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2 NEPHI 5

Laman’s Curse: Etiology and Race

in the Book of Mormon

For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him,

that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they
were white, and exceeding fair and delightsome, that they
might not be enticing unto my people, therefore the Lord
God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.

And thus saith the Lord God, I will cause that they shall
be loathsome unto thy people, save they shall repent of
their iniquities.

—2 Nephi 4 (1830 Edition)

ETIOLOGY IS THE STUDY of how things got to be the way they

are. Religion and mythology are full of etiological tales. The story
of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) is an etiological story to
account for the development of languages. “How the Bear Lost Its
Tail” is an etiological story about why bears don’t have tails. We
humans are naturally curious; we like to know where things come
Michael Austin Buried Treasures

from. And our emotional desire for explanations far exceeds our
rational capacity to discover true answers. In the absence of good
science, we are always willing to buy stories that just seem like
they ought to be true.
I say this as a preface to my discussion of an extremely
problematic passage in the Book of Mormon—the story of
Laman and Lemuel’s curse in the fifth chapter of 2 Nephi. This
is a problematic passage for many reasons, but mainly because
it tends to produce really racist readings of the entire Book of
Mormon—readings rooted in a long and incorrect tradition of
seeing Laman’s curse as an etiological tale to explain the origin of
Native American racial characteristics.
I want to make two points about etiology and race in this
passage that I hope will not be controversial, but that I suspect
will be because their combined effect requires us to acknowledge
both personal and institutional failures. The two statements go
like this:
When the Book of Mormon was first published in the 19th
century, it was seen by nearly everybody in and out of the Church
as an etiological tale—the story of how the American Indians
developed their specific racial characteristics.
Today, it is the official position of the Church that the Book
of Mormon is NOT an etiological story—or at least that it need
not be read as an etiological story—because the Book of Mormon
should no longer be seen as describing the only or even the
principal ancestors of Native peoples.
The first of these assertions is beyond serious doubt. Just
about everybody in the early Church from Joseph Smith on
Reading the Book of Mormon Again for the First Time 37

down saw the Lamanites of the Book of Mormon as the principle

ancestors of the American Indians. Early Mormons considered
Native Americans to be the fulfillment of Book of Mormon
prophecy—a remnant of the House of Israel that was destined to
accept the Gospel and hasten the return of the Lord. And in the
process they were going to become white.
In 1830, there was hardly any other way to read this narrative.
In the first place, the notion of dark skin as a divine curse was
deeply embedded in the culture, both by a long history of racism
and by the biblical precedent of the Curse of Cain—which most
white Protestants in the 19th century accepted as the origin of
black skin. In this sense, we see biblical typology again playing a
key role in the reception of the Book of Mormon: for more than a
century, the Curse of Laman was read (incorrectly) as an antitype
of the Curse of Cain (which was also read incorrectly), and these
two etiological fables supported each other in the Church for far
too many generations.
This also had a lot to do with the state of scientific knowledge
in 19th century America. The first generation of Mormons lived
in a pre-Darwinian, pre-Mendelian universe that knew nothing of
genetics, DNA, natural selection, or even the ages of rocks. In this
world view, everything that people saw around them had to have
come about in 6,000 years in a universe that had no mechanism
for the gradual development of phenotypes. “God did it” was a
pretty standard etiology for all kinds of stuff, including racial
traits and socioeconomic conditions.
In 1830, there were very few plausible explanations for
racial divergence that did not involve divine intervention. The
Michael Austin Buried Treasures

