What does the Mormon faith believe about Native Americans?
The classical Mormon view was that three brothers, Nephi, Laman and Lemuel – who were members of one of the ten lost tribes – and all their wives fled Jerusalem in order to avoid the Babylonian conquest, and wandered around on the lam from Babylonians for eight years until finally they came to the Mediterranean, where they built a boat capable of crossing ocean-lengths of water. They crossed the full width of the Mediterranean, and then finally the width of the Atlantic until they landed in the Americas somewhere. Mormons originally taught that North America was uninhabited, and that the three brothers founded two great familes, the Nephites – descended from Nephi – and the Lamanites, descended from Laman and Lemuel. They taught that the Lamanites “turned native”, with a tendency to dress skimpily and to wear a lot of war paint, and that they became violent, such that they eventually wiped out the Nephites, from among whom were the authors of the Book of Mormon. These days, modern Morm
