Heritage is Choice: When Latter Day Saints Construct the Lamanite

This essay explores the history and rhetorical strategies of church leaders in constructing a Lamanite identity throughout the 1970’s. Firstly, I examine the ways in which “Lamanite work” was narratively constructed as a divinely sanctioned proselytizing mission by the LDS prophet Spencer W. Kimball. I argue that prominent members such as George P. Lee, who self-identified with the term, used their Lamanite identities to represent the opinions of Indigenous peoples broadly and thus reified the categories significance as a divinely sanctioned classification of being. With Kimball and Lee’s reciprocal foundation, I then look forward to contend with the legacy of the Lamanite category to show how Meso-American texts, like the Title of Totonicapán, became rhetorical tools to support the narratives purported within the Book of Mormon. At the same time, scholars interested in Book of Mormon archeology contended that the Lamanites existed within indigenous and Meso-American cultures. This intervention seeks to bring attention to the historical development of the Lamanite category as emphasized throughout the 1970’s, the rhetorical strategies used to reify it, and the tenuous legacy of its categorical construction.