Book of Mormon/Lamanites/Relationship to Amerindians

This page is based on an answer to a question submitted to the FAIR web site, or a frequently asked question.

Question

Are all Amerindians descendants of Lehi?

Answer

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. Critics have also insisted that LDS prophets who have mentioned such ideas are "wrong."

Regardless of the population model which one uses, or the geographical model, this claim is demonstrably false.

The popularity of Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, led many Christians to consider the question of whether (as the novel postulates) Jesus Christ could have sired children and have living descendants today.

Non LDS-writer Steve Olson (an expert in population genetics^[1]) wrote:

If anyone living today is descended from Jesus, so are most of us on the planet. That absurd-sounding statement is an inevitable consequence of the strange and marvelous workings of human ancestry...Say you go back 120 generations, to about the year 1000 B.C. According to the results presented in our Nature paper, your ancestors then included everyone in the world who has descendants living today... If Jesus had children (a big if, of course) and if those children had children so that Jesus' lineage survived, then Jesus is today the ancestor of almost everyone living on Earth. True, Jesus lived two rather than three millenniums ago, but a person's descendants spread quickly from well-connected parts of the world like the Middle East...In addition to Jesus...we're also all descended from Julius Caesar, from Nefertiti, from Confucius...and from any other historical figure who left behind lines of descendants and lived earlier than a few thousand years ago. Genetic tests can't prove this, partly because current tests look at just a small fraction of our DNA. But if we're descended from someone, we have at least a chance—even if it's a very small chance—of having their DNA in our cells...People may like to think that they're descended from some ancient group while other people are not. But human ancestry doesn't work that way, since we all share the same ancestors just a few millenniums ago.^[2]

If Lehi existed, and if he left any descendants who survive to the modern day, then it is overwhelmingly likely—via the laws of population genetics—that virtually all modern Amerindians count Lehi among their direct ancestors. (If someone in the Middle East at the time of Christ would be the ancestor of everyone currently alive, then Lehi's entry to the Americas 600 years prior to that time almost assures that he would be the direct ancestor of all Amerindians.) In a similar fashion, it is even more certain that all Amerindians are descendants of "the Lamanites," regardless of whether one considers Lehi's group to have been "the whole show" genetically or a mere drop in a genetic sea.

And, by the same token, the chance of actually having "Lehi's DNA" or a DNA marker from Lehi is vanishingly small under most population models, unless (as in hemisphere model, type 3) Lehi is literally the only source of DNA for the continent, and even then not all descendants will have a given marker.

Another non-LDS author discussed the difficulties associated with using genetic tests to determine ancestory even a few generations back:

Many amateur genealogists are interested in whether they might have a Cherokee ancestor, for example. And for some people, admixture tests can give a relatively accurate answer about Native-American ancestry. But other people, including Greeks and Ashkenazi Jews, may have "Native American affinity," according to the tests, even if they and their ancestors have never been to America. As far as anthropologists know, there were no lost tribes connecting Greeks, Jews, and ancient Americans. [LDS readers might pause here and wonder!] So, maybe this "Native American affinity" reflects the scattering of alleles by prehistoric Asian nomads to the ancestors of Greeks and Jews as well as to American Indians.^[3]

Articles which address the phenomenon of how large groups (or the entire human population) can have fairly recent common ancestors include:

• John M. Butler, "Addressing Questions surrounding the Book of Mormon and DNA Research," FARMS Review 18/1 (2006): 101–108. off-site wiki
• Matthew Roper, "Swimming the Gene Pool: Israelite Kinship Relations, Genes, and Genealogy," FARMS Review 15/2 (2003): 129–164. off-site
• Brian D. Stubbs, "Elusive Israel and the Numerical Dynamics of Population Mixing," FARMS Review 15/2 (2003): 165–182. off-site

So why does Lamanite lineage matter at all?

One might ask, however, that if this is true, what is the point of identifying anyone as a "Lamanite," since much or all of the current population might be able to claim Lehi as an ancestor? President Spencer W. Kimball is known as a powerful advocate for the Native Americans, on the basis of their status as "Lamanites." He said:

we would say that many, many of us are Lamanites, which includes the Indians and the mixtures of Indians with other races. Even I have been adopted into some of the Indian tribes and have been given Indian names...

The term Lamanite includes all Indians and Indian mixtures…It is a large group of great people. The Church has always maintained a tremendous interest and concern for the Indian people and all of the Lamanites.^[4]

Thus, for President Kimball, the “Lamanites” and “Indians” are made up of both genetic descendants and those who have been adopted into the tribes, or added through “mixtures…with other races.” This goes a long way toward explaining why the critics' DNA attack is fundamentally misdirected—the participants are talking past each other. Church leaders are quite happy, generally, to extend “Lamanite” status to any Amerindian (or even a white of European descent like President Kimball) because gospel promises are the focus of their attention. The Church is not and has not been particularly worried about someone’s Lamanite genes, but rather about their eligibility for the promises made to the Lamanites as members of the covenant people. Thus, President Kimball is quite happy to have all American Aborigines considered Lamanites, since he considers them all eligible for these promises—he is also quite pleased and proud to be considered a “Lamanite” not because of genes but because of covenant blessings.

This idea is familiar to Latter-day Saints, whose patriarchal blessings indicate a lineage in one of the houses of Israel. Genetically, it is probable that all people alive today share all of the sons of Jacob as genetic ancestors. Yet, the blessings of the gospel come to people because of the covenants, and thus one ancestor is focused on as the conduit for those covenant blessings. Having lineage declared from the tribe of Ephraim, for example, does not mean that a member of the Church has no genetic ancestry from another tribe. It means simply that the member's blessings, promises, covenants, and duties are being focused upon the Ephraimite lineage.

Lamanite is an inclusive, not exclusive, term in the Church. President Kimball even extends the label of “Lamanites” beyond “the Indian people,” and no wonder, since his goal is to teach that

There are no blessings, of all the imaginable ones, to which you are not entitled—you, the Lamanites—when you are righteous.^[5]

We should perhaps be cautious, then, in assuming (as the critics do) that gospel statements about Lamanite ancestry are mostly about genetics, when they are most likely primarily about covenant duties and promises.

Articles which discuss the nature of "Nephite" and "Lamanite" in the Book of Mormon:

• D. Jeffrey Meldrum and Trent D. Stephens, "Who Are the Children of Lehi?," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 12/1 (2003). [38–51] link (Key source)
• John L. Sorenson and Matthew Roper, "Before DNA," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 12/1 (2003). [6–23] link