Do they still have whole missions to the "Lamanites?" They used to have a mission to the Navajo, and a friend of mine went on a mission to the Indians up in the Dakotas. Do they have any members at all anymore?

It wasn't going very well back then, in the early '70s.

When current mopologists try to redefine who Lamanites are/were and claim the church never taught certain things about the native peoples of the New World being direct descendants of the Lamanites, I'm among those who know it's total bullshit, because I was there, I taught the lessons, I told the church's fairytales, including the curse of dark skin that could be reversed through righteousness. I took people to see the Lamanite Generation perform. I hauled crying kids to the Indian Placement Program busses. I believed the church's racist, xenophobic, paternalistic horseshit -- because it came straight from the brethren. It had to be true.

Stray Mutt Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It wasn't going very well back then, in the early
> '70s.
>
> When current mopologists try to redefine who
> Lamanites are/were and claim the church never
> taught certain things about the native peoples of
> the New World being direct descendants of the
> Lamanites, I'm among those who know it's total
> bullshit, because I was there, I taught the
> lessons, I told the church's fairytales, including
> the curse of dark skin that could be reversed
> through righteousness. I took people to see the
> Lamanite Generation perform. I hauled crying kids
> to the Indian Placement Program busses. I believed
> the church's racist, xenophobic, paternalistic
> horseshit -- because it came straight from the
> brethren. It had to be true.

Stray Mutt, you and I have lived parallel lives. I worked at both ends of the Indian Placement Program, first as a missionary signing kids up, then as a RM, the stake representative for the kids while they lived with their white families. There were lots of problems, a kid named Alfred set fire to his foster family's garage... ha.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/29/2011 07:24AM by george.

Hello all.

As my screen name says, I am a Survivor of the Lamanite Assimilation/Genocide Program.
The abuse I suffered was nothing short of extreme torture. I was repeatedly sexually abused, sodomized, beat, and when I told the Police, my assimilators put a revolver to my head in a twisted version of Russian Roulette called 'Kill the Indian'or 'Savage Roulette'
This pst December after years of trauma therapy,and receiving a call from thr National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation whose sole responsibility and legal mandate (through an Act of Parliament is to collect, preserve, and protect the stories of Survivors from Canada's Assimilation/Genocide policies with thr 'church'), I decided that I was ready to share my Story with thr NCTR


So much for those who tried to silence me!!!

Welcome here! (I'm assuming you're new).

Lamanite Program Survivor Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> ... I decided that I was ready to share my Story with
> thr NCTR

I'm so glad you are feeling able to do that. I've read that it is often a good start towards potentially beginning to heal.


> So much for those who tried to silence me!!!

Indeed!

All power to you.

You may want to be cautious about giving out any personally identifying information. This is a public board and posters are anonymous.

Also, we are just fellow travellers here, not professional therapists by any means.

However, I hope you feel comfortable sharing more of your story if it could perhaps help you.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2024 08:46PM by Nightingale.

They closed up the meeting house on the Pine Ridge. Lakota women who were believers could not attend church anymore. One commented that she wished the missionaries had never come to the rez in the first place to convert her parents. The Pine Ridge women who believed the BoM suffered the most from this.

We are putting some very fine laminates in our newer temples. This is contracted work, so we don't have any laminate missions. We do laminate certain types of identification used in the Church Office Building.

On the 2nd floor of the hospital, we (staff) watched mishies walk accross the campus towards the housing area. One of my coworkers had been abducted from her home and the los angeles family attempted to make her "white and delightsome." She lost out on a couple of years with her family who had been duped by the church. The LDS claimed victory. Keep a kid away from the cornfields for a couple of summers and their skins become lighter. She will never forgive them. There was hatred and hurt in her eyes when she saw those "missionaries." She was separated from her family, who were told that she would have better food and education if the LDS took her away. She ran away and went home, but she has a deep resentment of the loss of those years away from her grandparents, parents, cousins and siblings.

Only the most arrogant cult on Earth would do this to a child. Think about it. "Our church can make your skin lighter. Otherwise you're a lamanite doomed to hell." That's arrogance. That's my definition of true evil. IT'S ABOUT SKIN COLOR!! You lurkers in denial (why are you even here?) might want to read the quotes by Brigham Young.

I know those missionaries live in tough circumstances on the rez. They also have not been prepared and won't question the lies. When I watched those missionaries I wanted to follow them and question them and tell them about the damage that was done by the LDS, but I was stopped from doing so. By their victims. Sick, sick cult

The True Church now considers Mexicans and Central Americans as the true Lamanites. That's why it is growing so much in those areas. At least that's what the missionaries told me, that I should be proud to be a Lamanite, being Mexican and brown skin and all.

Nowadays, you never hear the top leaders talking about it. The ordinary members and missionaries may do so, but it seems like the General Authorities have developed a consensus among themselves that they won't talk anymore about who the descendants of the Lamanites are.

