Saturday, July 6, 2013

Nephites and Lamanites



In addition to geography, another mistake many Latter-day Saints make is that the people described in the Book of Mormon were the only people living in all of North and South America.  This is not true.  There were many other groups of people indigenous to the area before Lehi’s family ever arrived.  There are indications within the book that Laman’s and Lemuel’s families intermarried with some of these people, which could explain the changes in their appearance noted in 2 Nephi 5:21.  It could also explain why the Lamanites outnumbered the Nephites within the space of a generation or two.
Where did these other people come from?  No one knows for sure.  I was always told in school that some of them migrated across the Bering Straits following the herds during the ice age.  That may have been the case for the Inuit and the Athabaskan-speaking people.  It is not necessarily true of them all.
 
Today, most Native American groups find that theory unacceptable in light of their own traditions. The native peoples' origin stories vary and should be respected. The point of my discussion here is not where they came from but that they were here.  The Book of Mormon is not the story of the entire hemisphere, but of a small geographical area and of, essentially, one family.
Text copyright July 2013 Gebara Education
 
Pictures from:
Lehi's Famkily www.lds.org
Clovis people www.cristolinks.com

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