Native American Seer Stones & Hats (Thomas Murphy 2 of 4)

Did Native Americans use seer stones? What if the roots of the Book of Mormon’s narrative trace back not just to revelation, but to a classroom?

Book of Mormon Ties to Darmouth?

In this second part of our conversation with anthropologist Dr. Thomas Murphy, we explore a detail of Smith family history that rarely gets discussed: Hyrum Smith’s education at Dartmouth’s Moor’s Indian Charity School, where he studied alongside Haudenosaunee students. It’s a small historical fact with potentially large implications for how we understand the origins of the Book of Mormon.

https://youtu.be/9nNErpiSeb8

Don’t miss our other conversations with Thomas: https://gospeltangents.com/people/thomas-murphy/

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Check out a transcript of the interview on Amazon.

Shared Classroom, A Shared World

Moor’s Charity School was founded with the explicit purpose of educating Native American students alongside colonial settlers. Hyrum Smith — Joseph Smith’s own brother — sat in classrooms with Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peers! This raises a compelling question: how much of the cultural and spiritual knowledge exchanged in that setting might have made its way, directly or indirectly, into the Smith family’s later religious project? Murphy doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but he makes a compelling case that this connection deserves far more attention than it has historically received.

Seer Stones and the Zelph Story