When I was a kid, it was commonly accepted by virtually everyone in the LDS Church that ALL of the pre-Colombian peoples of North, Central and South America, the Caribbean and most of the Pacific Islanders were descendants of the Lamanites of the Book of Mormon.

I think a couple of factors have caused the Brethren to stop talking about it. First, DNA research has added further support to the prevailing understanding that most of the pre-Colombian inhabitants of the Americas are descendants of people who came from east Asia and have no connection with the Semitic peoples of the Middle East. Second, the Brethren are afraid to talk on matters that concern racial distinctions and classifications. It's like a minefield for them and they want to avoid controversy at all costs.

If they could get away with it, they would probably like all of the traditional teachings about Lamanites and missionary work among the Lamanites and so on to just disappear down the memory hole. But it's so much a part of the Church's history that it's almost impossible to make it go away. So the Brethren do the next best thing. They simply don't talk about it anymore. If the Church survives for another 2-3 generations, there probably won't be many members left who will talk about it either.

In Bolivia, back in the early 70's, we used to receive motivational messages from the GA's on a regular basis. Bottom line, we were told that we were working with some of the most pure blooded lamanites on the face of the earth...field was white...ready to harvest...go get 'em team!!!

Now it seems that they just say the lamanite stuff in "south of the border" temple dedicatory prayers, and it is just for local consumption.

What a contrast from 2011, when some of the best and brightest of the apologists, who understand the dna science, say, "we just don't know who, or where the lamanites are...don't worry about it...just have faith".

Sadly, my tbm kids/grandkids, just can't/won't see LDS INC in the same way that I do...well done brethren...well done.

Please tell me they have given up on this one. My aunt and uncle had several kids live with them in the 70's and 80's through the program. I remember being critical of it and my mother told me the parents BEGGED for their children to be taken into the program and sent to live with white families. It gave the children more opportunities, or something.

What a hateful program that was!

voice, "The day will come that the lamanites will blossum as a rose." Yikes. In my opinion, some of those delightsome white morgbots who adopted the "lamanite" children were those who wanted to one-up their fellow mormon neighbor. If you could adopt a "lamanite", somehow that placed you higher on the spiritual pecking order.

"We in the Church are always doing anything we can to strengthen families so with this in mind we take children away from their families and have them raised in active LDS homes in hopes of making them more active and a better asset to the Church than their remaining family on the reservation."

Its the apologists way of blaming the misguided members throughout all the generations of the church since its inception while attempting to protect the leaders from any kind of blame.

I find it disgusting.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/29/2011 09:07AM by kookoo4kokaubeam.

I know of at least one lamanite girl who was adopted by a local Mormon family. They happened to be a very sweet nice family and did their best to help this gal. She ended up getting pregnant as a teen and not active in Mormonism... so I guess even with the nicest of Mormon adopted parents and family, it "didn't work."

did so for the free labor. I remember hearing people talking about getting an Indian kid to help with spring cleaning, canning, putting in the garden, child care, etc.

That we should remind our tbm friends and families about. Check out this article from the July 1971 Ensign, titled "Lamanites and the Church"...
One young Lamanite Latter-day Saint at Brigham Young University feels this growth. Howard Ranier, a Taos-Pueblo who has a bachelor’s degree in communications and has served a mission for the Church, said, “The wonderful prophecies of the Church are being fulfilled at such an accelerated pace that the Lamanites must now consider their place in this great work, which the Savior said would surely come before his return.

“Thousands of dollars and hours have been poured into the work by so many members to bring about this new era,” he added. “The time has come for Lamanites to awaken to the fact that they can be experts and work side by side with non-Lamanites in building Indian Israel.

“We are definitely going to see in the future many more Lamanites graduating from college who are going to be ready and willing to meet the challenges of doing their part in making the scripture ‘blossoming as a rose’ a true symbol of righteous living and who will share their technical skills with those Indians who are seeking to become a self-reliant people.”

Howard is only one of literally thousands of Lamanites who have been influenced by one or more of the special Church programs.

During this year over 16,000 youngsters from elementary through high school age have been involved in Indian seminary programs in the United States and Canada. The enrollment of Lamanite students at Brigham Young University reached 548 during the spring semester, an increase of over two hundred from the previous school year. As an aside, there are more Indian students at BYU than any other Anglo college in the United States.

It has already been noted that more than five thousand youngsters from reservations throughout the United States and Canada spent the last school year with non-Lamanite Latter-day Saint families. Even though there are some problems and frustrations, this great program widens the vision of the Indian youngster and helps to narrow the opportunity gap that exists between the Anglo society and the Indian society."

This makes me sick, to think of the arrogance of those involved. Just this one issue demonstrates how "wrong" the "brethren" and the Church doctrines are.

Thanks for the reminder.

I suspect the brethren would like all things lamanite to pass into "flecks of history" status

"...brown flecks of history..."

I've been considering doing some work among the laminites that incorporate peyote into their lives.

I'm looking for a more profound spiritual experience than can be found through picked apart white bread and thimbles of water.