Misconceptions of native Americans began with the misnomer “Indian” based on a navigational error. Mainstream Mormon art, literature, and music, which grants the American Indians a Book of Mormon history and destiny as Lamanites, embraces…
Was it only yesterday that men first sailed around the moon? You and I § marvel that men should travel so far and so fast. Yet if they have traveled far, then I have traveled…
Perhaps others than Helen John, Amy Avery, Golden and Thelma Buchanan, and Spencer W. Kimball might have compounded an equally powerful scheme for blessing the lives of Indians, but to these individuals fell that lot.
The first group of Welsh converts to Mormonism arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on 26 October 1849 after a voyage of more than eight months. They had buried more than one-fifth of their number…
Late in the nineteenth century, thousands of Indians resentful of reservation life gathered in groups to chant and dance themselves into hypnotic trances until they collapsed from exhaustion. Some Plains Indians, while shuffling steps to…
The captivity narrative is one of the oldest literary genres of the New World: some 1,000 examples survive from the sixteenth century. It is also one of the earliest forms of popular literature in the…
Dialogue 18.4 (Winter 1984): 65–80
Shortly after the church was organized, one of Joseph Smith’s main priorities during his lifetime was preaching to the Native Americans, who he believed to be the descendants of the Lamanites.
My parents grew up conditioned toward racial prejudice—as did most Americans, including Mormons, through their generation and into part of mine. But something touched my father in his early life and grew constantly in him until he and my mother were moved at mid-life gradually to consecrate most of their life’s earnings from then on to help Lamanites.
This blade of stone
cuts the grass
to the quick.
Spencer Kimball wrote in his journal in 1951, on the occasion of David O. McKay’s becoming president, “I am positive that the appointments of His Twelve by the Lord and the subsequent deaths control the Presidency…