The classical Mormon view was that three brothers, Nephi, Laman and Lemuel - who were members of one of the ten lost tribes - and all their wives fled Jerusalem in order to avoid the Babylonian conquest, and wandered around on the lam from Babylonians for eight years until finally they came to the Mediterranean, where they built a boat capable of crossing ocean-lengths of water.

They crossed the full width of the Mediterranean, and then finally the width of the Atlantic until they landed in the Americas somewhere.

Mormons originally taught that North America was uninhabited, and that the three brothers founded two great familes, the Nephites - descended from Nephi - and the Lamanites, descended from Laman and Lemuel.

They taught that the Lamanites "turned native", with a tendency to dress skimpily and to wear a lot of war paint, and that they became violent, such that they eventually wiped out the Nephites, from among whom were the authors of the Book of Mormon.

These days, modern Mormons generally don't think that the America's were totally uninhabited when the three brothers landed.

There's more scientific knowledge now, so they tend to believe that the children of Laman and Lemuel simply integrated into the native population, adopting native ways and customs (or, as Quebecois would put it, they went habitat) whereas the Nephites tried to stay pure Jew in blood and culture, and this modern interpretation of the Book of Mormon is justified by two observations:

1) DNA analysis of most native Americans shows zero consanguinity with ancient Jews,

Except for...

2) A group of natives in Peru who have a genome found only elsewhere in Turkey, which would have been a logical place for Jews to have fled upon Babylonian invasion, and yes, it *is* curious how people with a genome only found elsewhere in Turkey ended up in Peru.

Further curious is that it's in Peru where we also find ruins with obelisks recording a history indicating that the builders of those ruins were not originally from Peru, and that they had traveled up the Amazon from the east to get there, which means they weren't exactly of the Inca tradition, so it's thought by Mormons who study human genetics and early American architecture that those people are the likeliest candidates for being of the lineage of Laman and Lemuel.

Whether holding the classical view of the Americas being uninhabited when the brothers landed, or whether takeing the modern view that the Americas were inhabited but it was only the Nephites who tried to stay genetically and culturally pure Jew, in either case they think that the idea of building pyramids and large agricultural civilization in central America was a notion that came originally from the middle east via those three brothers, which understandably annoys most native Americans, because it implies that native Americans would not have been able to get the idea of doing something like that themselves.

Mormons traditionally taught that it was because the Lamanites "went native" and "turned savage" that those central American civilizations collapsed, but what we know now is that they suffered the problem of soil depletion.

Whereas in the Old World there were rivers like the Nile and Tigris and Euphrates that would flood every year to deposit fresh fertile silt on the farm-land, there were no such rivers in the Old World, so cities could build up and survive until they'd exhausted the soil around them, whereupon they had to move and start building a new city-civilization based on maize somewhere else, until *that* soil was depleted...

In the 19th century when the Book of Mormon was first published, it was considered to be common knowledge that native Americans were hostile and aggressive, but it's not because they were native, as early readers of the Book of Mormon presumed...

It's because in the 19th century the natives were hungry, and that tends to make anybody grouchy, because in fact native American were a lot more civil than their post-Columbian invaders.

It was when the post-Columbian invaders started starving them out that they got grouchy, but they didn't start that way. In the beginning they were quite helpful to the European immigrants.

Neat trick eh? Some people are nice to you, but you want their land, however you cant' justify it on moral grounds, so you starve them until they get violent, and then subsequent to their first act of violence from hunger you declare them to be an enemy by virtue of having been attacked, whereupon you use that as moral justification to declare war on the natives.

Mormons believe that Native Americans are related to a lost tribe from Israel. This tribe as they claim are believed to have come across the ocean about 600 B.C. to America and was led by an unknown Jewish prophet called "Lehi."