The Book of Mormon: The Memory of Israel in the Americas; arrival locations of Mulek, Lehi and the location of Arsareth - Land of the Lost Tribes
Updated: 2 days ago
English Cleaned-up translation of the relic Copper Records related to Midewiwin Record Keeper "Mormon"
A breakdown of the translation process
The Book of Mormon: The Memory of Israel in the Americas
The Book of Mormon presents itself as the history of a remnant of the House of Israel who journeyed to the Americas in ancient times. For many readers, this claim is accepted or rejected based upon religion, archaeology, or modern scholarship. Yet among some descendants of ancient record-keeping traditions, the question has never been whether the history is true. The question has been whether the time had come to speak openly about what was preserved.
The Midewiwin Nanaboozoo Priesthood language, called roots and branches, often associated with red ochre markings found on stones, mountains, and traditional teaching places throughout the Americas, was never entirely lost. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was intentionally carried underground by the Anangokaa for preservation. According to teachings associated with the Seven Fires Prophecy, there would come a time during the Seventh and Eighth Fires when the descendants of the original peoples of this land would once again possess a voice, even if small. They would stand as equals among the descendants of immigrant nations and once again hear the words of their ancestors from the pre-colonial world. What had been hidden could then be spoken openly.
During the early colonial period, knowledge of both our spoken language and these priesthood languages remained known and accessible. Their existence attracted intense interest from Catholic Jesuit missionaries and European scholars who recognized in portions of these traditions what appeared to them to be familiar forms of orthodoxy, covenant, and sacred instruction.
Unfortunately, this attention often resulted in the theft, destruction, suppression, and misappropriation of sacred teachings, records, and traditional knowledge. In response, many Elders, knowledge keepers, and record keepers chose preservation over exposure. Portions of the traditions were carried underground and entrusted only to families and individuals responsible for their care.
Although much was lost, enough survived.
The teachings survived. The ceremonies survived. The records survived. Most importantly, the memory survived.
Through the generations, record keepers continued carrying forward histories, languages, genealogies, and sacred knowledge so that future generations would not be entirely severed from their inheritance.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it became increasingly apparent that the dual existence envisioned under the 1701 Treaty of Montreal would not be permitted by expanding colonial systems. As pressure increased upon Indigenous nations, much of the historical knowledge preserved in the northern regions was moved westward into the Plains and Rocky Mountains.
According to traditional records, two families, one being the Deer Clan of Lake of the Woods from the descendants of Ogimaa (Chief) Mamangazeda, who died in 1792, whose descendants today are found within the Rocky Mountains and mixed within various Pembina Ojibwe bands, and the other represented today within the O'Chiese First Nation in Alberta, they are recorded by those in the Great Lakes lodges as transporting more than six cartloads of records westward for safekeeping. These included scrolls, stone tablets, genealogies, calendars, sacred teachings, and small hand-sized copper plates preserved by generations of record keepers.
It also contained the location of Arsareth and the current modern tribal nation and location where the majority of those who are descendants of lost tribes can be found. When confronted with this truth in 2026, this group's leadership and their national assembly openly admitted it and this September and October will declare the full story to the world's review.
These records were not for sale.
They were not preserved for the review of a foreign people.
They were not maintained for approval, validation, or the satisfaction of outsiders.
They were entrusted to record keepers because they belonged to the descendants of those whose histories they contained.
Their purpose was not to create identity. Their purpose was to preserve memory.
The Book of Mormon presents itself as the record of migrations from the House of Israel into the Americas approximately three to five thousand years ago, with additional migrations occurring approximately twenty-seven hundred years ago and again around two thousand years ago. When certain copper records were examined and compared with surviving plates and with a language still understood today by a small number of individuals, record keepers identified important notations made by ancient record keepers and later by a seventeenth-century record keeper remembered as the Great Thunderbird, Gijigosikot.
Among these preserved memories are references to the record keeper Mormon himself sometimes speaking in his own words, together with explanations regarding why histories and teachings had been hidden up for preservation.
Additional generations of record keepers later recorded their own discoveries of earlier records. They preserved those memories and carried them forward so future generations would continue searching for and recognizing the buried history of the people.
Therefore, we declare that this record is true.
We do not declare that every Indigenous nation, tradition, or faith must accept it as true. Many peoples have no generational connection to the history contained within these records. It is not their story, and we do not claim to speak for them.
Rather, we declare that the descendants of those whose histories are preserved within this record already know who they are.
They know they are Israel.
They know this record is true.
This knowledge was preserved through memory, language, ceremony, oral tradition, and the work of the record keepers. Though often spoken quietly and guarded carefully, it was never forgotten.
The Book of Mormon therefore stands not as a new revelation to its descendants, but as a witness of memories preserved across generations.
Nor does the truth of this record exist to validate any Western denomination, institution, church, or religious claim.
It is not presented as proof of another people's faith.
It is presented as a witness of our own history.
The record does not give identity to us.
It confirms what was already known.
Therefore, let us be direct.
Lehi was a senior Chief Elder of the Tribe of Joseph who departed Jerusalem around 600 BC and led his family from the Nation of Israel. Migration itself was not uncommon in that period as many peoples traveled from Europe to East Asia along trading routes. What makes this journey significant is where it led this family and who was leading them.
According to the memory preserved among the record keepers, Lehi's family arrived in the Americas upon the western coast of Guatemala overlooked by Lake Atitlán. Guatemala is Zarahemla or Sarahemal "The Land of Compassion and Forgiveness". The lands today known as Honduras and El Salvador are the Land of Nephi. The Land Bountiful corresponds to the region still known as Bon-Tikal, encompassing Chiapas, Campeche, Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and Belize.
