Today were taking a look at the adamant claims of a Mormon prophet, and the stand he took on perpetuating the stories from the Book of Mormon. One has to wonder what the Church would say about this Ensign article, published 45 years ago.
Ensign, “Of Royal Blood,” July 1971; “With pride I tell those who come to my office that a Lamanite is a descendant of one Lehi who left Jerusalem six hundred years before Christ and with his family crossed the mighty deep and landed in America. And Lehi and his family became the ancestors of all of the Indian and Mestizo tribes in North and South and Central America and in the islands of the sea, for in the middle of their history there were those who left America in ships of their making and went to the islands of the sea. Not until the revelations of Joseph Smith, bringing forth the Book of Mormon, did anyone know of these migrants. It was not known before, but now the question is fully answered. Now the Lamanites number about sixty million; they are in all of the states of America from Tierra del Fuego all the way up to Point Barrows, and they are in nearly all the islands of the sea from Hawaii South to New Zealand … The descendants of this mighty people were called Indians by Columbus in 1492 when he found them here. The term Lamanite includes all Indians and Indian mixtures, such as Polynesians, the Guatemalans, the Peruvians, as well as the Sioux, the Apache, the Mohawk, the Navajo, and others. It is a large group of great people.” – Spencer W. Kimball
