Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories Foundation and relies solely upon the support

of people like you, its listeners. To help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of

the community, please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on

the Donate button on the right side of the page under Support. All contributions to Mormon Stories

are completely tax deductible in the United States and go towards producing the podcast and building

communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks for your support.

This is my life you're making. There is love for the taking.

Summarize for us, though, let's just say the key three to five things that were just generally

believed about Native Americans. Prior to the Book of Mormon being published that we would

have probably thought was original stuff from the Book of Mormon that really was just

remex or plagiarism or whatever you want to call it. If those can come to your mind readily.

Oh yeah. Okay. So one would be like I said the Mount Builder Myth and the idea was these

mounds all through the Great Lakes region were filled with bodies of the dead, the ancestors of

the Indians and how did these bodies get into the mounds and they would speculate that there were

these great wars and that there was a white race and it had to be a white race because

the Indians didn't have the ability according to the Puritans and those after them to build

these mighty works in America like down in South America, Central America, what were the mounds,

some of them were temple mounds, some of them were burial mounds.

They believe the Indians didn't have the capability of building them so it must have been another race

that the Indians had destroyed and what this was actually was a projection by the Puritans

onto the Indians that they feared that the Indians would do to them what had happened in the ancient

times to these mound builders that had disappeared. They vanished into, you know, where did they go?

...