From there these peoples expanded northward along the Usumacinta River and entered the Gulf of Mexico. Following the waterways of the continent, they eventually moved north up the Mississippi River toward the place where the rivers branch in what is today northern Missouri.
There they encountered another people descending southward.
That people were led by Mulek the son of The King of Judah, and they shared something in common, they came from the same place although they took very different paths as one crossed the Atlantic after Jerusalem's destruction and the other navigated the Indian and Pacific Oceans before Jerusalem's destruction.
Mulek, of the House of Judah, the son of King Zedekiah and heir to the throne of Israel, was among those preserved during the destruction of Jerusalem.
According to the preserved memory, Mulek and his two sisters escaped Jerusalem and first traveled to Egypt. From there they moved beyond the Mediterranean and northward toward present-day Ireland where traces of their memory survive historically. Following the ancient copper trade route, they sought Arsareth, the land associated with the Lost Tribes which is in the American continent.
The trail existed because Naphtali, the Deer Tribe, had historically maintained knowledge of its location as they ran relations between nations.
Entering the St. Lawrence waterway during winter, Mulek's party reached the mouth of what is now the Ottawa River, remembered traditionally as the Lake of Two Mountains. There the vessel became frozen in the waters as the Great Spirit Winter Moon rose.
After a cycle of the moon, they departed the vessel.
At that time an old man accompanying them withdrew a pair of antlers from a satchel carried across his body.
The meaning was immediately recognized.
The Anishinaabe who had gathered along the shore and surrounded the waterway with campfires understood that the visitors were seeking the Deer Clan, the keepers of the trade routes.
The people who had transported them were paid in tobacco and departed. It is told that we know today much of that tobacco is found within modern Turkey.
When Mulek met these peoples they were doing the teaching lodge constructed to display the Four Directions.
Two staffs were used in its construction so that when viewed from above the structure appeared as a cross within a circle.
Mulek pondered this teaching tool provided by Nanaboozhoo and to add upon an Iron Confederacy established, a union of families between Judah and the Adik Doodem, the Caribou Clan, he expanded it to include all the teachings of the two traditions related to the Creation story.
Mulek himself carried a large golden shield bearing the Star of David, which is misunderstood today as it is actually the symbol of the Turtle or the North American continent where we have memory that Creation began and the first family dwelt in a garden upon.
Later the Maya would refer to him as the Boy with the Golden Shield near modern Palenque where his remains can be found even today as he died there after establishing a great city of learning, the brain of the Great Hoof Nation, the Stone city of Palanek.
He was remembered as the Boy from the Sun or with the knowledge and light of the Creator. He met a people living on the continent in a bad way, or after the conclusion of a long war. He explained the five finger lakes of modern New York were symbolic of the Great Bear's claws scraping the earth or the spirit of insatiable hunger among the people. He sought to battle that way of living with awareness, knowledge, understanding and wisdom.
He replaced a life of consumption with a life of replenishment.
Mulek introduced Genesis into the teachings of the people and recognized the covenant relationship that existed between the House of Judah and the Deer Clan. To symbolize this covenant, his two sisters were joined with the two sons of Adikiins, or Little Caribou, the senior chief of the Deer Clan at that time. This is the moment of the creation of the Mooz Doodem, the Moose Clan. This clan is now extinct having been exterminated through the trickery of the British in the 18th Century.
The teaching lodge Mulek presented to the people represented Genesis in symbolic form. Constructed with eight poles, including two staffs in each cardinal and angular direction, it formed two Stars of David above, or the Great Turtle pointing in all directions. Together they represented covenant and relationship.
According to this memory, this is the origin of the sacred eight-pointed star whose echo can be found throughout the Americas.
Traveling southward, Mulek's people intersected with the people of Lehi who preserved written records brought from Jerusalem, including Genesis itself.
From these records a written version of Beresheit "Genesis" was maintained which, according to tradition, preserved information not found in other surviving Torah traditions that were reconstructed after the destruction of Jerusalem in the Middle East during captivity.
For this reason, the preservation of Torah among the Anangokaa remains of particular importance because the version they have is regarded as a source tradition.
Eventually these peoples became integrated throughout the continent, though not without divisions, challenges, and conflict.
In time those difficulties were overcome.
Later, Yeshua came to the Americas and found them, just as he said he would.
Many traditions concerning this visit survive. Some are pre-colonial. Some bear the influence of colonial interpretation. Yet the memory preserved among the record keepers remains unchanged.
He came.
He found Israel.
He ministered among them.
As these peoples expanded into the northern territories, Missouri and Illinois became Zarahemla of the North. Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota became Bountiful of the North.
The people understood north and south as reflections of one another, connected by water, niibi.
What was established in the south was established again in the north.
For that reason, names such as Zarahemla and Bountiful may refer to locations in either region depending upon the context. Travel routes, neighboring lands, waterways, and the peoples involved often provide the key for understanding which location is intended.
Those associated with the great waterways eventually became known through that relationship. The word niibi, meaning water or flowing righteousness, became associated with them. Anglicized, the memory survives in the name Nephi, and the Nephites, the people of the waterways.
The central testimony therefore remains clear.
Israel came to this land.
Israel remains among the peoples of this land.
Yeshua came to this land to find them and did.
The memory of His ministry remains among them still.
This is not a new story.
It is an old memory.
It is the witness of the record keepers.
It is the testimony of the ancestors.
And it is spoken today for the purpose of restoration regardless of what invisible lines trace the land or minds of the people upon it.
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