To browse Academia. In June of Orson Scott Card, a popular science fiction author and prominent Latter-day Saint, seized upon the news of the erosion of an ancient skeleton out of a riverbank along the Columbia River in eastern Washington during the previous summer.
Card prematurely suggested to a Mormon audience that this Kennewick Man represented an ancient founding Caucasoid population displaced by ancestors of American Indians. Indigenous peoples called this ancestor the Ancient One and participated in a long and contentious struggle between a team of scientists and the U. Army Corps of Engineers over repatriation. These authors anachronistically racialize both scripture and human DNA, misrepresent archaeological and genetic science, draw from fraudulent and looted materials, and disregard Indigenous perspectives on the Ancient One, now firmly established as ancestral to American Indians.
Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, eds. Yet, the essay insists on a priority of scriptural over historical claims and offers possible reasons for the lack of genetic evidence of the ancient migrations from the Near East described in the Book of Mormon. This chapter summarizes the church's essay, the historical context behind the issues it addresses, and offers constructive and critical analysis of its claims.
The chapter examines the settler colonial context out of which the Book of Mormon emerged and considers Indigenous critiques of the Book of Mormon alongside scientific analysis. The church's essay fails to engage Indigenous perspectives, ignores historical anachronisms in the Book of Mormon and avoids a discussion of oral history, archaeological, ecological, and linguistic evidence contradicting the Book of Mormon's portrayal of a white race of Nephites in ancient America. A more forthright confession of a nineteenth-century origin of the Book of Mormon and a more explicit repudiation of its racism are still needed if church leaders hope to rebuild trust with skeptical members and to establish more diplomatic and equitable relations with American Indians.
This article considers the repatriation of some the most ancient human skeletal remains from the United States as two sorts of ending: their end as objects of scientific study, and their end as ancient non-American Indian settlers of North America. The concept of the Palaeoamerican therefore denied Native American people their long-held status as the original inhabitants of the Americas.
