Stealing the land and the law: Thomas W. Murphy, ‘White is an Ite: The Book of Mormon’s Misappropriation of the Iroquois Great Law of Peace’, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 58, 4, 2025, pp. 47–72 | settler colonial studies blog

Stealing the land and the law: Thomas W. Murphy, ‘White is an Ite: The Book of Mormon’s Misappropriation of the Iroquois Great Law of Peace’, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 58, 4, 2025, pp. 47–72

13Dec25

Abstract: The Book of Mormon’s portrayal of a great peace that followed the climatic appearance of Jesus Christ in ancient America presents a conundrum. The people of Nephi reportedly became especially “white,” a label that is described simultaneously as not an “ite.” On the one hand, the narrator Mormon represented the “people of Nephi” as “fair and delightsome.”² Yet, a few verses later he declared that there were no longer “any manner of ites.” The paradox in this portrayal is that Nephites, even if they absorbed whitened Lamanites and renamed themselves the people of Nephi, remained rather literally (wh)ites. Put more bluntly, the label “white”—just like “Lamanite” and “Nephite”—remains an ite. In his 2017 book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, historian Max Perry Mueller confronts the same troubling passage from Fourth Nephi, noting that “Lamanites and Nephites unified to become one raceless (white) Christian people.” Mueller recognizes an unseemly paradox: “whiteness is the racial category that is, ironically, empty of race.” White is presented as “the original and universal racial category” as well as a mutable one: “within the Book of Mormon hermeneutic of restoration whiteness becomes an aspirational identity, which even those cursed with blackness can achieve.”³ In his 2024 book, The Testimony of Two Nations, Michael Austin, provost of Snow College, applauds the mutability of curses and races in the Book of Mormon. Austin asserts that in contrast to curses in biblical texts, “The curse in the Book of Mormon is reversible and tied clearly to continuing behavior.” He suggests that despite “the overt racism in some of its passages concerning race and skin color, it [the Book of Mormon] injected something genuinely new in to the divine-curse-as-racial-etiology genre of scripture.”⁴ I seek to unsettle this applause by highlighting Indigenous readings of the Book of Mormon that expose its broader colonial implications. Is the narrator Mormon’s suggestion of racial mutability actually something novel to be praised or might it be, instead, a rather common but disguised instrument of settler colonial erasure?

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