Lamanite Placement Program and George P. Lee’s excommunication

​Twelve years after successfully arguing for a Mormon exemption to the Indian Child Welfare Act, Diné man, Mormon General Authority, & Lamanite Placement Program graduate George P. Lee was excommunicated.

In the early ‘80s as “friend of the Indians” & Mormon Prophet, Spencer W. Kimball, was very sick. Future Mormon Prophet Ezra Taft Benson & others began to cut funding to the Lamanite programs Kimball had spent his life building up.

George P. Lee, as a member of the 70, protested these changes demanding: “Who is turning their backs on the Lamanites–the very people on whom your own salvation hangs?” 

Lee believed that the purpose of the Mormon church was to “bring the message of the Book of Mormon to American Indians” so that they may “blossom as a rose,” turn “white and delightsome” and prepare for the Americas for the gathering of Israel in the New Jerusalem and the Second Coming of Christ.

Lee understood the Mormon church to be divinely for, and eventually run by, Lamanites – aka the Tribe of Manasseh. Lee also believed, as the early leaders taught, that the salvation of Euro-Mormons depends on the salvation of Lamanites.

“(You) have no sense of responsibility to (Indigenous Peoples) because you displaced them and set yourself up as Ephraim more superior to the Lamanites and thus you are telling (Indigenous Peoples) that you are No. 1 and they are second class. It is getting to the point where every Gentile that is baptized is told and taught that he is the literal seed of Ephraim unless he is a Jew, Indian or Black. This… encourages an attitude of superior race, white supremacy.

“You have cut out Indian or Lamanite programs and are attempting to cut them out of the Book of Mormon. You are trying to discredit or downplay the role of Lamanites in these last days and downplay their role and importance in the building of the New Jerusalem.''

Partly, for this kind of protest George P. Lee was excommunicated. He was the first Mormon leader to be excommunicated in forty-six years. 

Although I believe the true purpose of this church is to make money and power for itself and its leaders, I do agree with Lee’s understanding of the explicit purpose of the church as founded in the Book of Mormon. Even today this church still teaches that the Book of Mormon “was written primarily to the Lamanites.”

For this church to be aligned with its Book of Mormon message, at least half of the quorum of twelve ought to be Native by now and they should be doing everything in their power to cause the Lamanite to “blossom as a rose.” But this isn’t the case, because as Lee points out in his excommunication letter, these leaders are more there for money, than “the Lord’s work.”

“I am not sure how many of us would really do the Lord's work if we were not being paid.”
- George P. Lee, 1989

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To read the full length essay with sources see “Mormonism and Indigenous Assimilation”