imputation of etiological significance to Laman’s curse, while

in no way required by the text, was an unavoidable result of the
cultural and scientific assumptions of the day. Today, however,
we have access to much better explanations for variations in skin
pigmentation. We no longer have to appeal to curse narratives
that are morally reprehensible and scientifically unsound.
This bit about scientific soundness is important. God
cannot speak to people in ways that go beyond their culture’s
understanding of the universe. Or, perhaps more accurately, when
the scriptures speak to people about things that involve natural
principles, we cannot understand what they are saying in terms
that go beyond our culture’s scientific understanding. When we
have access to better narratives, we need to take advantage of
them. And we usually do, though it can take us a while.
Let’s look at an easy example of this phenomenon. In Joshua
10:13, we are told that the Lord, at Joshua’s request, made the sun
stand still to give a military advantage to the people of Israel.
We know, of course, that no such thing could have happened,
since the sun does not actually revolve around the Earth. If the
sun appeared still in the sky, the Lord would have to have made
the EARTH stand still. But if the writer of Joshua had said that,
nobody would have had the foggiest idea what he meant, since, for
most of human history, thinking that the Earth moved around the
Sun has been a sure sign of insanity.
Fortunately, a Church lead by living prophets has the ability
to refine its understanding of ancient scriptures when cultural
and scientific progress make new narratives available. This is
exactly how the Church as an institution has responded to
Reading the Book of Mormon Again for the First Time 39

scientific evidence challenging the view that the Book of Mormon

peoples were the principal ancestors of the American Indians.
When presented with compelling evidence, the Church did
exactly what we all must do when the things we think we know
for sure no longer work for the world we live in.
In 2006, the official introduction to the Book of Mormon
was changed from describing the Lamanites as “the principal
ancestors of the American Indians” to listing them “among the
ancestors of the American Indians”. And the new Gospel Topics
essay “The Book of Mormon and DNA Studies” makes it clear
that the Book of Mormon need not, and should not be read as an
attempted etiology of the Native American people:

The Book of Mormon provides little direct information about

cultural contact between the peoples it describes and others
who may have lived nearby. Consequently, most early Latter-
day Saints assumed that Near Easterners or West Asians like
Jared, Lehi, Mulek, and their companions were the first or the
largest or even the only groups to settle the Americas. Building
upon this assumption, critics insist that the Book of Mormon
does not allow for the presence of other large populations in the
Americas and that, therefore, Near Eastern DNA should be
easily identifiable among modern native groups.
The Book of Mormon itself, however, does not claim that the
peoples it describes were either the predominant or the exclusive
inhabitants of the lands they occupied. In fact, cultural and
demographic clues in its text hint at the presence of other groups.
At the April 1929 general conference, President Anthony W.
Michael Austin Buried Treasures

Ivins of the First Presidency cautioned: “We must be careful

in the conclusions that we reach. The Book of Mormon … does
not tell us that there was no one here before them [the peoples it
describes]. It does not tell us that people did not come after”.

The “Race and the Priesthood” essay is even blunter about the
“Curse of Cain” etiological tale, grouping it with other discredited
racial theories and acknowledging that, “over time, Church
leaders and members advanced many theories to explain the
priesthood and temple restrictions. None of these explanations is
accepted today as the official doctrine of the Church.
This is a huge shift in something that once looked a lot like
immutable doctrine. Most Latter-day Saints of my generation—
who grew up with Tom Trails, the Polynesian Culture Center,
and the Lamanite Generation—have a hard time re-orienting
ourselves to this new understanding of race and etiology. We
never questioned the “Native-Americans-as-Lamanites” narrative
when we were younger, but we need to now. Not only has the
institutional Church cast serious doubt on that narrative; science
has given us much better ways to understand the evolution of
different skin coloring—ways that do not require us to be racist
jerks.
So it is up to us to find ethical readings for these stories that
have been read unethically for so long. When the “curse
narratives” of Laman and Cain are emptied of etiological
significance—when they are no longer attached to racist and
unscientific theories about skin color and moral worth—we are
simply left with stories about individuals whose moral degeneracy
Reading the Book of Mormon Again for the First Time 41

took on physical dimensions. We can derive all of the meaning we

need from the story by seeing it as an allegory of hypocrisy and
the consequences of sin. It does not have to explain the concept of
race in America to have spiritual meaning and value.
And we might profitably use this recent shift in what was
once an important part of LDS theology as an invitation to show
more humility about other things that seem unequivocally true
today, but which may not seem quite so true tomorrow.