Mormon teachings harm indigenous people #mormon #nativeamerican #mormonism

The Ancestral Claim That Won't Go Away: How Mormon Teachings about Indigenous Origins Continue to Harm Native Americans

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has spent decades teaching that Native Americans descend from ancient Jewish populations who traveled to the Americas around 600 BCE. This doctrine, rooted in the Book of Mormon, shaped missionary work and member identity for generations. Yet DNA evidence has decisively shown that Native Americans trace their ancestry to Asian populations, not the Middle East. The central problem is not that the church once taught this claim. The problem is that it still does.

Recent testimony on the Mormon Stories Podcast highlights a painful irony: indigenous communities knew their own origins all along, yet found themselves subjected to a religious narrative that contradicted their own histories and oral traditions. Even more troubling, many missionaries continue teaching this ancestry claim because the church has not formally instructed them to stop.

The Book of Mormon Claims and What Science Has Found

The Book of Mormon, published in 1830 and considered scripture by the LDS Church, describes a people called the Lamanites. According to the text, after conflict with their righteous Nephite brethren, the Lamanites were cursed with a dark skin and became the ancestors of Native Americans. For nearly two centuries, this narrative was presented as historical fact in Sunday schools, missionary training, and official church publications.

Beginning in the 1990s and accelerating through the 2000s, genetic research produced clear conclusions. Multiple peer-reviewed studies using mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome analysis demonstrated that Native American populations descended from Siberian and East Asian populations who migrated across the Bering Strait thousands of years ago, not from Mediterranean or Middle Eastern populations. The genetic evidence is overwhelming and consistent across indigenous groups throughout North and South America.