Tribes in The Book of Mormon

While watching this video I noticed his description of Native American communities bear a strong resemblance to the picture painted in The Book of Mormon. He talks about how kinship was more about belonging to a community of people and not about blood. From a European perspective, everything is about blood, literal ancestry and who your parents were. For Native Americans it was about contributing to the community and being accepted as part of that community, even slaves could rise to be important members of a tribe.

This describes the patterns of tribal associations on the BoM very closely. In the BoM, it's all about being associated with one tribe or another, the Lamanaites or Nephites. People dissented from the Nephites and became Lamanites, and Lamanites joined the Nephites. None of these people were treated differently because they were born among a different tribe; it was more about who they associated with.

I think this pattern of tribal association is evidence that supports the theories of some that the Nephites and the Lamanites weren't the only people in the Americas during the time of the BoM. We even have a case of this presented in the BoM; The Mulekites are discovered and then pretty much never mentioned again, they are just absorbed into the umbrella term of Nephite. Where association and community is more important then direct bloodlines, any other non-Lehite tribe would either be lumped into whichever group they associated with or not even mentioned because they are irrelevant to the religious narrative. It's something interesting to consider; applying the same basic societal structure of the Native Americans which we have concrete records of can reveal hidden patterns of why things are described in certain ways in the BoM