Wikipedia
According to the Book of Mormon, a religious text of the Latter-day Saint movement, the Nephites are one of four groups (including the Lamanites, Jaredites, and Mulekites) to have settled in the ancient Americas. The term is used throughout the Book of Mormon to describe the religious, political, and cultural traditions of this group of settlers.
The Nephites are described as a group of people that descended from or were associated with Nephi, the son of the prophet Lehi, who left Jerusalem at the urging of God c. 600 BC and traveled with his family to the Western Hemisphere, arriving in the Americas c. 589 BC. The Book of Mormon notes them as an initially righteous people who eventually "had fallen into a state of unbelief and awful wickedness" and were destroyed by the Lamanites c. AD 385.
Some Mormon scholars claim that the forebears of the Nephites settled somewhere in present-day Central America after departing Jerusalem. However, both the Smithsonian Institution and the National Geographic Society have issued statements that they have seen no evidence to support these claims in the Book of Mormon and no non-Mormon archaeologist or historian has supported their existence.
Usage examples of "nephite".
Lord had revealed that the land of the Ute Mountain Utes would be the site where the first hard evidence would be discovered to support the Mormon belief in the emigration of the Lamanites and the Nephites from Egypt to the New World.
There are a lot of LDS who scour around old Indian sites hoping to find evidence of the Lamanites and the Nephites.
His understanding of what the Book of Mormon predicted about artifacts left by the Lamanites and the Nephites was perfunctory, even elementary.
Price and Horner were looking for evidence of northern migration by the Lamanites sometime after they annihilated the Nephites in battle around the fourth century A.