Passage to Zarahemla

When I wrote the original Mormon movie post, I wrote it because I had seen a different billboard than the one I ended up writing about, but I got so into the topic that there didn't seem much more room for it in that post. The billboards are still around though, so this morning, I looked for the official movie website for "Passage to Zarahemla". You can check it out too; be sure to watch the trailer.

I have been intrigued by this movie billboard which shows a white girl in the foreground and the silhouette of a Native American in the background. The subject of race is a contentious one in the church, and not just because black people were not allowed to hold the priesthood until the 1970s.

The Book of Mormon tells the story of a family that escaped from Jerusalem in about 600 BC, before the city fell to the Babylonians. The family travels in the desert and then by sea to the New World. Yuval read the Book of Mormon when he first met me. He wanted to understand a little better where I came from. He loves geography and maps and draws countries from memory to entertain himself on long rides. Which led him to immediately ask me, "How exactly did they do this, this little family that lived in a city all their lives?"

"I don't know. I guess they sailed in the Mediterranean and then across the Atlantic or walked across North Africa and then sailed from there." I had never really thought about it before.

"Do you have any idea how big North Africa is and what it would mean to walk across the Sahara and then sail a boat? Or sail across the Mediterranean, out the Strait of Gibraltar and then across the Atlantic?"

"Not really," I shrugged, embarrassed. I later took some time to examine the distance that I had never noticed before. This came to my advantage when my friends told me that they were planning to visit Morocco on their trip to Egypt. They felt they might as well do it when "they were in the area". I told them it wasn't exactly in the area and it was a bit like planning a trip to Seattle when "in the area of New York". They didn't believe me, we bet, we found a map, I won.

Anyway, this small family of Jerusalemites sailed to somewhere in the Americas, and as I was taught, they became the ancestors of the Native Americans. A small storm of controversy was stirred up this fall when the introduction to the Book of Mormon was changed by one word. "Past editions of that page say all of the people chronicled in the book 'were destroyed, except the Lamanites, and they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians.' The new introduction reads much the same, but says the Lamanites 'are among the ancestors of the American Indians.'" (See the Deseret News article on this story here.)

This caused quite a bit of debate around here. People asked how come they were editing the word of God. Others answered that it wasn't the word of God; it was the prologue that was added by some guy in the 1980's. Still, it was a change from what I was taught as a kid, which was that the Native Americans were purely descendants of the little family from Jerusalem.

Another thing that I was taught as a kid (incredibly) is that in spite of coming from the same family line, one side of the family became darker in skin color (Lamanites) and the other lighter (Nephites). The fights that result from this belief rage along both sides of the Mormon-Gentile divide. Some Mormons take this at face value and believe that even today people of color who are righteous could (or their children could) become whiter. Other Mormons wish that the Mormons who believe this are mad, racist, and a humiliation and wish that the people who believe this (and people like me who talk about it) would go crawl off into a dark hole and take their opinions with them. These Mormons believe that it is a misunderstanding and that the word "white" was used as a substitute for "pure" or "fair", but "fair" as in lovely, and not as in light. I used to be in the latter category. But that became harder and harder to believe. Here is a link to a copy of the Book of Mormon from 1830. It describes Zarahemla at the time period when the movie takes place and says very clearly, just as it still does: "And it came to pass that those Lamanites who had united with the Nephites were numbered among the Nephites; And their curse was taken from them, and their skin became white like unto the Nephites; And their young men and their daughters became exceedingly fair, and they were numbered among the Nephites, and were called Nephites." Ouch.

So, when I saw a white girl with a Native American in the background, I had to look up the movie. Were all the Natives played by white people, and if so, was this because they were righteous Nephites, or just because there aren't enough Native American actors in the acting pool in Utah? If you watch the trailer, it appears that their solution to the problems presented by both the contentious point of race in the Book of Mormon and the lack of Native American cast members was to pour paint on all the actors. I think it is supposed to look like war paint and I think that it is the same kind of paint for both sides of the racial line. The white girl it turns out is neither a Nephite or a Lamanite, but a modern white girl who finds a doorway to the past (a sort of Book of Mormon version of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). The leading man and love interest appears from both his first name (Moroni) and his last name, to be a Mormon Pacific Islander, who they decided not to cover with paint. While I can't help but be relieved that at least they chose not to have a light side and dark side fighting it out, I do feel uncomfortable about the fact that a movie could be made these days with actors in blackface and as far as I know, I'm the only one bugged about it.