazine reporting on the great progress of the church among the Lamanites, Apostle Spencer W. Kimball very confidently declared:

“The term Lamanite includes all Indians and Indian mixtures, such as the Polynesians, the Guatemalans, the Peruvians, as well as the Sioux, the Apache, the Mohawk, the Navajo, and others… they are in all of 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… There are three stakes in Samoa and another is to be organized in those small Samoan islands. Four more stakes with Lamanite leaders… There are three stakes of Zion in Mexico City with Mexican leaders—Lamanite leaders. The stake presidencies, the bishops, the high council, the auxiliary leaders—everybody, with one or two exceptions— are Lamanites. In Monterrey, Mexico, in Guatemala, in Lima, in New Zealand, and elsewhere we have stakes of Zion with all their appropriate leaders.”²

    Thus, for these many years the Church has been literally gathering Israel, bringing western American Navajos and Apaches, native Hondurans and Mexicans, and indigenous Bolivians and Peruvians to a knowledge of their God and their heritage. But in looking at the archeological, cultural, and linguistic evidence, anthropologists have come to the conclusion that New World pre-Columbian civilizations had much more in common with the ancient peoples of Northeast Asia. This theory has virtually been made fact by recent DNA studies.

    In light of the DNA evidence and the immense difficulties in finding any substantive clues of a pre-Columbian Christian culture in the Americas, apologetic Mormon scholars have been forced to revise and even discard long-held beliefs about Lamanite identity. Judging by some of their treatises on the subject, it would appear that the seed of Lehi was so overrun by outsiders that they have all but vanished, leaving no trace of their linguistic, religious, or genetic heritage. In other words, we wouldn’t know a Lamanite if he were staring us in the face! One wonders how the Church will watch the Lamanites “blossom as the rose” if it has no way to identify them. 

Read President Spencer W. Kimball's 1960 account of nearby Lamanites becoming "white and delightsome."   

    These revisionist ideas have apparently traveled up the highway to Salt Lake City, where the Mormon Church has made a very small but momentous change to the introduction in the Book of Mormon. What has for many years read, “the Lamanites… are the principal ancestors of the American Indians…” now reads, “the Lamanites are among the ancestors of the American Indians.” In reality, the Church has no choice but to change the Book of Mormon’s introduction. The DNA testing on 150 tribes located all throughout the Americas has been overwhelmingly conclusive, to the detriment of traditional Mormon claims.

Anthropologist Thomas W. Murphy commented on these findings:

“Some Latter-day Saints have expressed optimism that DNA research would lead to a vindication of the (Book of Mormon) as a translation of a genuine ancient document… The results, though, have been disappointing… Genetic data repeatedly point to migrations from Asia between 7,000 and 50,000 years ago as the primary source of Native American origins. DNA research has substantiated the archaeological, cultural, linguistic, and biological evidence that also points overwhelmingly to an Asian origin for Native Americans.”

“While molecular anthropologists have demonstrated a technological capability to use DNA to identify descendants of ancient Hebrews, no such evidence has turned up in Central America or elsewhere among Native Americans… Investigation of mitochondrial DNA of more than 5,500 living Native Americans reveals that 99.4% can be traced back to Asia… Only 0.6% came from Africa or Europe, most likely after 1492. Likewise, approximately 99% of the Polynesians surveyed to date can trace their maternal lineages back to Southeast Asia…"³

¹ “Genetic Research a ‘Galileo Event’ for Mormons,” by Thomas W. Murphy and Simon Southerton, Anthropology News, February 2003, p. 20, quoted in Salt Lake City Messenger, Issue 103, November 2004.

² “Of Royal Blood,” Ensign, July 1971, p.7.

³ From an essay entitled, “Lamanite Genesis, Genealogy, and Genetics,” posted on Brent Lee Metcalfe’s website, http://mormonscripturestudies.com; modified version found in Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe, eds., American Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), pp. 47–77.